Divorce Step 3: Anticlimactic! But Cool!

So yeah, I just mentioned all offhandedly and shit in my last post that the long-awaited court date for our divorce had suddenly arrived.

This is something that happens a lot in Turkey. You wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait for something to happen, getting all stressed and worried about it. And I was getting worried, seeing as I have a conference out of town this week, an upcoming move, and the days before the judges all fuck off for summer holidays are ticking closer and closer. The things you're waiting for always have the potential of not fitting into your schedule. But then, after weeks of waiting, the thing you were waiting for suddenly and with little fanfare gets finished.

That's what getting divorced was like. Lucky for me, getting divorced fit nicely into my work schedule. We were in exams week, and I had no classes or exams scheduled for that day. I'd planned to spend the morning pacing around the house trying to figure out what one wears to a divorce, but instead spent the morning making Mother's Day lotion with a friend. Best plan ever. Making lotion is super-fun, and a good, sympathetic friend who acts like you're not going completely insane also helps. We listened to Jamiroquai and hardly made a mess at all and I actually only spent a half hour or so getting dressed. Or maybe it was more. I wouldn't know.

When it came time to go get divorced, I walked down to the minibus like I always do, and got on, avoiding the seat with a big step under it, and listened to music on my iPhone. Acoustic Sublime. I know, right? And I rode that to the metrobus which stops conveniently in front of the new courthouse.

Only in Turkish, it's not the courthouse. Courthouse sounds all quaint and friendly, with pillars and wisteria. In Turkish, it's the Palace of Justice, which sounds like the place superheroes convene to decide how best to fight bad guys and mete out justice and goodness. The best part about this particular Palace of Justice, aside from its having its own metrobus stop, was that there's a sign out front advertising that it's the biggest Palace of Justice in Europe.

Hee! The palace is bigger, therefore there must be way more justice going on in there. We have way more justice than Europe! Check us out! Part of the reason the sign is funny is that it was put there by the construction company that built the Palace of Justice. Only the Palace has been finished for over a year, but the sign is still there. You just can't get over all the justice, can you?

I hate the goddamned convenient metrobus.

 The whole time I was riding public transportation all dressed for my divorce, I felt like being one of those people on public transportation who tells everyone what I'm doing there.



"Hi," I wanted to say to the surly but oddly attractive driver. "I'm Stranger and I have to go get divorced now. After that I might go shopping."

"Oh," I wanted to say to the lady who was telling everyone she was going to visit her son. "Well, I'm on my way to get divorced. I'm going to the Palace of Justice."

But I just listened to Sublime. And then I got off at the right stop and found where I needed to go and went there.

Only there was a long line at the door. BE phoned me in a rage wondering where the hell I was even though I wasn't even late yet. In fact, I was early. Do you really think I'd be even a second late for my divorce? He yelled at me and then hung up without saying goodbye. "Motherfucker," I said into the dead phone. Then I remembered I was here to get divorced from this and I was all, "Hooray!" I asked the security guard what the line was for and he told me it was to get in to the Palace of Justice. "It's very crowded," he said. Apparently, there is so much justice being meted out in there, you have to wait in line to get some.

No matter. The line gave me time for a cigarette. When I reached the security guard, he seemed cheerful I wasn't mad at him for making me wait in line. "Hell no!" I wanted to say. "I'm here for a divorce!" Instead he complimented me on my Turkish, which people often do, giving me a false sense that I speak Turkish well. Which in all honesty I completely don't at all. I just know enough to trick people into talking really fast. Fucking great.

Actual Palace of Justice toilet paper holder.

The first thing I did upon entering the Palace of Justice was find a toilet because I was full of nervous pee. There was no toilet paper, though, which made me wonder a little how much justice there actually was in this place? After that, I was confounded by the signs pointing to our courtroom so I asked at the information desk and was sent upstairs where I was further confounded but eventually found the right courtroom, along with some other people waiting to get divorced.

BE tried really hard to be a dick because that's what he's like. Except he's not really a dick by nature-- that's a special thing just for me. And we had to wait a really long time for the judge anyway, so after a few minutes he started acting nice and chatting with the lawyer and I, which was a good thing because we had to wait like an hour. She was wearing this cool cape that I thought was a cape at first, but actually was a Turkish lawyer coat.

