My Daughter's Identity Crisis (Still Unfolding). [Divorce]
21 March 2019 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
the situation of my divorce and my
relationship with my daughter is actually something that people want to know about but they feel uncomfortable asking me about and that's peculiar because for me it's not something I'm uncomfortable talking about really not at all and this comes up to my mind most strikingly with the people who are now in the gray area between being just fans of the channel and really being personal friends of mine because they're quite a few people now the mid watch the channel for two years four years where it's been and to a significant extent they know me but every so often they they kind of mention look they say something like look man I don't really know what's going on with your marriage and your situation their daughter they say look man I only know what [ __ ] your YouTube channel and then I also get kind of positive feedback with people where I mention it or give some kind of update and people say oh wow you know I you know I'm really glad to hear that or they really appreciate knowing because apparently something they want to know about but they never asked themself so no I'm I'm hard to offend that way but sure every so often people make you know presumptuous or denigrating or insulting statement and I'm not impossible to offend put it that way the purpose of this video is not to explain the dry legal details of the current situation although some of that will be mentioned in passing and it's not to talk about like my relationship with Mac's wife or really even my feelings in my perspective on it um I really want to talk about the kind of unfolding identity crisis that I see in my daughter's life and obviously I don't just have an outsider's perspective I had the perspective of someone who with real detachment is trying to interpret what a four year old a five year old and what six year old is telling me and to some extent the things she's telling me or things she's really programmed to say by her mother but only to some extent and you never know to what extent that is so he has pause on a much lighter note as an example of this after one of our visits with Alexandra I got a series of angry angry emails from my ex-wife because she felt Alexandra was coming home and making inspirational statements about veganism that we have we appropriate it to her that wasn't the case at all on that trip you know Alexander really had her own interest in veganism and she was very plucky about it and to give an example this is real kind of five-year-old reasoning but not someone reasonable she went back and said to her mother that if she ate a healthy vegan diet she could eat broccoli every day but then it would be fine if she ate chocolate-covered bananas this isn't what I taught her but you know she's putting the pieces together you know the chocolate-covered bananas that in France a very small amount of chocolate very thin coating it's mostly just a banana it's a lot healthier than most candy and desserts people give their kids I don't know kid you got it all figured out yeah so you know but that that wasn't something we'd sent her home to believe it's something she had figured out for herself as a theory she made up in her own mind we didn't even hear that from her she went back and told her mom proudly that she'd figured this out about veganism so you know in another more imaginative example from that same trip was that she'd kind of invented this whole story in her mind about Mister Rogers the children's TV actor that Mister Rogers from children's television and questions about his health and why did he have a heart attack if it's like my ex-wife sends me these angry emails as if I as if I'd program my dogs that it was like look it's coming straight out of her imagination my daughter is an imaginative strong-willed kid and she she makes up her own material on this I did not know doesn't come from me so it can be misleading to assume that your daughter is repeating stuff she's been told but both in terms of what she knew and what she did not know what information she's been presented with and what she's been deprived of we've gotten to see over the last two years approximately how my daughter's perspective on Who I am has changed and one relatively material one relatively tangible element of this story is the extent to which my ex-wife has just deprived my daughter of access to the toys that I've given her so over these years I sent her a lot of toys I'm not gonna get into details but on this last trip my daughter was really confirming it had come up before in the past that I'd given these toys to her or sent these toys to her and then she'd never see them again she either just see them when she was with me or in some cases that were sent in to put it in the mail and then they would disappear entirely and there was one toy where she really thought with him of that she loved it so much you want to key but you want to keep playing with it and her mother kept coming with pretexts to take it away or give it away to charity so this very strange struggle to erase my presence from my daughter's life erase the memory of me or raise questions about me by physically removing any toys any reminders of Who I am from their lives so that that's one palpable element now a little bit more impalpable is this the first time we saw my daughter that was the least emotionally complex but also maybe jarring and troubling its own way because she literally did not know who I was so there were a lot of strange and emotionally memorable moments where she said things like I love you you guys are really great to me like you know she really had a great time playing with