CSA award in Father’s favour

It’s been a while since I posted, time has been diluted and I have avoided facing my stepfamily issues in hope they will subside but bombshells still go off unexpectedly here and there.  Some bigger than others!  So much has happened since my last post but first I want to update my post about the CSA.

The Issue: The CSA, after a tribunal the Judge decided to tell my DH’s ex that he had in fact been overpaying, told the CSA that they were useless and awarded the judgement in my DH’s favour.  They gave him all his overpayment money back and his ex has to repay it to them.  Hoorah!  Justice does in fact exist!!

Result: Ex/BM is LIVID!!  She has now put in a new assessment request which will make her more livid because it will be returned as nil.  This means she will get no money.  Why?  My DH has tried to get the CSA to disregard his recently awarded War Pension and move straight to the reassessment but they won’t do it.  DH explained that his Ex would go nuts if they assessed it as Nil and take it out on his son.  They didn’t really seem to think there was a way round it but decided to leave the current payment as it was and wait for her to put in a reassessment request herself, that way, in the meantime, Ex gets money and SS gets a peaceful life.    BUT..she’s already put in the reassessment claim after reeling about having to pay back the CSA £1,000.  After she gets a Nil assessment she will apply for another assessment and that will sort things out, but the shouting OMG stage from her is unavoidable…and DH tried to prevent it from happening.

Fallout on SS: The CSA want paying back the overpayment they made to DH’s Ex.  She is so angry about it all that she is taking it out on their son.  She has had tantrums, her husband has told SS that THEY paid for his recent birthday present of a bike because we bought it with THEIR money (honestly, I think he is just as crazy as she is).  Her everyday child punishments seem to be becoming more disjointed and absurd with each passing day.  We are worried.

The Counsellor’s View: My stepson (aka SS) sees a counsellor because his mother (aka BM or Ex) couldn’t communicate with him and he was having increasing problems with both her, his stepfather (aka SF) and his extended family.  This is the second lot of counselling he has had.  He has just turned 11.  The Counsellor has watched SS go up and down with emotions, feelings, experiences and all in, his verdict is: BM is showing signs of Psychosis and SS should really come and live with us sooner rather than later. Great news for SS, great news for his Grandparents, great and bad news for his Father and crippling news for me.  My immediate reaction is NO WAY!!  But more on that in another post.

Life just got so confusing it is outrageous.  I have to figure out where my loyalties lie, with my husband, my step family or with myself.  What do I want?  Can I cope?  Do I want to?  What the HELL do I do next?

Am I ready to commit or throw in the towel?

So here we are, the fork in the road I never wanted to stand at.  Never.  To be honest, I never thought I would have to.  It is now that I reflect on what has been and gone before this moment that I realise the impact that I have had as a stepmother.

Once upon a time my SS was a weak, beaten, fragile little man with a manipulative mother who overpowered him.  He has endured her wrath, her tantrums and her punishments for so long I never thought he would speak out loud enough to be heard.  But then, when I think back, I did the same thing and I recall, in past conversations, that I have told him as much.  I have told him that I snapped once, that I finally had enough of my Dad one day and we came to blows.  I remember vividly feeling more angry and stronger than I had ever felt before in that one moment..and it all came out in a flashflood of shouting, expletives and violence (unfortunately).  Dad was trying to push me out of the door and I was gripping onto the frame for dear life.  It was then that the moment hit me, then that I snapped and I laid into my Dad and punched him in the head.  We had rowed for so many years and I felt so controlled by silly small rules and constantly punished that I snapped.  It took me a long time to get over my father/me relationship issues.  They continue now but only in small amounts and few and far between.  I am grateful for the distance and maturity I have to be able to deal with it now.  I just wanted him to approve and praise me not get on my back all the time and it got too much for me to bear.

Maybe I empowered my SS to do the same by letting him know that he is not trapped.  He recently started to tell his mother he hates her.  I feel for him on that, it is horrible to hate your parent.  I have always encouraged him to sort out his problems with his mother and stepfather yet the problems obviously continue.

As briefly explained in my previous post, his counsellor says he is so worried about the mental state  and pressure put upon my stepson to get through his 11+ tests and into Grammar School that the best thing would be for him to live with us.

I freaked out at my husband.  NO WAY!!  I have totally lost it and so inappropriately timed too.  My poor husband has just got a diagnosis (yesterday) of Fibromyalgia on top of his Chondromalacia Patella condition – both chronic, both painful, both incurable.  He really didn’t need me freaking out about his son coming to live with us.  I guess I didn’t really see how much I felt about that situation and how much I didn’t want it.

I am lost right now and I don’t know which way is up…

Do I allow a chewed up and spat out stepson with an ocean of problems to sort out into my home permanently?

Do I love my husband enough to let his son live with us?

Can I cope with leaving them both if that is what I choose?

How will all the responsibility be split up?

Is my own childhood effecting how I feel about the situation?