My lawyer coached us on the stuff a judge might ask, like did I really want to get divorced. She reminded me to whisper to her if I didn't understand something, because if the judge thought I didn't speak Turkish, I would have to pay for an interpreter. I just tried to look game, but actually I was imagining a dour old religious man appointed by AKP who would be fixing to make us give the marriage another go. I imagined questions about adultery during the year of separation being asked in Ottoman legal Turkish.

Could have been way worse.

Instead, when we were finally granted access, the judge turned out to be a middle-aged woman. And while the courtroom looked like a real courtroom (albeit in miniature), the judge's table was littered with papers and folders and piles of stuff that reminded me this was just another bureaucratic thing we were dealing with. She asked me if it was my signature on the documents, and she asked BE a few other things about the agreement, but the whole point of the proceedings as far as I could tell was to dictate the divorce decree to a clerk.

When we got married, I had no idea what the marriage guy was asking me. Again, this was because we didn't want to pay extra for an interpreter. Someone had told me ahead of time the correct answer was "yes," and since I understood he asking yes-no questions, I just said "yes."

I understood my divorce way better. The other way my divorce differed from my marriage is that it takes way longer to get divorced than it does to get married, even if you subtract the waiting time.

Cures what ails ya, in any situation, thank goodness.

Afterwards, BE refused to shake my hand when I offered as a joke to lighten the mood. But he wanted to go for tea so we wandered around the Palace of Justice for awhile looking for the tea place. It was on the top floor. We smoked a bunch of cigarettes and drank tea and talked about LE and stuff he does and how we're going to deal with this stupid school thing, all newly fucked up by AKP. It was just like when we were married only we were divorced.

Several times, I had to physically use my hand to wipe the smile from my face just to be polite to BE, who was very sad and verging on tears but at least he didn't cry.

When it came time to go, I showed my ex-husband the most affection I've willingly shown him in a long time. I hugged him even though he didn't want to be hugged, and kissed both of his cheeks which he seemed okay with, then I patted one cheek and rubbed the back of his head. I thanked him even though there was no reason in the world to thank him except that he let me go after all that time of trying to be let go without a fuss.

And the fuss could have been a whole lot worse.

They don't have these here.

So after that, I went to eat a hamburger at Carl's Jr. because BE and my lawyer had been talking about that and it planted a seed. Between bites, I messaged everyone I know that I was divorced. Then I bought a swimsuit.

After that, I went to listen to a Türk sanat music concert where my student had a solo and life went on in this weird way it keeps on doing...

Clusterfucked! Dumbass Cat And Adventures in Pet Care

He's into bags.

Havuç is a very stupid cat. He's the kind of cat you can yell at 20 times for doing the same annoying thing and he'll keep doing it. Of course, he's also nice because he's the kid of cat that will let a 5-year-old poke his eyes and explore his ears and the worst thing he'll do is go somewhere else. He also lets grown-ups use his own paws to play his belly like a drum, or hold him up to pretend he's Godzilla doing the Can-Can.

Not that I would know anything about those last things. Ahem.

Last week, Havuç fell off the balcony. At first I wasn't sure if he'd escaped or fallen. But when he didn't do it again for several days, I figured he'd fallen because if he'd found an escape route he was sure to do it again. Havuç is annoying like that. And it was seriously annoying fetching him back to the house because the only way to reach him in the next door garden was by shuffling through armpit-high nettle.

My name is Havuç People call me Havuç.

I also figured if he'd fallen once, he would be more careful after that. We live on the 4th floor by Turkish counting and the 5th by American.

But I forgot how stupid Havuç is. The other night we came home late after Turkish lessons and heard him meowing. He was huddled under a wooden box thingie in the next-door garden, looking pathetic, and he couldn't walk on one leg.

There was fuck-all I could do about it then. It was LE's bedtime and he was crabby. Obvious cat pain, but no blood. I set Havuç up with a pillow and a towel in the bathroom and hoped for the best.

No dice. But I still had to go to work in the morning and get the boy to school. I felt really bad for the stupid fucking cat, so I came home at lunch and took him to the neighborhood vet. The vet took one look at Havuç's leg and declared he needed an x-ray. Without an x-ray, he didn't want to do anything for fear of causing unnecessary pain or making the leg worse.

Problem 1. The vet's x-ray machine was broken. And apparently there are no x-rays anywhere near my house, meaning an afternoon trip on the minibus with the heavy, howling cat in his carrier. Fucking hooray.