us and going to the parking one at the beach we did normal kids stuff going to the ferris wheel this kind of thing she said you know I love you I love you guys you know she even said things like I wish you were my real parents but it's sad I wish I wish I could meet my real father you know my father who came to see me in Germany there was this distant memory of me coming to see her when she was in Germany and you know we tried to explain to her what it didn't just come up once no no I I actually am your real father I am the same man who who came to see you in Germany now most generously you could suppose that she was confused about this just because nobody nobody told but there was just silence about me that she wasn't actively coached to think that I was not her but again as this period of two years goes past in the later visits it seems on the contrary that the darker truth is she's really been actively told that that I'm not her father and now finally that that someone else is in terms of what is her name and and what is her identity in what have you so in the first couple of visits Alexander was really tremendously positive in tremendously enthusiastic about Melissa as her new mom very very enthusiastic about Melissa and you know little kids are shallow look look I'm sure part of the reason why she's enthusiastic about me being her dad or the presence of giving her the toys and the video games and going to the beach and when she spends time with us we don't have to force her to go to school we don't really have to force her to do anything she doesn't want to do we can just have fun so there's a real contrast between weekday parenting and holiday parenting or vacation parenting that way I know we have a kind of unfair advantage in that sense you know in terms of how she perceives us as as parents that were were nothing but but fun and laughs in good times and maybe when she's with her other family she's forced to do some chores or forced to get ready for school or that kind of thing but yeah little kids are shallow a lot of her enthusiasm about Melissa was because Melissa was so beautiful and she told us that every day she she but she was aware in relation to Melissa she was aware that Melissa was not her genetic mother but and she one of the ways we heard this was that she said she wishes that Melissa was missed she actually said things like I wish melissa was my DNA mommy I wish I had your DNA I wish you were my real mommy I want it you know so she said this kind of thing and again we not only did we not coach her to say this but we really cautioned her we said look you know you don't want to hurt the feelings of your your biological mother you know you don't want to say these things you know and again as nicely as possible we said no you know Melissa loves you we're here to play with you and I fell with you but no we know Melissa is not your real mother you know she's just molasses she's my girlfriend whatever let's say and we talked about that in future also in the first two visits you know she did say that she wanted me to marry my ex-wife I think just the first two visits where she talked about that and it was very cute and harmless minute that didn't seem to be psychologically burdened but she just said that she loved me so much and and she thought that I should get back together with my ex-wife and you know she came with some creative ideas about who Melissa should marry that we should all stay together or the four of us or something but you know so she had some ideas with that she was really positive she want us around but in the first two visits that was a difficult process of getting her to recognize that I was her father at all so these are spaced out by approximately six months each of these these four visits we made together so I thought we'd hit a kind of harmonious mutual understanding but the third visit of the four which is why the fourth visit was so disappointing so Melissa can you grab my mom on the third visit it seemed to me she really understood that I was her biological father that her her mother you know has in effect married another man they're not legally married but she has this boyfriend who lives in the apartment with her and that that man you know I guess helps her get ready for school and does other you know parental things from day to day she seemed to really clearly understand yeah on the third trip there didn't seem to be a lot of anxiety about that one way or the other from her she seemed to be really kind of confident and clear-headed about that I guess the other thing that went on in the background to this was related to her fascination with the death of mr. Rogers she had really just figured out what death was due to the death of my father so she had met my father and she was really aware that my father had died and was very interested in that that seemed to be the first time she figured out the meaning of the word and that inspired her to think a lot about how many grandparents she has you remember once that went into a bakery I was carrying her on my on my shoulders and she was sitting sitting on my back and she announced probably to everyone in the bakery how many parents she has nobody grandparents yes that's he but this is her regarding the divorce positively in the sense that this extended her her extended family so yeah it was really shocking and disappointing when on the fourth visit all of that progress seemed have been reversed and what we now seem to be encountering and again there's a kind of dotted line linking this to the issue that she was given a bicycle she never saw the bicycle she was given an electric musical keyboard electrical piano she never saw it even once and the gifts we'd given her that she did see briefly while