Once again I contact my ex to see if we can actually organise for me to have my son for a while. She seems to be maintaining her stance of bringing other people along. As far as I am concerned, this is not acceptable and will not be acceptable for a long time.

Bring on the Dispute Resolution session. :-(

I tried to see my sonn this weekend, but it didn't happen. Or maybe the right line is that it wouldn't happen.

My ex and I had an SMS exchange over the last few days trying to organise something.

Thursday Evening:

Me:

Hi. Is Nicholas available to spend time with me this weekend? I'd prefer Sunday afternoon.

Her:

Sunday Afternoon after his sleep is fine. Where would you like us to meet you?

Friday Afternoon

Me:

Sorry for the delay. I was thinking of the Camelia gardens and the park below it. Just you, me, Nicholas and some lovely open space.

Her:

I will call you when he wakes on Sunday

Sunday Afternoon

Her:

Nicholas has not long woken up. What time do you want to meet?

Me:

How about 3:30

Her:

What ever. See you there! Just confirming it is in the park below the gardens?

Me:

Yes that's right. And just you and Nicholas.

Her:

Please foot (sic) start dictating who i bring and dont bring you do not control my life!

Her:

It is your and Nicholas time not any thing to do with me and who I bring

Me:

It is a time for Nicholas and me, not Nicholas, me and whoever else you may want to include. Please do not being anyone else. I won't be.

Her:

Who I bring is none of your business. Like I said you dont control me. And hwoever I being will not interfere with your time with Nicholas. And I have never stopped you bringing anyone.

Me:

If you cannot respect a reasonable request for my time with my son then today is in danger of being cancelled. Again. And Nicholas would miss out again.

Her:

I have my mother driving me as I do not feel comfortable around you on my own. Like I said it is you time with Nicholas. I am there for Nicholas only, not to interefer in you time with nicholas either. Your choice, Nicholas is not missing our as we are on our way, and I will moot break my promise to him. you decide. We will be there.

Me:

You've clearly made your decision, then. He could have had a good time with me this afternoon.

Her:

No you've clearly made your decision. I wont be controlled by you nor do I take your threats lightly. Yes Nicholas could have enojoyed some time with you. He is having fun feeding the ducks as we speak. I have net my end of the visitation by bringing Nicholas to your requested spot. Your the one deciding not to turn up. Your loss!

It will now be three weeks since I last saw my son. My ex isn't showing much interest in working with my life; seemingly expecting me to work with hers. Well, this weekend, I'm busy the whole of Saturday at a Church Working Bee and she's taking him to his cousin's second birthday party on Sunday. I can easily say she's making it hard for him to see me, in fact, I will.

The SMS exchange went like this (edited slightly for spelling):

Me: Can we organise something this weekend for Nicholas to see me? I'm busy all of Saturday, but could do something Sunday afternoon.

Her: Nicholas has his cousin's birthday on sunday

Me: I hope Nicholas enjoys his cousin's birthday on Sunday. I will be at the church all day on Saturday at the working bee. Maybe we can work out a way he could spend some of the day with me next Saturday

Her: I am sorry that the working bee is more important than seeing Nicholas. I will look up what is on and let you know.

Me: And I'm sorry you chose Nicholas seeing his cousin over his father. I wouldn't think you wanted that argument. Please don't judge my choices.

Her: I had no choice. I have not started to argue, I don't see the point. You are the one deciding to miss out.

Me: The person who is really missing out is Nicholas.

They say there's always three sides to any conflict: each person's view and then there's the truth.

I tried to organise to see my son again this weekend. Again, we chose after church. Unfortunately, he had been up extra early this morning (I'm told) and my ex had to take my son home before the end of church for a sleep. She messaged me a little while ago that he'd awoken. "He has just woken up, where would you like us to meet you? He will need lunch!"

I responded with "Okay - can you bring him and his bike and a ball up to Cooper St in about half an hour?" as I don't have any toys of his or for him as a) I can't afford it and b) she has fought me doing this. Her response was somewhat acerbic: "Why should I bring his entertainment for your visitation?" Note she is still referring to this as me visiting Nicholas. AFAIK, 'visitation' has been removed from the legislation some years ago. I've been making a practice of referring to it as 'Nicholas spending time with me'. I responded with "Because it is for Nicholas' benefit".