Problem 2. None of the vets my guy recommended have recent information posted online. There was a phone number no one answered and an unclear location on Google Maps.

Undeterred, I went and taught my two remaining classes. For the last class, I had decided to do my videotaped observation we are now required to complete. I'd chosen this class, down to 10 students from the 26 on the list, because last week I'd bribed them to be nice and do their work for the remaining 6 days in return for a C. They suddenly became very enthusiastic.

Right at the end of my class before the observation, my period decided to explode through the tampon and when I went to deal with that, there was no toilet paper and the girl in the next stall was my student. That meant I needed coffee.

And while I was waiting for the coffee machine, an email came from my lawyer saying the judge wanted us in for the divorce the next day. I called BE and told him the time. He acted all balky, like that was a bad time for him. I was all, "The fuck that is a bad time for you. We need to get to get this shit done." And he demurred because what on earth other chance did he have?

So it wasn't a clusterfuck in the real sense but in my mind it was like that. Fucked up dumbass cat! Embarrassing period problem! Observation! Divorce tomorrow! Hooray! Fuck!

I later watched the videotape of my observation and I was grinning like an idiot the whole time, even dancing around a little while my students were working. And no, it wasn't because of this one student wearing a V-neck. Or maybe just a little bit because of that. Anyway.

So I got back to the office and tried to sort out the cat thing. A fabulous co-worker agreed to come along, especially because they've put in a Macro under the vet. And another fabulous co-worker offered to let us use her car. Suddenly it all became a super fun adventure, getting the dumbass cat patched up.

Doped the fuck up.

The vet, who'd I'd found and located through a series of phone calls, poked around Havuç. Havuç didn't care for it at all. So he got shot up with some methadone or something that made him unable to move but also unable to blink. Except for the blinking thing, I kind of wanted me some of that.

Hee!

They did some x-rays and it turned out the stupid fucking cat has broken his leg. By falling off the balcony a second time.



So they made this gorgeous red cast. I was sorry LE was missing the whole thing because he adores medical procedures. And then they gave him an Elizabethan collar which was, more than I care to admit, the main outcome I'd hoped for from this particular vet visit.

Hee! No wait... No. Hee!

No, actually, I admit it. I'm fucking evil and there's nothing funnier than a cat in one of those collars.

Needs a designated driver.

When I got home, I set the poor pathetic drugged cat up in the bathroom and waited for him to do something. He didn't for awhile but then he started struggling around all over the place, turning drugged-cat red-cast somersaults and generally having a rough time of it. The collar and the cast were pissing him off unimaginably. As far as I could tell, he hadn't blinked for like 3 hours so I pressed his eyes closed for him a few times.

Blink, damn you!

After awhile he ventured out of the bathroom. One of his claws was bleeding from trying to pull the collar off and he didn't so much venture as tumble around into the light. He tracked blood everywhere. When I dumped him back in the bathroom I saw there was blood smeared all over the floor and walls.

And what is there to do in that case but shut the bathroom door and pretend it's not happening? Plus, a neighbor came over with a request so bizarre I think it needs to be saved for another story.

While the neighbor was changing into another outfit (yeah, I told you it was weird), I went and checked in on the cat again. He'd added to his blood decorations by pissing all over, taking off his cast (the collar is useless but funny! Who thought of this shit? How is a cat supposed to eat and drink in one of those?), and then rolling in the piss, the wonderful little superhero.

The Big Sleep?!

Before we'd gone to the vet, my friend and I'd set a monetary limit on how much I'd pay for the dumbass cat. Beyond that, we were tying to work out how to say The Big Sleep. The vet fee was over  the comfort limit, but not quite enough to ask for The Big Sleep.

Fucking expensive.

That being said, after he got the cast off and coated himself in pee and I removed the collar, the cat seemed happier. It struck me that the 385 lira I'd spent (85 over the limit) was completely pointless other than the few hours of comfort the vet-dope had given him, and the comparative joy he'd now found in life by not having to wear the cast and the collar. So cats, like people, find their joy in relative happinesses. Cool!

So now he's still limping around, but maybe in a little less pain. Goodness knows why he's in less pain, but he is. It's possible he'd also dislocated something and the vet fixed it. Also, Spider fucking hates him right now. Whenever she gets near him, she hisses and puffs up and runs away. He must have some sort of smell that appalls other cats. I don't know if it's the drugs or the leg or something else that's making her hate him so much. They used to be such good buds.