she was with us she'd then never seen again they were taking away from her as soon as we we'd left and her struggles over this one toy that that she managed to hold on to despite that and she began that trip with us telling us in no uncertain terms that she was not my daughter that she never had been my daughter she denied that my that her name was the same as my name what was the name I'd given her so that's been another long slow controversy boiling only on the fourth trip did she insist that her last name is not the same as as my name which legally it is by the way um but on the three trips before that there was a lot of tension surrounding her first name now whether there are any ill intentions my ex-wife has given her a first name an informal nickname or first name that she's been taught to regard as her real first name and it is not and I'll just say it's it's a Russian first name or it's an Eastern European sound first name and she's now being told that she's gonna learn Bulgarian moved to Bulgaria and become Bulgarian and she's been given she's believes or she espouses that she has this Bulgarian Eastern European sounding last name again for my outsider's perspective it doesn't sound much different from a Russian and last name these are Slavic last names but the first name the first name that predates my ex-wife's relationship with the Bulgarian man it seems to go back a long long way mmm not to put too fine a point on it so maybe they're from about the same period I don't know so this business of giving her a different name giving her a different identity and then apparently you know her mother is coaching her through or rehearsing with her this transition to a point of view of rejecting me as her father and claiming that someone else is her father only now the plot twist is that since the fourth trip just in the last couple of months my ex-wife dramatically decided that she would rip up the custody agreement that we have so the custody agreement the word agreement nobody agreed to anything we have a court order we have a judge's judgment that tells us when I have custody and what to do and someone it's a writ from a judge it wasn't agreed to but the two sides it was created in a totally hostile situation and it governs our separation not our divorce as I've mentioned repeatedly my ex-wife refuses to divorce me so she's directly refused to receive paperwork she's refused in various ways and again in in the whole history of this case her lawyers have never once been willing to negotiate with my lawyers legally it would be called they've never made a proposal to my lawyers they've never discussed terms of words they've never been willing to proceed with a divorce neither amiably Noora Noora hostile divorce in france there were two tracts for divorce one cooperative not so cooperative so we have a situation now in which my ex-wife has said she doesn't care about the the court order so to speak that she is not gonna allow me to speak to my daughter by Skype every two weeks and she is not gonna allow me to see my daughter to have custody of my daughter once every six months and there has been no explanation for this she just says this is her new position and I can talk to her lawyer wishes to say my lawyer can talk to her lawyer and indeed yet more money as being spent on lawyers now than ever before so that will slowly start to unravel and unwind the other clue to this mystery is that allegedly and I could only say allegedly my ex-wife is now having a second child or at this date I can say most likely she already has a second child that she became pregnant presumably with her long-term boyfriend who is Bulgarian position European and we know about this entirely from my daughter that my daughter told us excitedly that she's gonna have a new baby brother and she told us all kinds of details that a young child would not make up about where the baby's gonna be sleeping and this this kind of thing I would point out also that she said some of this in front of her adoptive father my my ex-wife's new new boyfriend and he looked incredibly upset by her mentioning it he was downcast oh yeah you weren't you weren't there the first time that I've served melissa was you just weren't standing right there or elsewhere in the train station that when that happened so I I got the impression that if anything they had tried to coach her not to say that enough to talk about it and my ex-wife indeed has never been mentioned to me remitted to me nor has my ex-wife's boyfriend discussed it with me it has been suggested to me that there are legal reasons as to why that might be my ex-wife is refused to divorce me and that creates certain legal difficulties under French law I think legally I'm the father of that child legally that's my second child until we get paperwork saying it isn't a lot of countries don't like that within the United States I think it varies from state to state but if you're married to someone and get pregnant and have a baby it's presumed to be the legally wedded husbands baby until you take steps not to you so guys get divorced before you have chosen else and then the other problem is legally it means that she's guilty of adultery and that can matter in court yes it's ridiculous that you've been separated for five years and legally something's considered adultery when was she supposed to live in celibacy all this time but that is the hot water she has put herself into by refusing to divorce me refusing to have any kind of amiable resolution and progress so look um in closing I got a question on patreon that didn't insult me or upset me at all somebody asking what my perspective is in the divorce in this respect I was asking me basically how do you feel about the fact that your