The response showed she didn't want to give any ground: "I am sorry, why can't you provide what he needs for his benefit during your visitatio time. I have done it long enough for you to know what he needs." It seems like she wants to not only control how my son sees me, but she wants control over changing the rules, too! Well, no more. My response: "Okay, then. I'm calling today off: you're arguing. Nicholas has now lost the opportunity to see his father this afternoon. I will be at church tonight, though." She would have done the same work and seem the same material at the FRC that I did. She should recognise that we're disagreeing over Nicholas, and that I'm not going to do it anymore.

Her response: "I'm not arguing I just don't see why I have to provide everything as I have received legal advice about it and they agree I shouldn't. You are the one missing out. Nicholas will not be out in the night air because of his croup and asthma so if you want to see Nicholas he will be at Cooper St in about 15 min. As at no point have I argued."

Yet again, she doesn't see we're in disagreement and that she has taken a position she is not prepared to change. More: she is expecting me to capitulate and to be where I suggested. Not going to happen. So I miss out on my son again.

It doesn't appear that I will be seeing my son this weekend. My ex-wife doesn't want to leave him in my care.

Backtrack. I last saw my son last week. I seem to be averaging about an hour a week, which is pretty paltry. In truth, my working life makes it hard to do much about that without a lot of planning. But the solicitor last week expressed concern that it was so low. The courts don't like it that low without a reason.

But "an hour a week" takes into account the previous week where I didn't see him at all. The week before I met him and his mother at Cronulla beach and we had a pretty good time. He really liked the sand, digging, filling his little bucket, tipping it out and starting it all over again. The water he wasn't so interested in, but that was okay because I wasn't dressed for a dip in the sea (oops). Even my ex and I seemed to get along okay for a change; hard to avoid the fact this might have been because her mother wasn't present.

The intervening week I didn't plan anything and didn't get in contact with her, so nothing happened. I'm annoyed she doesn't make first contact when that happens, after telling me many times that she wants our son to know his father. I find it a challenge to call her during the week, so often leave it later than I should.

Last week went well, on the whole, though. I met them at a local shopping centre around midday whereupon she foisted him on me (yay! score!) for me to give him some lunch and then play in the indoor play area nearby. I thought that on the whole it worked well, though I let him have some milkshake in defiance to her request that he may want some milk for his reflux. He trusts me to be with him, and to get him food and to take him places. He's also quite patient and obedient. But I want to care for him, at least part of the time, not just play with him.

Then we come to this week. I messaged her a few days ago seeking to organise this weekend. I'm sick of the nearby indoor playground, and playgrounds in general because I'm being just another playmate for him. She also insists on supervising me, which makes last week all the more odd. We're in the middle of a process for negotiating parental access, as a precursor to putting out problems before a magistrate. This way is much cheaper and quicker. We haven't reached the shared session yet - but I've had a few one-to-one sessions with the facilitor assigned to us. I've made it clear that I resent her supervising me all the time, and I want to be looking after him without needing her approval. I began to suspect she was informed of this before last weekend. It would have been nice to know that that was going to happen, of course, as I didn't come prepared and had to rely on her support bag, and me spending money I didn't really have to spend.

And that brings me to this week. My initial request got a response that Saturday morning was available. Now I have been using Saturday morning to do my washing and shopping. After some chatting with my mother about my options, she suggested I merely take him with me. This has the benefit of him starting to see me living "normally" and being with Daddy as he does things other than play. So I suggested this, including the opportunity to let him see my cats, which he will remember from when were living together last year.

My ex was not buying it. She basically won't let me take him anywhere I can't walk with him. Of course, the exhange was a bit more emotionally charged than that. :-( Plus she is still using her mother's email account to send email (which I am not replying to), and due to her own phone being flat, she's sent a message from her mother's phone. I'm not impressed.

My response - to her phone, not her mother's - is that I can't accept her conditions. So Saturday is not going to happen. And I and Nicholas miss out on each other again.

