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"Tax season is upon us, and for the first time in twenty years, I am not &amp;quot;married filing jointly&amp;quot;. I need to file separately from Peter this year (for reasons I can&amp;#039;t get into right now) even though it will mean no tax refund at all. So now we get to haggle over who gets to claim what. How do we claim the interest on the mortgage, and the taxes associated? We jointly own the property, but since he left, I&amp;#039;ve been paying the mortgage solo. I&amp;#039;m not sure if it&amp;#039;s fair for him to get half the benefits of that. Do we each claim a kid? I&amp;#039;m OK with that in principle, but I would think he probably has to have custody of them more than 25% of each month. From the research I&amp;#039;ve done, the IRS only considers a child your dependent if they&amp;#039;re living with you at least 50% of the time, and you&amp;#039;ve been assigned full or joint custody in the divorce. The thing is, though, we&amp;#039;re not divorced yet. So now what? This is all part of a much larger conversation regarding our finances that I absolutely must have with Peter. This week. And I really, really, really don&amp;#039;t want to. I have had a knot in my stomach like you wouldn&amp;#039;t believe. The hardest part is figuring out when. When he&amp;#039;s dropping the kids off or picking them up? If he gets angry and our conversation turns ugly, I don&amp;#039;t want the kids hearing that. I could just email him - that&amp;#039;s what he&amp;#039;d do to me - but he&amp;#039;ll only pick up the phone and have it out with me once he sees it. It&amp;#039;s kind of a lose/lose scenario. I told him once that people of character have the difficult conversations - no matter how hard they are - because they need to be had. Now my words are haunting me and I can tell you it&amp;#039;s given me some serious sleepless nights. It&amp;#039;s best just to do it and get it done, I know. I&amp;#039;m just afraid of having to deal with angry, ugly Peter. I haven&amp;#039;t had to talk to him in a long time. Have you ever had to have a difficult conversation with your ex that you really wanted to put off? How did you finally make yourself do it? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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