And even though Havuç is a dumbass cat, I hope it's not the smell of death.

Spectacularly Bad Mom: A True Story

This actually happened.

He really did say that. Hee!

A Bout Of Insanity

Through a series of relatively uninteresting events it has arisen that I might have to move soon. It's okay. It's just a downstairs move. But it came up all of a sudden and because it's just downstairs, I've done practically nothing to prepare for the move.

Instead, I've done a whole lot of things not related to moving. Or vaguely moving-related. Yesterday, when we had the day off, I tried all of LE's clothes on him to see which ones didn't fit anymore. He was surprisingly easy-going for the whole process, and we got rid of about half his clothes. So at least that's getting rid of stuff.

Then I threw out some other stuff.

Today, instead of packing to move, I decided it was a good idea to start organizing LE's toys and throwing out the crappy ones while he's not home. He shares my own inexplicably and deeply passionate againstness of getting rid of any one single thing, ever. So my doing this with his toys while he's not here is completely evil. I was always extremely sensitive about throwing stuff away. Just ask my mom.

And then, Spider became extraordinarily interested in this little sack of dead batteries in the kitchen. She carried it off triumphantly, as she does. And I thought, "What the fuck is in that sack of dead batteries she wants so much? And moreover, why the fuck do I have a little sack of dead batteries?"

So it's possible I'm being cool about the move but also going a little insane.

Anyway, organizing the toys. I started with one little basket in the living room.This doesn't include the 1-2-3 boxes or all the toys in the child's bedroom. Which is no longer a bedroom because it no longer has a bed. It's a toy hole. Anyway. I started putting the toys into piles and this is what I ended up with.

Boy stuff includes tools, police stuff, and army stuff, including little men.

You know what the cats are doing now?

That's right. The cats are killing the joker cap and batting the small balls everywhere.

Thereby making a wreck of these piles.

And then you know what I did? Took pictures of the piles, cleverly labelled them in MSPaint, and wrote this blog instead of dealing with the toys further, or even protecting the piles from the cats. So it's as though I did nothing but make a tremendous mess.

Completely fucking insane.

23 Nisan: Adventures in Neighborliness

Looking down on you kids. Benevolently.

 For us and the cats, 23 Nisan started the day before when they started testing the sound system at the stadium outside our balcony. "Test test test bir iki üç test test test..." Then it was all, "Çocuklar hoşgeldiniz. Bayramınızı kutlu olsun." That went on for awhile, and then with the music. The cats didn't care for it, not one bit. One of them gets all puffed up at the slightest oddity. The other just beats it.

For my part, I'm used to explosive noises. Not so much the screeching feedback, though. After a couple of hours, things were sorted out. They only paused for the midday ezan.

We won!

Then today, the kids started piling in, dressed in grouped colors with lots of sequins, arranged by height. The little stadium was more packed than it ever is for a football game. 23 Nisan is a fine day of marching and lock-step traditional and non-traditional dancing and (dare I say? Dare! Dare!) near-Fascist displays of nationalism, culminating in the kids marching out a giant Turkish flag with Atatürk's face on it. The one where he's wearing the cool fuzzy Hat of Victory.

Been drooling over you since I was 12.

LE had already declined to watch the festivities in favor of watching Iron Man. I am always supportive of watching Iron Man, even if it's just to hear Robert Downey Jr.'s voice from across the room. We were both in our jammies at 11am. LE had whipped his shirt off and I had some serious bedhead going on.

My friends! Can't you see this is fucking creepy?

But our Downey, doing-nothing bliss was not to be. The doorbell rang and there was a neighbor wanting to come up and watch the display from our balcony. Seeing that it was obvious we had nothing going on, I had no choice but to invite her in. At that point, the youngest group of kids outside was doing this weird ballroom dance thing, with the girls in slinky pink dresses and the boys in tuxes. If you live in Turkey you know what I'm talking about. If you don't, it's sort of a Jon Benet-Ramsey-lite thing because the kids that do this particular dance are usually about 6 or under.

I began to worry about having to turn up for this sort of event, and groom LE for it, in my near future when he starts school. I wondered if there's some way to rope his baba and the in-laws into doing it instead.

