Teensy Tincy Trucks & Rails

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I'm Jane Marie, and this is the dream.

I run the websites for four different nonprofit Michigan hospice brands and all of their social media.

I create all the freaking content for all four of these goddamn brands and it's it's a team of one doing the work of about five people.

No, today's episode is not about creating social media for hospice companies.

I just thought that was a funny job to think about.

Like deathbed challenge or put a finger down if you're about to die.

No, today's episode is about family, love, marriage, and a swindler of the sort I promise you've never heard.

All of this brought to you by someone very dear to me.

Introducing Betty, real name.

Other names have been changed to protect the guilty.

So you're my best friend's cousin.

I've known you since you were a small child.

Yep.

Also, you come from a very strong

matriarchal family.

And it's not just matriarchal.

You all claim it as such.

Yeah.

You know, I think part of it has to do with our Polish heritage.

Catholicism.

Yeah.

Catholic Polish women tend to be pretty front and center.

um and my mom was the middle daughter of five daughters

and

they all of my aunts and my mom are, they're very intelligent.

They're very sort of self-possessed.

And they all have very unique personalities.

No two are the same.

How did those get nurtured?

Because I know all of them.

And I was like, what?

How come some of you get to be gay and some of you are young and some of you are like the boss at the

GM plant.

And like one of you is the boss of a family of all boys

and knows how to do things like build shelves and you know lay concrete.

Yeah.

And

I don't know.

I think my grandma, she was not a super affectionate mother.

There was a little bit of emotional distance there.

And they grew up during a time where

My grandpa owned a little grocery store and all of them worked at the little grocery store growing up.

So they were all really like a big part of the community, the Catholic community there in Jackson, the Polish Catholic community, which was a major during that time period.

It was a kind of a boom town.

So, you know, they were all, they all went to Catholic school.

They were smart.

Did your grandparents immigrate?

My great-grandparents did.

And they lived right next door to them growing up.

And Jackson was like a city.

It was like a little city.

So they had sort of all the amenities.

They were able to kind of be wrap scallions around Jackson growing up in the 50s.

They're so rad.

I'm still really close to them all.

Can you talk just a little bit about your mom?

So my mom and dad divorced when I was six.

And I never really knew why until I was 24.

And I was moving from Chicago out to Portland, Oregon.

My mom came down to take some stuff.

And

she told me at that time that a relationship ended in her life with a partner who I knew all

through my teenage years.

And it was kind of an unspoken

friendship.

Yeah,

it was a friendship.

We all sort of assumed it was more than a friendship.

Yeah.

So I was basically getting ready to get into a taxi to go to the airport and she

tearfully told me that her 11-year relationship with her partner ended and she could barely tell me what happened.

She was so emotional about it, which was unusual.

And so I definitely could see that that relationship meant a lot to her, and she was heartbroken.

At the end of the day, the reasoning behind that relationship ending was because my mom didn't feel comfortable being a part of the LGBTQ community.

You know, she didn't want to go hang out with all the lesbians in Jackson.

That wasn't her scene.

She wanted to keep hanging out with her sisters.

And, you know, there's this notion of kind of familieship and joining a community that is outside of that.

And I also found out around that time that my parents' marriage ended because my mom had had an affair with a lady neighbor.

So I think probably my mom was bisexual

and she just didn't have the language, didn't have the the comfort, didn't have the support from her family.

I know that like my grandmother had asked asked her during my parents' divorce to never raise us with another woman.

So that was.

So they knew.

They knew what was going on.

They definitely knew.

And

it's weird thinking about it now that they all knew my entire growing up.

And

like, I just remember just always feeling so

angry and confused about it because, you know, if I was a kid.

Because you weren't let in.

Yeah.

And I like this partner that the

devastating relationship that ended when I was 24, like this one, this woman was in my life

all of my teenage years, all through college.

She frequently, you know, came to family events.

She'd, you know, visit me when I was away at school.

And I kept in touch with her.

And I'm still in touch with her.

But my mom did not know that I stayed in touch with her.

So I'm just kind of, you know, I definitely continued the familial trend of keeping secrets.

So you grow up, you get married.

What happens?

Okay, so I met Stan in Portland, Oregon, and he was my second Tinder date.

So I was in a phase of dating where I was dating like it was my job.

I scheduled two dates on the same day.

My My first date was a lunch date with another man named Stan.

No.

I dated.

Yeah.

So I had a day date with Stan

and then I had an evening cocktail with the Stan I ended up marrying.

