A Dream about Arrears
One of my favorite topics to write about is my dreams. The few dreams I've written about so far have been surreal horrors, but some nights my dreams are more mundane. Most nights I don't remember my dreams at all.
Last night's dream was one of my more mundane, notable only because it felt so realistic. Real enough to inspire awake-life action.
Some context. Within the last year, I finally decided to bring my ex to court to enforce a formal child support requirement. A decade of unsuccessful self-enforced support wrangling had resulted in a mere $500 of support. She is the type of parent who needs a legal incentive to compel her to help support her own flesh and blood.
She is not the type of person you would call... financially stable. Before the legal agreement, she hopped from minimum wage job to minimum wage job, unemployed more often than not. I couldn't help but feel that the child support order was, in a sense, a form of tough love. A lesson to force some sort of adult responsibility. But I should have realized full well who dealing with: the expert at perpetual victimhood.
The moment the child support order was signed, she was already $6500 in arrears, since the court allowed backdating up to a certain time. To my surprise, other than a few weeks at the beginning, she has consistently paid her weekly dues, not that she has much of a choice since the support is automatically plucked from her paycheck every week. As I mentioned earlier, without being legally compelled to do so, she wouldn't even be paying a penny.
When someone is as deep in arrears as she is and gets a large tax return, the government requires the refund to be intercepted and used to pay off any child support or other federal debt. In this case, the total would have been practically the full arrears total, over $6,000. While the expected amount was deducted from her return, none of it ever reached our child support balance. Apparently the IRS had redirected the money to pay off some student debt. The government comes first, always, even at the expense of children.
In the dream, I received a text from my son's mother informing me that all of the money had been deducted from her arrears, meaning the $6,000 was on its way to us. When I woke up, I dashed to my phone to see if the text had been real. Had I read the text in a half-asleep haze and written it off as a dream? No such text existed.
I even went as far as to log into our child support case account and check the status. Nothing. So, yeah. A pretty mundane dream, but certainly a realistic one. Wishful thinking can be a hell of a drug. We could certainly use that $6,000 right about now.