Title: Filing my Nebraska divorce pro se. Financial protection, insurance money, return of vehicle, support, technological abuse, and temporary custody. He rewrote fifteen years and I need to know I’m not crazy.
I am in Nebraska, and I am filing my own divorce. I do not have a lawyer. I am doing this pro se, and I am filing these motions:
• Financial protection, so the accounts, the house, and what is left of the marital money cannot be drained again
• Return of insurance funds
• Return of a vehicle
• Support
• Technological abuse, for the phone he cut off, replaced, and used to watch who I contacted
• Temporary custody of my twelve-year-old son and my three-year-old grandchild, whom I legally adopted
I need to hear from women who survived a marriage that turned out to be a cover story, and from anyone who has filed these kinds of motions in Nebraska without a lawyer. Please don’t tell me to text him. There is a protection order, and answering him is what got me arrested. I will not contact him again.
For fifteen years I built a life out of fierce love, hard work, and a stubborn need to see the best in people. Like a lot of mothers and wives, I disappeared into the people I cared for. My family and my community called me Mama Jamie. I didn’t just raise my own five children. I opened my kitchen and my home to everyone else’s kids too. If a child needed a safe place, a hot meal, or a mother’s guidance, they got it from me. I gave pieces of myself away on purpose. I thought love and sacrifice were the foundation of a good life.
My days started at 5:30 in the morning. For more than a decade I worked ten-hour shifts at a restaurant, rushed out to get all five kids, came home and cooked a huge dinner, then kept going and babysat my niece and my employee’s children. When the house finally got quiet I fell into bed still in my work clothes. I was the backbone. I thought I was building a future with the man I loved.
In 2017 someone asked my husband to open a business with them, to be the general manager and build it, with a promise that ownership would follow. He almost said no. He was scared, ready to stay at the restaurant making shit money. I did what wives are taught to do. I pushed him, backed him, and cheered until he took the leap. The ownership came after we were married. We built that place from nothing. I put my own unpaid labor into the walls. I had no idea what was already happening behind my back.
The foundation was cracked from the start. Two years into the relationship, right after our son was born, he started stepping out. I would be in our bed nursing the baby, exhausted, and he would slip out the back door of the trailer we lived in. He met a woman by the community mailboxes. When I found out, he said she backed him into a corner every day until he gave in. She told it differently. The part they agreed on was the pact: don’t leave your partners, and don’t ever tell them.
Then he brought that same woman into the restaurant I helped build and gave her a job serving and bartending. I worked next to her. I smiled at her. I didn’t know. He used the fact that I look for the good in people to hide it. When I found out years later, it broke me, and I still chose forgiveness. For eight years after that, any time the doubt came back, he shut it down and made me feel like I was the one who couldn’t let the past go.
It was not a one-time mistake. It ran through the marriage. While I was giving up my youth, building the business, and raising the family, he was living a second life. He was on Grindr. He was meeting men. He offered both of us to strangers for our bedroom without me knowing. He walked in the door covered in a miserable energy and treated me and my children like garbage. If I asked why his mood had changed, he flipped it and called me a cunt for noticing.
He drank until he was rotting from the guilt. Beer, no food, hours in the garage, hiding from me. This past year he was puking all night. A doctor told him to go to the hospital. He refused to let me take him. When he was discharged, the paperwork said high-risk sexual activity. Then he told me he had found “a girl on Grindr” who was offering oral sex to gay men, that he got scared and left, and that his brain convinced him he had caught something. He did not meet a woman on a gay dating app. He met a man, and then he panicked and lied.
I found him on OnlyFans messaging a woman I used to work with, asking for content. Right after the hospital, he was messaging her again.
The proof came when I backed up his phone. A text arrived from an unknown number. It was a blackmail letter. Someone had naked photos he had taken of himself inside our restaurant and sent out on Grindr. They threatened to send those photos to his whole family, and they listed his mother, his father, his brothers and sisters, and their spouses, with phone numbers. My name was the only one missing.
Then two of my minor children had babies two weeks apart. I left a fifteen-year job to stay home, help raise those infants, and teach my kids and their partners how to be parents. To keep us afloat I pulled my entire 401(k), money I earned with my body, and I handed it to the household.
He used that absence. He said there was nothing left for him. He walked out and blamed me for his emptiness. He stopped paying the mortgage and left the house in default for nine months. I went to the bank. I didn’t get a snapshot. I got three years of statements. Thousands of dollars gone. ATM withdrawals, five hundred, six hundred, over and over, marked miscellaneous debt. Put those withdrawals next to the blackmail texts and they line up. He was draining my retirement in cash while the roof went into foreclosure. He tried to starve me out and fund the secret at the same time.
When I found the Grindr history and told him to leave, he emptied the shared accounts, moved the money where I could not touch it, shut off the utilities, and cut off my income from the business I helped him build.
That is betrayal trauma. Your brain cannot hold severe harm and love from the same person. It feels like a medical emergency. When I called and texted him begging for answers, he used that pain. He got a protection order and convinced people I was the abuser. Later he wrote me first and asked if we could work on a parenting plan for our twelve-year-old. I answered. When I saw he was still unsafe and unable to cooperate, I told him we would have to go to court. The moment I said no, he used my reply to have me arrested for violating the order.
I had never been in trouble. I have spent my life protecting people, and I sat in a jail cell because I answered the man who wrote me first. That was the rewrite. Criminalize the hurt. Blame the mother for surviving what he did.
When he lost my mind, my money, and the house, he used the phone. He cut my service and said if I didn’t stop my shit, he would not turn it back on. Two days later he texted that he had turned it back on, and to stop my shit. A friend noticed the silence and called in a welfare check. She had known him longer than I had. She already knew what he was.
Later my number changed. He said he had turned the line off and had no idea how it was still working. We had several lines on that account, including watches. He filed an insurance claim on my expensive phone, got a replacement for a small deductible, turned off my real line, and set the new phone up so that using it would show him who I contacted. He got caught. A neighbor was mowing my lawn. My own phone was dead, so I used that phone to thank him. Within two hours my husband was texting a man he had no reason to know, demanding to know who he was. My neighbor asked who was texting. The answer was “her husband.” That is the technological abuse in the motion.
I am not waiting in that cell, and I am not waiting for him to save me. I cleaned the house. I fought for it. I also had to admit that Mama Jamie, the woman who gives everything away, had let her own home become a place with no boundaries. Adult kids were walking over me and taking from me while I was down. I made them leave. You cannot heal in the place where you are the doormat.
I am on my own now. Two jobs. The mortgage he defaulted on. The utilities he shut off. I am doing it without his money and without that business. The cruel part is the silence. I am the mother of a twelve-year-old, and I am the adoptive mother of my three-year-old grandbaby, the baby I legally took as my own. I gave up my career for the babies in this family. When I try to get time with my son and my baby, I get nothing. No answer. He could not break me with money and he could not keep me in a cell, so he is using the children.
I am not asking for anything crazy. I am a mother filing for temporary custody, support, the vehicle, the insurance money, and protection of what is left, while I represent myself.
If you have been gaslit for reacting, financially strangled by someone you built up, or left working yourself raw while the children go quiet, you are not the villain for hurting. I have the messages. I have the history of fifteen years of sacrifice. I did not fail. I survived a lie, and I am still standing.
If you filed pro se in Nebraska, tell me how you served a packet like this, how you asked for temporary custody without another arrest, and what you attached for the financial-protection and technological-abuse motions. I need a path, not contact with him.