Liz Barry

THE DIVORCE

During the divorce proceedings, my wife’s mother let slip to the court welfare officers something which they felt sufficiently concerned about that they called me in, specifically to tell me what she had said: “the divorce had not worked out as intended.”  Intended?  So, there was a plan, and there was more than just my wife involved in it!                                         

 So, in  what way did the divorce not work out as intended?

For  a start, I was not someone who would give up my children without a fight. My wife completely misjudged me on that.

She thought that ruthlessly manipulating our children for her own ends would have no consequences. She poisoned their minds against me in an attempt to drive me from our home. Eventually she gave up and left, taking the children with her, after which I put it up for sale so she could have a share of  the equity to buy herself a house. She came round to thank me, and as she left she said that in return she would sort things out with our daughter so she would come to see me in future. I can still picture her saying this as she got into her car on the drive to leave.

I couldn’t believe how brazen she was, admitting to me that she had manipulated our daughter’s mind and emotions in order to get money from me. If she did try to undo the damage she had done, she didn’t succeed. 14 years on and I have not seen my daughter or eldest son since, and they remain implaccably hostile to me, without ever pointing to any substantial reason why. I doubt I shall ever see them again, such is the damage which Liz Barry greed for money inflicted on our children.

Her mother, seems to have wanted to believe that her daughter had not done this deliberately. Perhaps she couldn’t face the truth herself: that her daughter had forever destroyed the bonds between me and my children in her sordid attempt to grab as much of my money as she could get.

Our approach to our children  was fundamentally different. To me, their future meant everything. I worked to provide a nice home for them. I wanted to spend all of my free time with them, to create a wide circle of  friends for them, to make then confident, intelligent, high achieving people. I felt thwarted at every turn. My wife didn’t pull her weight. Although she either didn’t work or worked part time, she made little effort to use her time to make our home warm and welcoming, or to create networks of friends for our children . When I came home from  work, I found I had to spend time tidying up, cooking, fixing things, time I would have preferred spending with our children., and my constant irritation with her made me less patient with our children.

Above all, it was paramount to me that our children came first. I would never have broken  up our home, and I couldn’t believe it when she did, putting her own emotional need to find another man before the needs of our children for a stable home.

GREED

At the time we married, I actually thought she loved me. In  reality, I was an easy target for a gold-digger. The Divorce settlement ordered £103,000 to her, which was 83% of all we had, and the order specified it was to be spent to purchase a home for herself and our 3 children.

She did buy a house with it, but not for the children to live in. It was a semi-detached house, 45 Chelmarsh Ave. Wolverhampton, which she appears to have bought as an investment for herself. For 8 years it stood empty, while she remained living in a council flat with the children. The house became an eyesore and a health hazard to the whole neighbourhood, and a financial burdon on the same Local Authority which was providing her with a subsidised council flat. At one stage the Council had to force entry to the house to stop a water leak which was damaging neighbouring properties. Eventually the house was taken over by the Council in 2013 under a compulsory purchase order, and she, not the children, was paid the value of it. She had lied and cheated and destroyed the bonds between me and my children in order to get her hands on this money, and she made sure that what was left of it went into her pocket. Our children never had the intended benefit they should have had from that £103,000.

THE MARRIAGE

When I first met my wife-to-be, Liz, I was 35, she was 20. I had a good job, my own house, and a pension to look forward to, I was inexperienced with women, and naive and trusting. By contrast, she hadn’t managed to hold down a job before she met me, had no exam  qualifications, and lied to me about both. I wasn’t bothered about her work or school background, but I was worried why she would lie to present herself as something she wasn’t.

Within a year of our marriage I discovered a love letter and confronted her with it. She admitted to having sex with at least 3 other men in the run-up to our wedding, one of whom was a man in his 60s, called Barney, whom she had planned to sleep with during the week before we married!

I was a kind and gentle man she thought she could rely on not to make too much fuss when in time she would divorce me and strip me of everything. Her behaviour began to knock the kindness out of me from the beginning, and when she finally robbed me of my children and turned their hearts and minds against me I lost the ability to love altogether.