ex-wife is shacked up with someone else that she has a new new boyfriend or new new informal husband and I feel completely positively about that I didn't divorce my wife or swear I didn't try to get divorce I didn't initiate the divorce let's be clear I dumped her and even though legal statements in court stayed that she didn't leave me I made the decision to dump her but I didn't dump her so that I could control her life forever it no that's ridiculous I know a lot of guys have that kind of attitude I don't want to you know be the person who vets or approves or controls or her love life fundamentally be like well if she gets a new job I'm happy for her taking on the life she again earlier you know when she wanted to move to Germany I would have been positive and supportive of that you know if she wants to move to a new country you get a new job training things have a new husband I would have every reason to be positively inclined and encouraging about that the problem is precisely the extent to which my ex-wife has made every of this process combative dishonest spiteful counterproductive its she's done so many things legally emotionally personally that are that are simply unforgivable she's done so many things that serve no purpose except to harm me and that obviously are gonna harm my daughter and from my perspective they have now created a very very strange identity crisis from a daughter every home I'm aware of them having including my ex mother-in-law's home I found it striking that they had my daughter's full legal name like on the doorbell and on the post box so in the first trip I was invited to go there by the way I was good to go there to pick up my daughter and drop off my daughter and on the fourth trip again I went to pick up some toys briefly saw-max mother-in-law so I just mentioned it's not obvious I was invited to go to these places these these different times and of course the different times I've been sending checks for child support and that kind of thing so I don't know it's if it's so that she can receive legal benefits from the French government or why that is it's unusual to have a child's full name and earlier it was really a baby the full name the full legal name of a baby on your your post office box you know where you received mail but that's what she's been doing so you get this full name it's my name it was my name I kafir and my last name next to max wife's name and my ex mr. Claus name I whoa okay so that's that's always been striking to me and earlier in the divorce my ex-wife was trying to blackmail me into signing a document that would give her the legal right to use my family name so without going to the US I just always seemed bizarre to me like why would you have to force me you know it's just weird what are you doing so that was not the only thing she was trying to blackmail me into but I should flesh out if I'm gonna say blackmail so for example all of this I can prove in court all ii prove just by showing the email she wrote one of the modes of blackmail was of inviting me to see my daughter in germany and then telling me no she wouldn't let me see my daughter in Germany unless I signed a series of legal forms that among other things would give up anyway to see my daughter but in the list of demands she wanted me to sign was also starting over the right to use this name very strange so she's made a transition from that to this new fantastical mode of I guess trying to take revenge against me of giving my daughter a new first name a new family name and coaching my daughter to believe that she's not my daughter at all so look all these things aren't forgivable I said many years ago in this channel short-term thinking starts to resemble evil it's incredibly blind I mean long-term I was this gonna work out for you how can you possibly win how can this turn out well how can this turn out well for her relationship with her own daughter with my daughter's relationship with me with my relationship with her what you really want in a divorce is what I was offering her that's step one you want someone who's positively motivated to do co-parenting for one thing that's a free babysitter someone who's positively motivated to contribute your life financially in terms of time effort someone who's gonna be whatever whether I gets once a month or a couple times a year someone who's gonna you know collaborate with you someone who's gonna talk to you positively about the plans to the future and what's going on you know you want someone who's positively motivated in contributing and that was what I was from day one in this divorce that was what I would I had to offer and instead she's done everything she could to create an invidious situation invidious is really the word and I I really have no invidious feelings on my end if she wants to get married to someone else if she wants to have a child with someone else from my perspective the only thing she owes me is completing the legal paperwork for the divorce but I guess the reason why she doesn't want to do that is that it would take away from her forever the little bit of a gray area the a bit of wiggle room she has to do exactly what she's doing now and that is to stab me in the back over my right to see my daughter my right to have custody my right to even talk to her by Skype the little bit of wiggle room she's been enjoying the legal privileges she's been abusing by a court process in France that began by ruling in my absence not informing me intentionally concealing from me that the court process would begin to know in this world guys there's no justice but you know there's kindness there's detachment there's respect there's dignity and each and every one of us has to struggle to to live a life of Dayton II despite a justice system in which there is simply no interest in justice at all