I can't wait for this FDR session. I am just so sick of her trying to run my relationship with my son. I realized this afternoon that I barely believe her about his medical status, anyway, which probably doesn't help, but all I see in that is an excuse for her to exert some control over things. She won't accept what she thinks is me telling her how to think - and has said so - so there's no reason I have to believe her vision of How The World Is. I believe she's already discovered this with the Family Dispute Resolution process; we have to go through this before a court will listen to the complaint, and can even send people back to the process. I know she would rather front up to a magistrate, though I don't understand why, so this would be annoying for her. I want to look after him for a few days a week (or fortnight). That is, have a bed for him to sleep in, bathe him, feed him, clothe him. Even perhaps take him to childcare once a week (or fortnight); there's a subsidised one near where I work. He already likes train journeys....

In the meantime, it's slowly getting harder to spend time with Nicholas.

I've gotten unexpected hugs, but not from a total, complete stranger. The closest was a visitor to church one night who liked hugs.

I'm treading water at the moment. Waiting for my incoming to exceed my outgoing. Waiting for Family Dispute Resolution so I can have a clear idea of how much I'm going to see my son in the future. Waiting for my other lawyer to reply so I can start making my separation final. Waiting for enough cash to buy another kilt. Waiting for a whole lot of things so I can sell my Lancer and buy an old Porsche instead.

I'm sick of waiting.

I'm sick of my ex-wife wanting to run my involvement with our son. I'm sick of her always including her mother whom I have almost no time for anymore. "Oh Lord teach me patience and teach it to me right now..."

I tried to organise to retreive some more of my personal belongings today. My ex is being troublesome, seeing things in the world her way. Not that I don't either, of course. After her picking the day and time for me to do this, however, she tried to go on about how she's made all these arrangements so that my son isn't present to see this.

Except he's two and I don't understand how seeing Daddy come and remove things he wasn't using anyway is going to adversely affect him. Unless she's playing it up. Which is idiotic. It means she's trying to use him as a weapon and that will back fire because I will be telling the FRC facilitator about this. My son knows me and loves me. This is so obvious I don't know why she doesn't acknowledge it. Perhaps she doesn't want to.

I had a good time with my son yesterday. A good time, but not a great time.

Why is it we so often seek approval from those around us? It must be something we're trained to do, trained to think. Are so many people in this modern, western society so self-unconfident? We want people to more than accept who we are and what we choose to be: we want them to praise us for it. The last thing we want is for those we're seeking acceptance (and approval) from to criticise us and require we change.

My (ex-)wife is one of the latter. I find her hard to be around because she doesn't approve of me the way I am and thinks she has the right to tell me how I should be different. This is the reason behind the reason we separated. However, we have a son between us who I want to be a father to. Currently this means me spending a little over an hour a week with him, partly as I work full time but also because I have no facilities (at the moment) to house him. And she wouldn't let him go into my care, either. Not without a fight.

I had an interesting talk with a good friend at church the other day about man-women relationships. The topic had shifted to my more-or-less failed marriage, and I had opined that I felt I was also on-trial, always having to seek my wife's approval, rather than her just accepting me as I was. My friend's response was enlightening: her beau had asked her the exact same question. Puzzled, she asked other female friends about this and the responses were that this seems to be par for the course. My friend's reaction shows a certain dissatisfaction with that -- and I quite agree. I recently read one of Pamela Stephenson's book about Billy Connolly. In it, we see a man and a woman who both love one another, but are still both their own person. Pamela freely admits both that Billy can drive her up the wall and that she does things that he objects to. But neither is permanently seeking the approval of the other.

I remember realizing to myself, long before I even met my wife, that I wanted a woman who would chase me. I'd kinda forgotten this for the longest time. To an extent, Rachael sought me. But maybe she wanted to be sought, too. And once we were married, we didn't know how to translate that into a married life.

How do I figure out how to generate self-approval? How do I get off the roller-coaster of needing those around me to validate my existence and actions, and get on with being what I am and what I can be?