He was very charming and it was very fun.

I knew you were going to say he was very charming, but tell me what was charming about him.

So he was dressed so well

and carrying around like a little briefcase like he was a boss business dude or something.

No.

Yeah.

And like little monk strap shoes.

You know, he was, he was, he was very handsome.

And we went to this cute little cocktail bar in Portland.

And I

didn't know what to order because, I mean, I was like a poor graduate student and he ordered an old-fashioned and I thought that was like the coolest thing ever.

And I was like, I'll have a I'll have a gin and tonic.

So

it was romantic and fun and lovely.

And I was totally smitten.

Can you describe what he looks like besides his beautiful manner of dress?

Like a tall guy who rode his bike around Portland, you know, carrying a little briefcase.

You know, he was giving, he was giving that.

So Betty,

you just said like three red flags in a row.

I'm sorry.

I know.

Jane,

this was during a time in my life where I was not making good decisions for myself.

And I was far away from my family.

And I was really set on like, I'm going to meet someone and they're going to be my boyfriend.

Like we had great chemistry,

good conversation.

sexy times immediately.

And it was fun.

It was an adventure.

He'd He'd fly me down to like San Francisco.

All the way from Portland.

Come on.

Well, he was down there working.

And like, I thought that was exotic.

Yeah.

And no, I love this for you.

I love this beginning part.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was, it, I was super love-bombed, big time, major love-bombed.

And so it was, it was kind of nice to like

do nice things and eat a nice meal.

And

uh,

God,

it sounds very like I was basically an orphan.

So

we all have a desperation inside of us that's like, I need to attach myself to another barnacle.

Yeah, and I felt super anxiously attached to this person.

I knew he was a pioneer of open relationships at the time.

This, you buried the, I didn't, you didn't tell me this.

He, he would date other women, and I tried to have some sort of agreement with him about what that meant and like what was okay.

And you know, sort of rules of engagement with that.

And he was not very good at following these rules.

So there were like a thousand red flags.

Was he your age?

Yeah, same age as me.

Okay.

Same age.

So he's got open relationship vibes from the jump, or when did you find this out?

Pretty much from the jump.

And in my mind, at the time, you know, how old was I?

I was 32.

And

I was thinking, I can try that.

I'm an open person.

And I, you know, I dated around while we were dating and tried to do that whole thing.

And that turned out to be unpleasant on a number of levels for me in Portland.

Say more.

Say more.

Tell me.

What are you talking about?

Well, I decided.

that I was only going to date him and I but I wasn't going to put the fence around him to only date me um because I'm a people pleaser.

And so the reason why I decided to stop dating other people at the same time was because I got sexually assaulted and it really terrified me.

Did he know about the assault?

I did tell him, yes.

How soon did you tell him?

Immediately.

Okay.

I feel like the assault kind of helped him prioritize the rules that we had agreed on as far as dating other people.

That was around the same time that he let me know that he was moving to Ireland for work.

Okay.

And I was totally heartbroken.

What's his line of business?

It was working in the tech industry.

Oh, tech.

Okay.

Yes.

And so

this is such a wild story.

I helped him prepare for the move, pack stuff up for him.

You know, I, I was a girlfriend all the while, you know, like driving loads to Goodwill, listening to childish Gambino and just crying, just sobbing in my car.

I was totally in love with him at this point.

Did you guys say that to each other?

No, oh, no.

That was not said at the time.

Okay.

All right.

Are we talking eight months in here?

Six months.

Six months, but okay.

Yeah.

So he moves to Ireland.

I basically think that the relationship is likely going to come to an end, but there remains this contact and we stay in touch.

And we had a long distance relationship while while he lived in Ireland for three years.

And I would go to Dublin and stay

every two or three months, pretty much.

And I mean, I got to travel and do lots of cool, cool stuff and

sort of a continuation of some love bombing there, but then also some very questionable practices in open relationshiping on his part.

While you were visiting?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

He would let me know that he'd been on a date and, you know, one of our rules was that they had to know about that I existed.

Pretty sure that didn't happen.

But some woman that he was dating in Ireland would like, I think she like purposely left marks on him so that I would see it.

Yeah.

Oh, like hickeys?

Like scratch, like bloody scratches.

Yeah.

Yeah, that is a thing.

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This was a time in my life where I think I had very low self-worth.

My dad suddenly died two years before I met Stan.

I was still hardcore grieving.

I was super close to my dad.

And he was kind of the man in my life.

And losing that connection was profoundly difficult.