relationship with my daughter is actually something that people want to know about but they feel uncomfortable asking me about and that's peculiar because for me it's not something I'm uncomfortable talking about really not at all and this comes up to my mind most strikingly with the people who are now in the gray area between being just fans of the channel and really being personal friends of mine because they're quite a few people now the mid watch the channel for two years four years where it's been and to a significant extent they know me but every so often they they kind of mention look they say something like look man I don't really know what's going on with your marriage and your situation their daughter they say look man I only know what [ __ ] your YouTube channel and then I also get kind of positive feedback with people where I mention it or give some kind of update and people say oh wow you know I you know I'm really glad to hear that or they really appreciate knowing because apparently something they want to know about but they never asked themself so no I'm I'm hard to offend that way but sure every so often people make you know presumptuous or denigrating or insulting statement and I'm not impossible to offend put it that way the purpose of this video is not to explain the dry legal details of the current situation although some of that will be mentioned in passing and it's not to talk about like my relationship with Mac's wife or really even my feelings in my perspective on it um I really want to talk about the kind of unfolding identity crisis that I see in my daughter's life and obviously I don't just have an outsider's perspective I had the perspective of someone who with real detachment is trying to interpret what a four year old a five year old and what six year old is telling me and to some extent the things she's telling me or things she's really programmed to say by her mother but only to some extent and you never know to what extent that is so he has pause on a much lighter note as an example of this after one of our visits with Alexandra I got a series of angry angry emails from my ex-wife because she felt Alexandra was coming home and making inspirational statements about veganism that we have we appropriate it to her that wasn't the case at all on that trip you know Alexander really had her own interest in veganism and she was very plucky about it and to give an example this is real kind of five-year-old reasoning but not someone reasonable she went back and said to her mother that if she ate a healthy vegan diet she could eat broccoli every day but then it would be fine if she ate chocolate-covered bananas this isn't what I taught her but you know she's putting the pieces together you know the chocolate-covered bananas that in France a very small amount of chocolate very thin coating it's mostly just a banana it's a lot healthier than most candy and desserts people give their kids I don't know kid you got it all figured out yeah so you know but that that wasn't something we'd sent her home to believe it's something she had figured out for herself as a theory she made up in her own mind we didn't even hear that from her she went back and told her mom proudly that she'd figured this out about veganism so you know in another more imaginative example from that same trip was that she'd kind of invented this whole story in her mind about Mister Rogers the children's TV actor that Mister Rogers from children's television and questions about his health and why did he have a heart attack if it's like my ex-wife sends me these angry emails as if I as if I'd program my dogs that it was like look it's coming straight out of her imagination my daughter is an imaginative strong-willed kid and she she makes up her own material on this I did not know doesn't come from me so it can be misleading to assume that your daughter is repeating stuff she's been told but both in terms of what she knew and what she did not know what information she's been presented with and what she's been deprived of we've gotten to see over the last two years approximately how my daughter's perspective on Who I am has changed and one relatively material one relatively tangible element of this story is the extent to which my ex-wife has just deprived my daughter of access to the toys that I've given her so over these years I sent her a lot of toys I'm not gonna get into details but on this last trip my daughter was really confirming it had come up before in the past that I'd given these toys to her or sent these toys to her and then she'd never see them again she either just see them when she was with me or in some cases that were sent in to put it in the mail and then they would disappear entirely and there was one toy where she really thought with him of that she loved it so much you want to key but you want to keep playing with it and her mother kept coming with pretexts to take it away or give it away to charity so this very strange struggle to erase my presence from my daughter's life erase the memory of me or raise questions about me by physically removing any toys any reminders of Who I am from their lives so that that's one palpable element now a little bit more impalpable is this the first time we saw my daughter that was the least emotionally complex but also maybe jarring and troubling its own way because she literally did not know who I was so there were a lot of strange and emotionally memorable moments where she said things like I love you you guys are really great to me like you know she really had a great time playing with us and going to the parking one at the beach we did normal kids stuff going to