After the neighbor finished chiding us for not wearing slippers and telling me to go ahead and get back to my work, she asked if she could invite another neighbor up. Then she called like 3 friends to tell them she was the American's house. I wondered if  "İşinize bakın" was just something one says when one barges into someone's house under false pretenses, or if she meant I ought to clean up the fucking mess already.

We will kill you.

The other neighbor came up, a sweet girl who looks after my landlord's mom downstairs. I offered them tea and they said no. I was messaging with a friend at the time, and I asked if he thought it was a real refusal or a pro forma one. I can never tell the difference. He told me they actually did want tea so I set about making tea. He also told me they'd be expecting biscuits with that. All I had was some gummy bears, a package of Tutku that's been open for a few weeks, and some dried apricots. I figured the Tutku were so full of preservatives no one would notice, and the apricots were still soft. I don't do guests much, now that the MIL won't come into the house for fear the cat's hair will lodge in her throat and kill us all.

I'll give you people something to gossip about.

At a loss for anything to do while the tea was boiling, I went outside. At that point I learned the neighbor's real mission for coming to my house. She wanted to know about BE and why he's not around anymore, and all the dirty details of the failure of our marriage.

Now, given that the Family Yönetici and the landlord's sister or sister-in-law and Azeri Teyze all have asked and have all been informed about the disappearance of BE and the failure of our marriage and the pessimistic view of its future, I figured she just wanted the dirty details from the horse's mouth, because I'm pretty sure everyone on the block knows why BE doesn't come around much anymore. She asked first if he had another woman and I said no, but that I hoped he did by now because that would be good for him. Wrong answer. She asked if he beat me and I explained about that whole situation and where it seemed like it was going and then I ran away to deal with the tea and play with my phone some more.

At that point, I got the idea for the haiku for the last post, which I scribbled onto the back of a notice from LE's school which said that I was supposed to have sent him with some pictures and information about Norway by last Wednesday. Whoops.

LE, who had been putting on and taking off various slippers and pairs of shoes since the neighbor had arrived, came into the kitchen to ask for some popcorn. I gave him some in a bowl. He took the bowl out to the neighbor.

Hate these.

Then LE started stealing the cookies. The neighbors were delighted. So was he. I was less so. Mostly I was worrying about how they must think I'm a crap mom and a crap hostess. Which, for the latter at least, I definitely am and I don't give a shit. I just don't like it rubbed in my face. Because no one likes one's own crap rubbed in one's face.

With that in mind, LE decided to totally upstage me on the host front by going off and getting his photo album of baby pictures. Seriously? How the fuck does he already know that's what people do when you have an uncomfortable visiting situation on your hands? I was totally proud and consternated at the same moment. I never thought my kid would be greasing my social wheels at the tender age of 5. And he was doing it cutely and well, bare feet and all.

In the end, they really didn't want the tea. Seriously, my friends. How do you know if it's a real refusal or a fake one? I'm thinking it had to do with the state of my kitchen. In any case, the neighbors left before the glorious trotting out of the giant flag amid great fanfare at the stadium. Teacups half full, the neighbors apparently were satisfied with their information and bid us good day.

Did you notice, despite everything, I said it was half full?

Spectacularly Bad Mom: A Foray Into Haiku

I want to be a
spectacularly bad mom
raise my kid up right.

Not like Joan Crawford.
Perhaps like Susan Sontag,
cool before he's 12.

 I'll teach him to mix
his mama a martini.
"That's my boy!" I'll say.

Divorce Step Two: A Bureaucratic Fuckup With A Happy Ending

Wedded bliss. The paperwork is just the first challenge.

When I wrote the first post about my upcoming divorce, I'd assumed it was going to be a series of steps, like getting married was. Go to this place for that paper, go to another place for a different paper, drive across town to another place for further paper, then take all the paper to a fourth place only to be told someone at the second place made a mistake and you have to start all over. But the guy at the second place didn't make a mistake after all, so you take everything back to the fourth place where a different guy says nothing about the alleged mistake and dourly stamps the hell out of everything and then gets money for it.

Waiting for...

Those are the kind of steps I can deal with. Instead, after the notary there was no need to go anywhere. There was just a lot of waiting. And the waiting was pretty much down to the lawyer, who clearly doesn't feel the same sense of urgency about all this that I do. Every day, I'm just waiting for BE to change his mind about the whole thing and then make me put up with his bullshit for another year until he changes his mind back. He did his part to make it all take longer by getting nitpicky about stuff he had agreed to and trying to get more stuff. I was like, "Fuck you. Take whatever you want and how about you pay me some fucking money already." Anyway, all he really wanted was more time with LE and I'm not into making a fight about that at all.