I had a great time this afternoon, basically being a big kid myself, charging around at a local indoor playground with my 2 year old son. He knew my name - and it was a real treasure to hear him calling to me "Daddy! Daddy!", and able to to disagree ("No, Daddy") and to ask for things ("Ball, Daddy"). I climbed around in the climbing structure after him, including a visit to the ball pit (but he didn't want to go down the slides), and we stacked big foam blocks in the other corner, only to knock them over again. I pretended to fall asleep at one point, and he did, too. Only I think he knows Mummy snores and was making snoring noises! :-)

I was particularly impressed that she left him with me for ten minutes when she went out to a nearby bargain store. Leaving him with me is something she has sworn would not happen, but clearly she thought I was taking good (enough) care of him and could afford the break.

All in all, a successful visit. I had some trepidation, of course. After they left I spoke for a few minutes with the lady running the place and she was sympathetic to the situation. She said it is fairly normal for single parents to visit their child there and she understands my plight.

Life is full of choices.

This morning, I chose to go to church like I normally do. I was a little bit late (not unusual), so the service had already started by the time I got there. I was about to park when I suddenly lost my nerve. My ex-wife and her mother were likely to be there, and sure enough, that was her car in the carpark. I had had an upsetting encounter last Sunday with them, so I was reluctant to do that again. The real fly in the ointment was my son, whom I love very much. Skipping out on church meant I wouldn't see him, either.

I drove away again. Choices. I spent the morning wandering the local shopping centre. This was not all that easy as most shops were (understandably) shut on Sunday morning.

Along the way home, I got a few extra things that would help with lunch, as I had volunteered to cook something for my parents and I today (more choices). It went off pretty well, actually, even if it was just Macaroni and Cheese.

The afternoon was a bit more mixed, though. I need to run a length of LAN cable from my DSL modem up to one of my computers. That involves finding where a piece of conduit appears in the attic. Unfortunately, the attic is very full of lots of stuff; so full, in fact, that it is quite difficult to move anything around to locate this small piece of conduit. So I didn't find it. :-(

Thus, in a not quite so good mood, I set off for church this evening. I always prefer the evening church crowd, mostly because they're younger. A little unexpectedly, my wife had turned up, along with her mother and my son. I know she does this from time to time. I discovered later that she was on creche that morning, which was probably the reason she came tonight. I was not all that happy about wandering in the front door pretty much directly behind them, but as it happened, a friend of mine was walking up to the church from the other direction and called out to me. She's a lovely young lady with a heart for God's work. And, it turns out, a bit of an ear for His voice, too. Choices. I made my decision to sit with my friend in the service.

This turned out to be a good thing. She knew the right thing to say after the service to get me to open up enough to let God work through her to me. So she heard about some of my troubles and prayed with me and for me and offered words of encouragement. I am a valuable person, who is loved and appreciated by those around me. I don't need to be walked over, or pushed down. I am what I am and need to stand my ground. I have to remember the good aspects of my current situation. My son still knows me and is always happy to see me, for instance, however little I see him. God has His hand on that and everything else, too. And it was God's prompting that caused her to park in an unusual spot in the first place that meant she was where I needed her to be outside church.

Choices again. In the end, I have a choice to make. I've never really abandoned my faith, though I've been tempted several times. In the current crisis, I've not really sought God, either. Now I have a choice to make: do I wend my way back, or do I try to go on as I am?

Grr. I owe $1400 on a mortgage on a house I'm not living in anymore. Then there's the $710 in child support. And the ~$500 court fine. And a mobile phone bill. And my car's rego is due in a few weeks. Then another mortgage payment is due... That practically wipes out not only tomorrow's payslip, but the next two (or three or four...) as well.

Like I said: Grr.

I'm not sure the first rule every new, budding writer needs to learn, but along with the one about not giving up, and about not getting too obsessed with word count, there needs to be one about being careful who you get to review your work. Family usually requires a thick skin, at least for early works.

I was fairly proud of Morning Trains. It is one of my more unusual ideas, has some challenging characterisation, and is a big change from what I've been writing, which is erotica. Morning Trains isn't erotica. Far from it. So it is the only story at the moment I can show my mother.

Ooh, boy.