the ferris wheel this kind of thing she said you know I love you I love you guys you know she even said things like I wish you were my real parents but it's sad I wish I wish I could meet my real father you know my father who came to see me in Germany there was this distant memory of me coming to see her when she was in Germany and you know we tried to explain to her what it didn't just come up once no no I I actually am your real father I am the same man who who came to see you in Germany now most generously you could suppose that she was confused about this just because nobody nobody told but there was just silence about me that she wasn't actively coached to think that I was not her but again as this period of two years goes past in the later visits it seems on the contrary that the darker truth is she's really been actively told that that I'm not her father and now finally that that someone else is in terms of what is her name and and what is her identity in what have you so in the first couple of visits Alexander was really tremendously positive in tremendously enthusiastic about Melissa as her new mom very very enthusiastic about Melissa and you know little kids are shallow look look I'm sure part of the reason why she's enthusiastic about me being her dad or the presence of giving her the toys and the video games and going to the beach and when she spends time with us we don't have to force her to go to school we don't really have to force her to do anything she doesn't want to do we can just have fun so there's a real contrast between weekday parenting and holiday parenting or vacation parenting that way I know we have a kind of unfair advantage in that sense you know in terms of how she perceives us as as parents that were were nothing but but fun and laughs in good times and maybe when she's with her other family she's forced to do some chores or forced to get ready for school or that kind of thing but yeah little kids are shallow a lot of her enthusiasm about Melissa was because Melissa was so beautiful and she told us that every day she she but she was aware in relation to Melissa she was aware that Melissa was not her genetic mother but and she one of the ways we heard this was that she said she wishes that Melissa was missed she actually said things like I wish melissa was my DNA mommy I wish I had your DNA I wish you were my real mommy I want it you know so she said this kind of thing and again we not only did we not coach her to say this but we really cautioned her we said look you know you don't want to hurt the feelings of your your biological mother you know you don't want to say these things you know and again as nicely as possible we said no you know Melissa loves you we're here to play with you and I fell with you but no we know Melissa is not your real mother you know she's just molasses she's my girlfriend whatever let's say and we talked about that in future also in the first two visits you know she did say that she wanted me to marry my ex-wife I think just the first two visits where she talked about that and it was very cute and harmless minute that didn't seem to be psychologically burdened but she just said that she loved me so much and and she thought that I should get back together with my ex-wife and you know she came with some creative ideas about who Melissa should marry that we should all stay together or the four of us or something but you know so she had some ideas with that she was really positive she want us around but in the first two visits that was a difficult process of getting her to recognize that I was her father at all so these are spaced out by approximately six months each of these these four visits we made together so I thought we'd hit a kind of harmonious mutual understanding but the third visit of the four which is why the fourth visit was so disappointing so Melissa can you grab my mom on the third visit it seemed to me she really understood that I was her biological father that her her mother you know has in effect married another man they're not legally married but she has this boyfriend who lives in the apartment with her and that that man you know I guess helps her get ready for school and does other you know parental things from day to day she seemed to really clearly understand yeah on the third trip there didn't seem to be a lot of anxiety about that one way or the other from her she seemed to be really kind of confident and clear-headed about that I guess the other thing that went on in the background to this was related to her fascination with the death of mr. Rogers she had really just figured out what death was due to the death of my father so she had met my father and she was really aware that my father had died and was very interested in that that seemed to be the first time she figured out the meaning of the word and that inspired her to think a lot about how many grandparents she has you remember once that went into a bakery I was carrying her on my on my shoulders and she was sitting sitting on my back and she announced probably to everyone in the bakery how many parents she has nobody grandparents yes that's he but this is her regarding the divorce positively in the sense that this extended her her extended family so yeah it was really shocking and disappointing when on the fourth visit all of that progress seemed have been reversed and what we now seem to be encountering and again there's a kind of dotted line linking this to the issue that she was given a bicycle she never saw the bicycle she was given an electric musical keyboard electrical piano she never saw it even once and the gifts we'd given her that she did see briefly while she was with us she'd then never seen again they were taking away from her as