And I didn't have any resources on how to deal with that grief at all, like zero.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

So you're in Ireland.

He's dating other people.

He's being a complete asshole.

It sounds like.

Pretty much, yeah.

And I'm kind, and I'm, and I'm kind of just accepting the scraps.

So three years of traveling back and forth between Portland and Dublin with this relationship.

And it comes about that he was getting the opportunity to move to the office in London.

And

we'd been dating for a long time at that point.

And I was

like,

I want to go to London.

Yeah.

And we sort of talked about

me moving to where he was.

And really, the only way to do that is to marry the person.

So, sure.

Yeah.

Cause you knew the visa and stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I pretty much texted him a marriage proposal.

Again, this goes back to the matriarchal family.

Like the women are in charge.

Yeah.

So I organized the whole wedding.

We got married at City Hall in San Francisco.

I found an officiant.

I did everything to make this happen.

We got married in April in San Francisco, and we both moved back to our respective places, me, Portland, him, Ireland.

And keep in mind, I'd only lived with him, sort of air quotes around that, for three months.

I did one stint in Dublin for three months where I lived at his flat.

So we hadn't lived together in a real way.

Yeah, you didn't do the day-to-day shit.

No, not at all.

And

I

pretty much noticed immediately that maybe I made the wrong decision.

I just, I started to see what the day-to-day looked like with him.

And I could tell that he

was extremely focused on his job.

And that notion of quality time was very difficult for him to comprehend.

I had a tech job at the time too, where I was working remotely for an American company.

So I had a means to support myself.

You know, I was independent.

And

within a month or two of living there, I got fired.

It was shocking.

It was devastating and shocking.

And, you know, then I really, I was already a dependent on his visa in a technical sense.

Oh, and

I became a dependent.

in a very real sense.

And

that

was extremely difficult for me.

And it was terrifying, I'm sure.

Yeah.

So I had a few jobs.

I did some freelance work here and there, but I was always very cognizant that I was dependent on him because he made a good living there.

And he'd always try and make me feel very secure in what he was bringing in and what he had saved.

So yeah, I had this sense of security based off of that and based off of what he told me.

He rarely would show me that the physical proof of this

i just trusted i trusted

when you work for a big company you know you get stock you you it vests it's got you got all this all these moving parts with the the how the money works for you and he wanted to live large because he'd never really gotten to live large before and he wanted to get one of those guns that shoots money like at the stripper exactly

And

he wanted to shoot it at me.

And like,

great for you if it's real, you know, like that's wonderful.

And it was, I think, it was, it was real for a little while.

But then it definitely stopped being real very, very suddenly.

We were in London for nearly seven years when his office decided to leave London and everybody got fired.

The whole, the whole office got let go in the autumn of 2022.

And in the spring of 2022, my mom died all of a sudden.

So it was a pretty shitty year.

And

Stan gave the eulogy.

He gave the eulogy at my mom's funeral.

And it was beautiful.

Everybody was crying.

That was another kind of a love bond too, that showing up in that way when he didn't show up for so many other mental and emotional reasons.

So considering that our visa was tied to his work.

and typically when you live in London on a worker, a skilled worker visa, you have 60 days from the time your employment ends to find a new sponsor.

Meaning a new job.

Yeah.

I was under the impression this whole time that that was what the plan was, that finding a new sponsor through work was going, that was going to be it.

Easy peasy.

Yeah, I thought

a new sponsor would be found within 60 days and we'd move on with our beautiful lives in London.

Yeah, so I started sending him jobs that I saw that came up through our network that he would have been qualified for.

He never said to me, hey, Betty, I'm not really interested in working in tech anymore.

I'm super burned out and I don't, I just don't want to, I don't want to do it.

That was never a straight conversation that he had with me.

Okay.

Whenever I sent these messages with these jobs, I never got any response back.

And I finally approached him one day and said, Hey, Stan, it seems like you're not really looking for a job.

And it's almost been 60 days since the job officially ended.

So what's the plan here?

Yeah.

Do I live here still?

Are we getting deported?

Like what?

Yeah.

And the plan was that

he decided on his own.

that he didn't want to look for a job.

And in this sort of interim period where I was foolishly sending him job postings, he decided very much unilaterally to

start his own business and get an entrepreneurial visa to sponsor us himself.

So I asked, what does that entail?

Like, how much does that cost?

How long does that take?

You know, regular questions that a person would ask in such a situation.

