March 5, 2023
Carmel, Indiana
Miss Donaldson,
As you predicted when I engaged your firm, and in particular you, in January 2023 to commence divorce proceedings from my husband of 24 years, our attempts to have an amicable divorce appear to have failed, and he is forcing me to describe to you, and potentially to the Court, a somewhat (but not completely) embarrassing episode from 2014, a very painful period of my life.
I had always been a self-supporting career woman, waiting until my early 30s to marry and have my only child, a daughter. Through the first 14 years of our marriage, my husband and I kept separate accounts, and did near-equal shares of ghe household tasks. I was advancing rapidly in my project planning career. That all changed when our daughter hit middle school, fell in with a bad crowd, and started acting out and failing in her academics. It was heartbreaking for both my husband and I to watch this happen. She needed a full-time parent at home to diagnose the root cause of her change in behavior, to coach her through her remediation (doctors and therapy visits), and to monitor her progress.
If our only child was a boy, I think my husband would have volunteered to give up his career and be the full-time parent. But because our child was a daughter, that burden fell on me. I walked away from my career in 2013.
Our daughter was diagnosed as being bi-polar, a chronic, difficult, but managable condition. My husband and I were facing a long, frightening future with her. While she was a child, we had some control; but at age 21, (which she hit in 2020--right in the middle of a pandemic, naturally), she would be free to declare herself self-supporting, and the course of her life would be in her hands.
After initial elation at receiving a diagnosis, and having a list of actions we could take, reality gradually set into my psyche. For the first time ever, I was depressed. I admit I withdrew from my husband. He and I kept having sex, but I wss going thru the motions, not enjoying it, and not being a very good partner, in- or out-of-the-bedroom.
What prompted this letter is that in mid-2014, he saw an ad I had placed on Craigslist, looking for a woman. He didn't share with me in 2014 that he had seen the ad, and he is choosing to dredge it up now as a negotiating ploy in our supposedly-amicable divorce.
He is wrong to do so. I did place an ad looking for a woman. But I wasn't looking for a woman to sleep with. I was looking for a woman to fistfight with. And I found one. And, yes, she and I met for an hour-long fistfight. Her name was Laci. She's had several last names because of divorces and remarriages. I lost touch with her in 2018, got blocked off her social media in 2019, and don't know what name she goes by today. She left Indiana for Kentucky in 2017, so I don't know where she lives today, either. Not zo get morbid, but I don't even know if she survived Covid. She began vaping heavily in 2019, and I spent a lot of 2020 and 2021 worrying about her outcome if she contracted the virus.
I want to get to her response to my ad, why we agree to fistfight, and what it meamt for me. But first, why a fistfight? Why would I place such an impulsive ad, and then meet a total stranger in such a dangerous context?
The short answer is: the question answers itself. The danger. I wanted a taste of danger.
But why a fistfight? In my daughter's therapy, it had come up that she liked to "blow off steam", to ease tension, by getting into fistfights. Many of her fellow female patients--heck, most of them--echoed her sentiments. By 2014, I needed to blow off of helluva lot of steam.
I went for it. I placed the ad, and got lots of offers. Tons of 'em.
One woman I ended up declining, after meeting her in person, was a Russian nanny named Tasha. She offered to meet me no rules but one condition. She lived on under the table cash pay from her host family, and she told me I needed to pay her 7 days of her cash wage, in case she got hurt fighting me and needed to miss work for a week. I declined because I couldn't ask my husband for that much cash without raising question.
My the hair on the back of my neck stood up, in a good way, at the thrill of talking to her. Were she and I actually talking about fistfighting, and hurting each other so bad that we spent a week in bed recovering??
After Tasha, I HAD to find a woman to fistfight with. No rules. To fuck each other up. Win, lose, or draw, I WANTED this fight, this experience.
I kept posting, reading responses, interviewing women.
When a few weks later, I read Laci's response. She was my age, my size, recently divorced. We met at a California Pizza Kitchen for lunch. She was very attractive. She told me I was attractive, too.
I knew right away she was THE ONE.
The woman I would fistfight.
To be continued.....
