…I vow, lest I die tomorrow, you’ll never be the father I am
You can think of your ups and downs in life as the ocean’s surface. Constantly in limbo rolling high and low. With the occasional thunderstorm. No matter how fierce the waves get, nothing is less permanent than water. The calm returns. Cycle repeats while following no definite time frame. From a distance, from afar, we can sometimes see the storms rolling in. Other times they catch us unaware.
I woke up yesterday in a particularly good mood. I’m a semi-early riser these days, and when my girlfriend doesn’t have to go into work until the afternoon, I sometimes let her sleep in while I get ready and head out the door to work. I’d just finished putting the proverbial pen to paper on my last blog post, and I think one could say it was a positive one. I felt really calm and in a content state of mind. About midway through my work day, I checked my bank account. Nowdays, with direct deposits and automatic payments, I don’t have to do much in the way of actually paying my bills. It all gets done for me, in an automated system. That being said, and anyone who has had the unfortunate experiences of having their finances go under is probably the same way, I like to check on things around payday “just in case”. Every month the same bills get paid, including my child support that I have automatically paid out by check. After bills, I have roughly the same amount left in that particular account every month. Except this month, its not. I immediately notice my paycheck is short. A lot short. When I go onto the payroll site for my job, I look through the latest paycheck and sure enough, a line under deductions that has never been there before is listed at the bottom. Child support. Somehow, my work had been told to pay my child support, without notifying me, all in lieu of me paying it on my own, on time, for several years.
Let me preface the rest of this by saying its not about the mother of my child. I am going to focus on a very broken system that has caused a lot more damage and headache than they have helped along any sort of “support” for my child. The Florida Department of Revenue is run by incompetent, under educated staff that constantly provide different answers whenever you have the unfortunate need to ask them a question. Whether its in person, or over the phone (after waiting for up to an hour) I have never gotten anything resolved despite always bringing documentation of all of my payments. Two and a half years ago, they attempted to have my wages garnished from my employer. Luckily that time I was given a letter stating their intentions and was able to go in person to their office in Crestview. The person I spoke to immediately told me this was in error and they were not allowed to do this without a court order. As in I would have to have been served with a notice to appear in court and told by a judge that my income would be withdrawn from my paychecks. Which of course has never happened. Not then, and certainly not now. So why are my wages being garnished from my paycheck, out of the blue, despite there never being a late payment made to the Department of Revenue? When I called today to ask, twice, they sure the hell didn’t know either!
When the Department of Revenue became involved in my child support payment, it was early in December of 2013. My child’s mother claimed I had not paid that month yet (it was around December 4th, check was in the mail at the time). SO their first record of me included that “missing” payment. When I had to pay them in January, I was already in arrears according to their records, despite her eventually getting my personal check and cashing it. When they attempted to garnish my wages, it became almost secondary to me that they were missing a payment from me because of how distraught I was about them contacting my employer. Once the wage garnishment issue was resolved, I tried to move on from there and simply told the Department of Revenue I had paid her the month of December and could prove it if they needed me to. They never once told me I had provided anything sufficient enough for them, despite me going to their office with the check receipt, bank statements, and anything else showing that I had indeed paid child support the month of December 2013. I was not going to pay these people for something I had already paid. This all was going on while my wife (now ex wife) was going through chemotherapy for lymphoma and unable to work.
Several months later in May of 2014, I planned a trip to Iceland with my spouse after she was given a clean bill of health. My passport had expired so I paid to have it renewed and expedited. It was denied, and the reason was because of unpaid child support. They got me. So I had to quickly pay that (which anything involving this department moves at a snails pace) and wait for the hold to be lifted from my passport application. The Department of Revenue accepts payments online, if you also pay an outrageous fee for doing so. It added almost $100 to my payment, just to pay online. After this, I called incessantly trying to see when they would contact the passport agency and lift the hold. No one was of any help, no one knew what the hell I was talking about, and every time I spoke to someone I always got a different story. With the time winding down, I went to the office of Jeff Miller, the representative in congress for our district of Florida. His aide went above and beyond trying to help me, just to get some sort of documentation out of the Department of Revenue that I had indeed paid the full amount of child support. Eventually, a letter from someone in Tallahassee finally was faxed to whatever office “releases” passport holds, and THEN contacted the passport agency saying it was ok to go ahead and overnight mail me my passport. I received it 2 days before we left. And only because of Congressman Miller’s aide moving things along. I have no idea how long this would have taken had it played out at the normal speed.
So here we are two and a half years later, every month in between with documented acknowledgement by the Department of Revenue showing I have paid on time and in full. Which apparently is not enough to prevent these people from contacting my job behind my back and illegally stating they are to take money directly from my paycheck and send it to the Department of Revenue. I doubt I will ever see that money returned to me, and if they bother to tell me this has been resolved again, why should I believe them? There is nothing protecting me from them, there is nothing forcing them to be accountable and treat me with any dignity. Being a part time parent is an uncomfortable reality for us as it is, without these distractions and apathetic intrusions into our lives. The bottom line is this: have they helped my child in any way shape or form? Absolutely not. As for myself, they will never know the details of my healthy, happy, and wonderful relationship that I have with my child, all while fulfilling my financial obligations to her mother, nor will they ever care to. ALL I AM TO THEM IS A CASE NUMBER.