And I would get kind of partial answers, a lot of defensiveness, and a lot of stonewalling, even at this point, and you know, accusations of I'm not being supportive.

He supported me for all these years.

So there was kind of that throwing the gauntlet down: I've been the breadwinner for all these years, so now it's your turn.

Oh my God.

And the business that was going to keep us in the UK on an entrepreneurial visa was

to be a purveyor of miniature skateboards.

What is that?

These are fingerboards that are little toys that people do tricks.

They do real skateboard tricks that you would do with your feet, but they do it with their fingers.

There's all, there's, Jane, there's all the equipment.

There's the little rails, there's the half pipes, there's like little mini swimming pools.

There's all kinds of it.

I know way too, I know way too much about this.

You know way too much now,

but then when he was

it's bonkers.

I knew that I knew that this was a hobby of his.

I knew that was a hobby.

That's not a hobby.

That's like a fidget toy.

It's a fidget.

Yeah, it is a fidget toy for sure um what's the hobby part like oh different grip tape yes jane yes jane

different grip grip tape is a part of it no

is this like dollhouses

or i don't even know like i respect dollhouses for some reason i don't know why

but

At least like dollhouses, like it requires you to do some things with like female and

you have to do some electrical wiring is there any electrical wiring going on in the fingerboard community

no but there is

mini there is miniature like specialized machining of of skateboard parts that are through there's skate i think it's like one tenth

i feel like i cannot do that

just think about it as being a sad story i can't imagine getting stonewalled by a fingerboard.

Like, I know, I know.

I know.

Like, you'd think that they'd be a jolly fun time, but no.

Like, can you imagine?

No.

Can you imagine going to the

whatever the hellever governmental body it is in London, going to them and then being like, hey, so what's it your business going to be here in the UK where you'll be

entrepreneurial?

And saying, fingerboarding.

I just can't imagine like the company's house there being like, yeah,

that works for us as an entrepreneurial person.

Like,

we're definitely going to give you an entrepreneurial visa license because of this.

because of fingerboards.

We started getting packages in the mail from all over the world, from like Venezuela and Korea and Japan.

And

I'm like, what?

Why are what?

What are all these packages?

Like, what's going on?

He was buying inventory from all these small makers from all over the world.

Yeah, Jane.

I was like, dude, I work at a nonprofit.

I cannot support whatever is happening right now.

He was using likely the severance he got and likely stock he sold that I didn't know about.

That's a fun story.

What?

He sold stock in a tech company.

Oh, yeah.

He decided to just, just throw every single penny he had at this endeavor.

So I continuously would ask where, where he was in the process.

Where are you in the process?

I knew we had to have 25,000 pounds in like a business bank account.

It took months for him.

It took months for him to even get a business bank account.

And everything kept stalling and there were always all kinds of problems.

So it took him 18 months to even launch his website.

Oh my, that's too long.

I know.

Got a website.

Yeah, I can launch one tonight.

Or you just open an Etsy store like a regular person.

Yeah.

And just start

do anything like a regular person,

any part of this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So all this while we had been in couples counseling for two years.

And one of, one of the first, like, this is so fucked up, but one of the first things he brought up to me and that was a problem for him in our marriage counseling sessions was that he said that I was bad with money and that we needed to write up a budget.

And

I was shocked, number one.

And

he basically called me a spendthrift.

And so I

I said to him, I was like, I am 100% here.

Let's do a budget.

I've never done a budget before because I've always been really good with money.

Yeah.

So let's do it.

I want to, since it sounds like you have some experience with it, let's sit down.

I'm ready.

Guess who never brought it up ever again after that?

Never again.

But you did two years of therapy with that being the starting point.

Weekly, yeah.

Yeah.

And in some of the last sessions, I would ask point blank, like, tell me how much money you have in the account that you got the severance into.

And he would, I was like, just give me a ballpark.

Like, just, you don't have to even show it to me.

Just tell me approximately how much we have in the coffers to exist in London.

Um,

uh, and let me know what I need to do to adjust.

You know, like I was trying to be, I was trying to be a reasonable human being about it and

a good partner.

Like, I was trying to support his.

This person's a lunatic.

Well, yeah.

And you're giving him every chance.

Yes.

I kept throwing several bones out.

Yeah.

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So I didn't fully, I didn't fully understand how deep things were, how bad things were, until I took control of the situation and forced his hand at making an appointment with the lawyers that he had been dealing with for setting up his business and helping us with this entrepreneurial visa that he was working on.

