Justice

My therapist accused my of trying to change the FOB by teaching him a lesson. I told him that I cared less about the lesson and more about the retribution.

My nature I'm not a venegeful person. I believe in seeing the good in people and beauty in the universe. That faith has been severely challenged over the course of the past year. Hopefully, when I'm old and gray, I'll see 2008 as the year that I lost my childlike belief that "good things happen to good people. As long as you continue to be good, you just have to wait for the good things to happen."

Sometimes you may have to wait a long time. In the interim, things like your car a/c will go out three times in a week or your vagina will develop its own ecosystem that is openly hostile to the area of delicate skin around it. It will become the Iran of your body. You will be one missle-test away from deciding just to nuke the whole damn region and revisit the issue in 500 years. Even then, with the threat of nuclear war dangling below your belly button, fate has no need for "niceness".

I always believed that if I was "nice" enough or "good" enough that the world would play by the rule book that I imagined was fair. My rule book is simply, really. If I'm nice to you (both the world at-large and individuals), you will be nice to me and not do things like end a relationship without saying good bye, abandon a child, or cause a school bus to quickly apply its brakes while turning right on red.

The cliche that you can only control your reaction to events dawned on me after I called the Attorney General's Office on Wednesday. The AG's office had issued a Writ of Withholding for the FOB's wages back in May. He had used his social security number on a job application in Florida and it was flagged for back child support due. The name of the place that the AG said the FOB worked was ridiculous. It sounded like a name of a seedy strip club, but I had faith that child support would begin to flow like a river around a sea of half-naked women.

I waited 45 business days for FOB's employer to start garnishing his wages. That's a little over three months in calendar time. It's also the legal length of time given to employers to begin garnishment. On Wednesday, the interim ended. I called the AG's office and asked them if there were any new developments on my case. Their answer was "no". The P.O. Box that was listed as an address for the employer didn't seem to actually exist. The AG didn't have a phone number or a home address for the FOB and didn't have a way to contact him. Funny enough, I don't have that information either. Nor does his family. It's almost like he's avoiding child support, which isn't surprising. I'd avoid owing the government $4,000 if I were in his shoes.

The AG representative told me that there was nothing more that she could do. They didn't have the means to investigate the case.

I hung up the phone and experienced rage like I have never experienced before. In those moments of sheer anger, I realized that I would trade monthly child support for justice. Imprisoning a man for non-payment of child support always seemed silly to me before I became a parent. You can't earn more than $.28/hour in jail and a criminal record made it more difficult to get a job afterwards. Then I became a parent and I understood that it's not about the money. It's about honoring commitments and responsibility and the FOB is the one person in my life that is legally bound to follow the rules of being "good". I wanted justice, just this once. I wanted retribution. I wanted him to go to jail and sit there every night thinking about the child he created.

So, what directly influences justice in America? Money. I could write a whole other post about the flaws of the American justice system, or I could start calculating how much money I'd be willing to spend to find his ass. The number got to be pretty high in my head, especially considering the fact that I put off going to see the Ob-Gyn for three months because of a $45 co-pay. "I have good credit," I thought. "I've always been so good about making sure my I pay my bills on-time, even if it meant that money was tight until I got paid again." I could get a loan. I could find him.

Before I did that I did a little more searching on his employer. Turns out that the AG had the full legal name, which didn't come up in any google searches because the business was doing business under a slightly different name. Some creative typing later and I was staring at a well-design website for an upscale restaurant chain. The FOB doesn't work at the store where the P.O. Box used to be located (two years ago, before the company moved its corporate headquarters). He works at the store an hour a way, in central Florida.

I called the AG's office back and gave them all the information I had, including the name of the FOB's manager and phone number to the restaurant. I asked, not particularly nicely, that they begin enforcing the court order and hold the FOB in contempt. I got a lot of excuses that primarily involved not having a home address to serve an order to appear in court paper to the FOB. I'm not sure how much easier it could be, though, to call up an employer, say you are with the AG's office and get the home address that an employee listed on their W-2.

The AG's office has 15 business days to determine the course of action regarding enforcement. In three weeks, I'll know what I need to do next to find justice. I've been good and nice long enough.