soon as we we'd left and her struggles over this one toy that that she managed to hold on to despite that and she began that trip with us telling us in no uncertain terms that she was not my daughter that she never had been my daughter she denied that my that her name was the same as my name what was the name I'd given her so that's been another long slow controversy boiling only on the fourth trip did she insist that her last name is not the same as as my name which legally it is by the way um but on the three trips before that there was a lot of tension surrounding her first name now whether there are any ill intentions my ex-wife has given her a first name an informal nickname or first name that she's been taught to regard as her real first name and it is not and I'll just say it's it's a Russian first name or it's an Eastern European sound first name and she's now being told that she's gonna learn Bulgarian moved to Bulgaria and become Bulgarian and she's been given she's believes or she espouses that she has this Bulgarian Eastern European sounding last name again for my outsider's perspective it doesn't sound much different from a Russian and last name these are Slavic last names but the first name the first name that predates my ex-wife's relationship with the Bulgarian man it seems to go back a long long way mmm not to put too fine a point on it so maybe they're from about the same period I don't know so this business of giving her a different name giving her a different identity and then apparently you know her mother is coaching her through or rehearsing with her this transition to a point of view of rejecting me as her father and claiming that someone else is her father only now the plot twist is that since the fourth trip just in the last couple of months my ex-wife dramatically decided that she would rip up the custody agreement that we have so the custody agreement the word agreement nobody agreed to anything we have a court order we have a judge's judgment that tells us when I have custody and what to do and someone it's a writ from a judge it wasn't agreed to but the two sides it was created in a totally hostile situation and it governs our separation not our divorce as I've mentioned repeatedly my ex-wife refuses to divorce me so she's directly refused to receive paperwork she's refused in various ways and again in in the whole history of this case her lawyers have never once been willing to negotiate with my lawyers legally it would be called they've never made a proposal to my lawyers they've never discussed terms of words they've never been willing to proceed with a divorce neither amiably Noora Noora hostile divorce in france there were two tracts for divorce one cooperative not so cooperative so we have a situation now in which my ex-wife has said she doesn't care about the the court order so to speak that she is not gonna allow me to speak to my daughter by Skype every two weeks and she is not gonna allow me to see my daughter to have custody of my daughter once every six months and there has been no explanation for this she just says this is her new position and I can talk to her lawyer wishes to say my lawyer can talk to her lawyer and indeed yet more money as being spent on lawyers now than ever before so that will slowly start to unravel and unwind the other clue to this mystery is that allegedly and I could only say allegedly my ex-wife is now having a second child or at this date I can say most likely she already has a second child that she became pregnant presumably with her long-term boyfriend who is Bulgarian position European and we know about this entirely from my daughter that my daughter told us excitedly that she's gonna have a new baby brother and she told us all kinds of details that a young child would not make up about where the baby's gonna be sleeping and this this kind of thing I would point out also that she said some of this in front of her adoptive father my my ex-wife's new new boyfriend and he looked incredibly upset by her mentioning it he was downcast oh yeah you weren't you weren't there the first time that I've served melissa was you just weren't standing right there or elsewhere in the train station that when that happened so I I got the impression that if anything they had tried to coach her not to say that enough to talk about it and my ex-wife indeed has never been mentioned to me remitted to me nor has my ex-wife's boyfriend discussed it with me it has been suggested to me that there are legal reasons as to why that might be my ex-wife is refused to divorce me and that creates certain legal difficulties under French law I think legally I'm the father of that child legally that's my second child until we get paperwork saying it isn't a lot of countries don't like that within the United States I think it varies from state to state but if you're married to someone and get pregnant and have a baby it's presumed to be the legally wedded husbands baby until you take steps not to you so guys get divorced before you have chosen else and then the other problem is legally it means that she's guilty of adultery and that can matter in court yes it's ridiculous that you've been separated for five years and legally something's considered adultery when was she supposed to live in celibacy all this time but that is the hot water she has put herself into by refusing to divorce me refusing to have any kind of amiable resolution and progress so look um in closing I got a question on patreon that didn't insult me or upset me at all somebody asking what my perspective is in the divorce in this respect I was asking me basically how do you feel about the fact that your ex-wife is shacked up with someone else that she has a new new boyfriend or new