The agreement was done ages ago but it took forever to write and translate. I mean, I know my lawyer has a new baby and everything and I'm trying to be sympathetic about that. But at the same time, I borrowed a shitload of money from my parents to give her and while babies are extraordinarily time-consuming, I know from Facebook when my lawyer goes to Antalya or does some other fabulous, not-dealing-with-my divorce sort of thing.

My lawyer, despite everything...

The fact that I like my lawyer makes it hard to get annoyed with her. She's still my champion in all of this. And the fact that I can say something like "my lawyer" makes me feel super-cool, like Tony fucking Soprano.

But still...

The only place I had to go was to a very nice and civilized cafe in Nışantaşı to deliver the signed agreements and power of attorney forms. So that was all right. I had coffee and my lawyer had tea.

A couple of weeks ago, my lawyer (my lawyer!) sent me a message that she was trying to file the papers at the court, but there was a problem about my name. Fuck. The name problem chose this time to come and bite me in the ass.

I think I've mentioned before how I have 3 official names in Turkey. The first is the name I came here with. That's the name on the front page of my passport and in my residence permit: Unused First Name Stranger Maiden Name.

This question gives me pause.

After I got married, I had the passport amended to show the name change, with the amendment on the back page because they don't give you a new passport when you change your name, not until the old one expires. My official name in America is this one: Unused First Name Stranger Maiden Name Married Name.

When I got married, the law was still that women were required to take their husbands' names. That law has since changed. If women wanted to hyphenate or keep their old names, they had to petition the Nüfüs Mürdüğülü Something Something office with lots of diacritics. Except this office doesn't have any jurisdiction over foreigners, so...

So in my marriage certificate, I'm Unused First Name Stranger Married name. We tried to get the guy who did the certificate to just go ahead and include my maiden name in there as a second middle name, but he didn't care for that idea, not one bit.

When it came time to renew my residence permit after getting married, we tried to get them to change the name to match the on my passport. But the foreign police will only use the name on the front page of the passport, and refused to accept the back page amendment. We tried for 7 years of renewals to get them to change it, but they were having none of it. Even after they got all computerized and my name was probably turning up as something else in their computers, they wouldn't change it.

Remember this? I do.

To complicate things further, about 5 years ago, the yabancı kimlik numarası (foreigner ID number) was introduced. So older official things of mine, like my original SSK account or my tax ID number, are attached to a number they don't use anymore, either my passport number or my residence permit number. My new SSK account is in what I think of as my "real" name (the one with both my maiden and married names), attached to the yabancı kimlik numarası. I'm not sure what my residence permit is attached to. Anyway, the number thing plus the name thing makes me understand why I ended up with two SSK accounts, though I still think it's a crock of shit no one over there noticed it. What are databases and computers for, after all?

Anyway, when the judge went to file the divorce stuff, he or she (probably he) discovered the thing about my names. I knew it would bite me in the ass sometime, and I was really hoping that this wouldn't be the time. The lawyer was sending me emails all day trying to figure it out, and I was sending her emails back, explaining the individual acts of stupidity and stubbornness, none of which were my fault exactly, that resulted in my name problem. By the end of the day I was just asking her to tell the judge to give me whatever name he wanted. I just don't care that much anymore.

Anyone can navigate it, seriously.

Back to the waiting. My lawyer, bless her, never got back to me about the result of the name issue. I waited for another week on tenterhooks, wondering what sort of bureaucratic triplicates were churning through the Byzantine underground. I started thinking I would never get divorced.

So I sent her another one of my politely passive-aggressive emails asking if any progress had been made. And a few days later, she replied telling me the case had been filed a week ago, with a lengthy docket number, and that a petition had been mailed to BE. The judge was busy that week, she said, but she will get back to me with a court date soon enough.

Just trust this guy, okay?

And with that, Divorce Step Two, filing the case, is complete. I admit I'm a little nervous about the part where a petition is being mailed-- Turkish mail is such that I once received a letter from my grandmother three months after she had died. But things always have a way of working out, so I'm hoping for the best.

Maybe they'll use a courier service.