Why do I not feel enough love for my stepson to want to rescue him?

Why do I feel so threatened?

How will I get through University with all these problems in my life?

Am I the most selfish person in the world?

I guess I will have to explore these questions alone.  I have tried to discuss it with my husband but right now he is reeling from his diagnosis and how he will have to reduce his working hours, the money problems that faces us with and the possibility of having his son finally come and live with us, getting him over not living with his mother, changing schools AND the possibility of losing his wife, me.

I feel like the biggest shit in the world right now and I want to vanish.  I want to just run away, start my life over (again..this seems to happen every 7 years!!) and I am scared about what happens next.

I got so involved that I trapped myself.   Sometimes I feel like my work is done here, that I was meant to stay for a reason and that is almost complete.  That is not how I should feel about my life and my wonderful husband.

I loved a man so much once that he shattered me and I think that has a lot to do with how guarded I feel.  I never want to feel that much pain again and I never want to inflict it on another.  What the hell do I do?

I have a lot to sort out in my head and my heart.

In my next life I would like to be something that has a short lifespan..like a butterfly or a bee and then repeat for eternity.

Who the hell decided I was capable of being a human being?  Not me!

The Child Support Agency Lost Files

this was not my intended next post but a snippet of life in-between.

Part of being a stepmum is the CSA Experience.  The good old Child Support Agency.  If you’re lucky you will never experience the stressful confusion they spread amongst broken families.  The parent with care will unleash their revenge by starting the process of a claim through the CSA.  As my husband and I went through court to get decent and regular access to his son/my stepson, why would he not pay towards his keep, he adores him.  Anyway, it seems that at every available opportunity of a review, his ex submits one.  She is married now to a man who owns a successful business, they have two or three holidays a year, eat out two or three times a week, buy expensive clothes etc, they have little need for the money and yet, she still complains that she does not get enough.  My husband pays the calculated amount of child maintenance that he is entitled to pay, buys clothes for him as he arrives in his school uniform for the weekend, feeds his son and teaches him good, honest morals and nurtures and loves him.

The CSA are hell.  They have told my husband that he is underpaying, then he is overpaying, then he is underpaying again.  They haven’t applied shared care at all even though numerous copies of the court order for access were submitted. We give up.  Right now my husband is standing in a Tribunal because he has apparently never submitted paperwork to inform the CSA that regular contact was taking place yet he has provided this many times over the last 5 years!  They have LOST all the paperwork from his file.  How?  His ex, despite my husband never missing a payment, always paid on time and paid the full amount asked, has written to slate the CSA and how incompetent they are and demanded a Deductions of Earnings Order (DEO) against my husband’s wages.

An extract taken from the Governments Child Support Agency www.csa.gov.uk website.

“Taking money from wages

If the non-resident parent works for an employer or receives an occupational pension, we can take child maintenance direct from their earnings or pension using a ‘deduction from earnings order’. This is one of the main methods of payment that employed non resident parents can choose. If they have not chosen to pay this way, it is normally the first step we take if a non-resident parent who is employed has missed payments and cannot give us a good reason why, or if they fail to agree a method of payment with us.”

My husband has not chosen this method of payment or missed any payments so it would be against their policy and the law to go direct to his employer without prior consultation with the non-resident parent, i.e. my husband.

I await the outcome.  It is unfortunate that my husband’s ex has been receiving too much money and would have to pay it back but it is not actually her fault, it is the CSA for miscalculating and losing paperwork.

For those suffering at the hands of the CSA I’ve just stumbled upon a website for those living their own CSA hell and the site is aptly named www.csahell.com a place to vent, submit your own story, get advice about dealing with the wonderful (ahem) organisation that is the Child Support Agency etc.

I have all my fingers and toes crossed for positive outcome and that, for once, the misfortune befalls the other side.  It would make a nice change, we need a break from it all.

Vent over.

Where do I start?

So, the stepmother diaries, here we are but where to begin?  At the beginning I guess, when I was small.

When a little girl is growing up she has dreams of a pretty wedding and a happy family.  Never does she imagine for one minute that one day she might become a Stepmother.  It’s not something a girl thinks about, it’s not on the list of things to do in life..but here I am.

How did I get here?  It’s a long old story, a sad one but lets just say that between an ex who didn’t want kids, a lot of wasted years, a tragic death and a genetic condition that poses a high risk of cancer, I met a man who can’t father kids and I fell for him.  It was fated to be and I battled for a long time about having a family, or ‘how’ to have a family and time was ticking by.  I wondered, through all that I had endured so far, the two children I had never had and the situation I was in, was someone trying to tell me that I was not meant to have kids of my own?  I kind of give in to the belief of fate and karma as battling against your served plate of life goods can sometimes seem like a mountain to climb or a heavy burden to bare.  Sometimes you have to just go with the flow.

So I flowed here, here I am.  A Stepmother.  WOW!

Next installment: Things to consider before you get involved with a man who has kids!