new informal husband and I feel completely positively about that I didn't divorce my wife or swear I didn't try to get divorce I didn't initiate the divorce let's be clear I dumped her and even though legal statements in court stayed that she didn't leave me I made the decision to dump her but I didn't dump her so that I could control her life forever it no that's ridiculous I know a lot of guys have that kind of attitude I don't want to you know be the person who vets or approves or controls or her love life fundamentally be like well if she gets a new job I'm happy for her taking on the life she again earlier you know when she wanted to move to Germany I would have been positive and supportive of that you know if she wants to move to a new country you get a new job training things have a new husband I would have every reason to be positively inclined and encouraging about that the problem is precisely the extent to which my ex-wife has made every of this process combative dishonest spiteful counterproductive its she's done so many things legally emotionally personally that are that are simply unforgivable she's done so many things that serve no purpose except to harm me and that obviously are gonna harm my daughter and from my perspective they have now created a very very strange identity crisis from a daughter every home I'm aware of them having including my ex mother-in-law's home I found it striking that they had my daughter's full legal name like on the doorbell and on the post box so in the first trip I was invited to go there by the way I was good to go there to pick up my daughter and drop off my daughter and on the fourth trip again I went to pick up some toys briefly saw-max mother-in-law so I just mentioned it's not obvious I was invited to go to these places these these different times and of course the different times I've been sending checks for child support and that kind of thing so I don't know it's if it's so that she can receive legal benefits from the French government or why that is it's unusual to have a child's full name and earlier it was really a baby the full name the full legal name of a baby on your your post office box you know where you received mail but that's what she's been doing so you get this full name it's my name it was my name I kafir and my last name next to max wife's name and my ex mr. Claus name I whoa okay so that's that's always been striking to me and earlier in the divorce my ex-wife was trying to blackmail me into signing a document that would give her the legal right to use my family name so without going to the US I just always seemed bizarre to me like why would you have to force me you know it's just weird what are you doing so that was not the only thing she was trying to blackmail me into but I should flesh out if I'm gonna say blackmail so for example all of this I can prove in court all ii prove just by showing the email she wrote one of the modes of blackmail was of inviting me to see my daughter in germany and then telling me no she wouldn't let me see my daughter in Germany unless I signed a series of legal forms that among other things would give up anyway to see my daughter but in the list of demands she wanted me to sign was also starting over the right to use this name very strange so she's made a transition from that to this new fantastical mode of I guess trying to take revenge against me of giving my daughter a new first name a new family name and coaching my daughter to believe that she's not my daughter at all so look all these things aren't forgivable I said many years ago in this channel short-term thinking starts to resemble evil it's incredibly blind I mean long-term I was this gonna work out for you how can you possibly win how can this turn out well how can this turn out well for her relationship with her own daughter with my daughter's relationship with me with my relationship with her what you really want in a divorce is what I was offering her that's step one you want someone who's positively motivated to do co-parenting for one thing that's a free babysitter someone who's positively motivated to contribute your life financially in terms of time effort someone who's gonna be whatever whether I gets once a month or a couple times a year someone who's gonna you know collaborate with you someone who's gonna talk to you positively about the plans to the future and what's going on you know you want someone who's positively motivated in contributing and that was what I was from day one in this divorce that was what I would I had to offer and instead she's done everything she could to create an invidious situation invidious is really the word and I I really have no invidious feelings on my end if she wants to get married to someone else if she wants to have a child with someone else from my perspective the only thing she owes me is completing the legal paperwork for the divorce but I guess the reason why she doesn't want to do that is that it would take away from her forever the little bit of a gray area the a bit of wiggle room she has to do exactly what she's doing now and that is to stab me in the back over my right to see my daughter my right to have custody my right to even talk to her by Skype the little bit of wiggle room she's been enjoying the legal privileges she's been abusing by a court process in France that began by ruling in my absence not informing me intentionally concealing from me that the court process would begin to know in this world guys there's no justice but you know there's kindness there's detachment there's respect there's dignity and each and every one of us has to struggle to to live a life of Dayton II despite a justice system in which there is simply no interest in justice at all