He tried to start the meeting with some gobbledygook, nothingness, and I took control of the meeting and asked them specifically, what do we do to stay in the UK?

How much will that cost?

And

how deep are we in right now?

So, and

they sort of breadcrumbs me a little bit.

They didn't spell out the entire scenario to me in that meeting.

And I found out over the course of several days after the meeting

exactly how much it was going to cost and how much he owed them and how likely/slash unlikely our ability to stay in the UK was going to be.

They said that we could expedite the application if we wanted to still apply for the entrepreneurial visa, but it didn't have a guarantee that we would be granted that license.

And so I asked, you know, how much is that going to cost?

That would have cost, I don't know, like 10 grand.

And then I asked, well, what do we need to get that application in?

And literally the main thing,

the last piece that was needed to make this application was we needed 25,000 pounds in his business bank account, which I had no access to.

I was under the impression that it was funded and that there was 25,000 pounds in it.

At least.

And I find out there is 5,000 pounds in this account.

And I said, okay, well, can you move some of your savings and the severance, whatever you have ready for this business that you've been working on into that account so we can do this application?

He has no money.

You know, I find, I find, I find out that the entire severance that he got from the job, which was sizable, was gone.

And

the stock that he had sold

was also, the money from that stock sale was also gone.

And I also found out that he maxed out his credit cards.

My God.

And so he was, he, yeah, he, he was at, he was desperate and he, he asked me for all of my money that I had been saving for, you know, on top of the death money I got from my mother.

I'd been saving money for a down payment for house for a long time.

And

when I find out, when the writing's all on the wall and I'm finding out that like, essentially, he needs $65,000 to save, to get this all figured out.

And I, you got to, you got to keep in mind.

So the things are moving very fast.

We have two weeks to figure out how to stay in London, where we loved, like, I loved living in London.

It was amazing.

So I had, I had given him $25,000.

Yeah.

So, and then I think I I gave him another big chunk of money too.

I can't remember how much it was, maybe another 10 grand or something.

And uh, I

wrote up a contract and I made him sign it saying that he was going to pay me back the money.

And he was very upset that I did that.

He was, he was not happy that I made him sign a piece of paper saying that he was going to pay me back.

Then I finally saw all the writing on the wall and was just like, okay, this is ridiculous.

This is not happening.

We cannot do this.

We cannot afford this.

We're moving back to America.

That is the final, that's, that's the final straw here.

And so I, I start dismantling my life in, in London.

I sold as much stuff as I could.

I had a fabulous garden there and I donated it and sold bits and pieces of it to people in the community.

And I arranged for

movers to come.

And all the while, all the while I'm mobilizing and doing all this stuff, Stan is doing basically nothing.

He's actively having a mental breakdown.

Do you still believe that?

I have to believe that, I think,

because I think if I think that he was putting on a show, that's really, really evil.

And I really don't want to think I chose to marry somebody who hated me.

Like, I feel like you would only do that if you really hate a person.

uh you'd only you'd only pretend to be suicidal if you really hated a person

And

there were trips to the emergency room with chest pains and there was all anxiety attacks and all this stuff.

So he kept,

he was just falling apart left and right.

And

I knew that I could not fall apart.

I made a very concerted effort and a specific choice.

to not fall apart because

I needed to figure out as soft a landing as possible for myself well you're a responsible adult this is true and i also had to negotiate with our with our landlord to not charge us massive fines because we had literally just signed a three-year lease game he did not

knowing that he had drained everything he's just like uh

he he was really living in a serious delusion Did he think like Tony Hawk was going to walk in the room and be like, hey, buddy, this is the best figure board company I've ever seen.

Let me invest.

I want to buy it for a million, billion dollars.

He thought he was making a product that

a company that somebody would maybe want to buy.

Yeah.

Like a fingerboard conglomerate would want to buy him.

Every time you see me.

I love this story because it's like,

oh, it so encapsulates.

It's like such a perfect, simple version of what most

women go through during a divorce.

Yeah, it was concentrated.

It was concentrated.

It's simple to explain.

It's fingerboard company ruined my marriage.

Yeah, and it's, it's so, it's interesting to think back on

that specific idea that fingerboarding ruined my marriage because he had, he, he had a sticker on his, his like Yeti that said, fingerboarding saved my life.

You know,

I'm a big believer in, like, you know, I guess we'll call it some cheerful despair, but you've got to laugh at this shit because otherwise you're going to end up in the pit.

And I don't want to be in the pit.

Right.

You know, I got shit to do.

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