I thought I'd finished the idea treatment and it was worthy of being published if I wanted to go to that effort. No, actually, it probably isn't. And mum was able to tell me exactly why.

I think I've let myself be spoilt by the expectations of the average erotica/fetish reader: it just has to mention the fetish in some detail and they're happy. In other words, the bar isn't very high. I'd probably already leapt above it. Trouble is, the next bar - good, consistent characterisation, interesting story, etc etc - is quite lot higher. So mum's criticism was quite a bit more than I bargained for.

Ah well. Onward and upward!

Okay, so I didn't get anything like a novel-lengths worth of work done during NaNoWriMo... but I *have* started writing short stories. It's kind of fun, actually.

Okay, I've decided to give NaNoWriMo a better try this year. I have written a couple of short stories recently and some friends crtiqued them, so I know I can write... So far, after one day, I'm up to 1208 words. That's a little below the desired average daily count of 1667. :-/ Ah well. We'll see.

Just a quick post 'cause doing this from my Nintendo DS is somewhat tedious (but kinda useful).

It can be surprising to find what little thing can put me in a good mood. Tonight, it was seeing a freight train sitting at the station this evening, waiting for a green signal. Then, whilst I was watching, the driver raised the engines, and moved off. It was as simple as that.

I heard an interesting little sound-bite the other day about job satisfaction. Actually, it was about income taxation. The broader discussion was about how politicians were spending a budget surplus by cutting taxes, as a number of income- and superannuation-related taxes have just been drastically lowered in Australia.

Then the expert being interviewed made an interesting point. He said that raising income taxes didn't affect the behaviour of everyone. The core argument was a bit complex, but the point was that people like doctors and lawyers don't usually adjust their working life in response because they usually love their work. They will finish the task at hand, whether it's an operation, or preparing a breif. However, workers in a factory are much more likely to reach 'knock-off' time and stop, or do overtime to get the same amount of money as before the tax rise.

It was an interesting comparison. Even though I'm a DBA and programmer, I'm fairly firmly in the second category: I love home time. The only times I'll stay back is basically if I have something I want to.

One of the TV shows that had me hooked is RSPCA Animal Rescue. This is a show where TV crews follow the efforts of some RSPCA inspectors as they go about their business of Preventing Cruelty To Animals. It's a rich vein of stories, ranging from stuck kittens, to injured wildlife with more than a few stories of neglect as well. I often get all choked up when watching it, especially when cats are involved.

Yep - I'm a cat person. I have two lovely cats of my own. One is a grey Burmese who is quite a smart little thing, and tends to get jealous of the laptop PC when it's on my lap. The other is a tabby moggy who is just so completely average except she's a size or two bigger than most and yet very gentle for all that. Both of them love me and I love both of them.

Tonight had a very moving story of a woman in a difficult life state - and whose house was overrun by some 60 cats! Basically, she'd had a few, and then acquired a few more who weren't desexed and then it all snowballed. It was so heartbreaking to see the sick and injured cats and kittens that she just couldn't take care of. It was oddly encouraging to see the RSPCA inspector was getting emotional about the situation, too. It took them 3 days to sort it all out and the ostensible owner was very happy to help however she could. She kept just one, but was very happy the RSPCA could help however they did.

I'm not angry at her or anything. I feel sad she fell into such a situation. She even said that she didn't know them all because so many of them looked alike. It makes me appreciate my own two.

We all know cats chase birds (of the feathery variety). Sometimes they even catch them. And sometimes then even kill them. It's part of what makes a cat a cat. It's why we put bells on their collars. It's why we keep them in at night. No big deal, right?

Well, sometimes it is. I discovered a dead bird inside this afternoon when I came home. Due to the fact I work fulltime and am currently looking after four cats, there is an arrangement that lets them all get in and out as they like while I'm out. Fortunately, the bird hadn't bled anywhere. In fact, it looked like it had had a very clean break to the neck. But it was definitely dead.

I'm guessing it was my grey Burmese cat, who is just 2 years old and as smart as paint. And she was also the one I spotted shortly before with a grey feather in her whiskers. Hmm. At least she'd had the consideration to do it before I cleaned the house...