Family Hit From Both Sides by Child Support System

Liz Taylor swears it’s not a matter of hating her husband’s ex-wife. “I know it’s against what God wants that I’m angry and hostile toward her, but doggone it. I’m fighting it.”

Taylor is worried about her feelings because, as a Christian woman, she doesn’t want to hate anybody.

It’s clear after talking to her that it really isn’t the ex-wife she hates, but the system. And as far as I know, there’s nothing in Christian theology that bans hatred of the system.

Taylor, the mother of three teen-agers, finds herself in an exasperating bind: At a time when she can’t collect child support payments from her ex-husband, her new husband of two years has been ordered to substantially increase his payment to his ex-wife for his two children, who are minors.

Taylor can’t help but feel like she’s catching it from both sides.

“I don’t even have a problem with paying her (the ex-wife) the money, if we had it,” Taylor says, “in that I feel if you have it, your kids should benefit from it.”

The problem, she says, is that her husband’s payment has leaped from $486 a month to $1,050--a jump, she says, the family can’t afford. What’s especially galling to her is that Taylor, divorced in 1983 and left with children ages 2, 4 and 6, hasn’t received any child support since 1990.

She received sporadic payments totaling about $29,000 from 1985 to 1990, she says, but only because she leaned heavily on the Orange County district attorney’s office to pursue her case.

The county came through, to the point of taking her ex-husband to court last year. But a jury deadlocked in the case, and Taylor received nothing. Deputy Dist. Atty. Jan Sturla, who supervises the district attorney’s family support division, said jurors believed Taylor’s ex-husband genuinely didn’t have the money to pay.

After her divorce, Taylor began a business as a consultant in word processing for legal offices. Her business, never lucrative, has dropped off to about $500 a month, she said. Her husband, Gary Wood, whom she married in 1991, is a refrigeration and air-conditioning repairman whose hours are erratic and who depends on overtime to augment his income. The family lives in Taylor’s modest Garden Grove home, a home her father helped her buy after the divorce.

Part of her frustration, she says, is that she told her children during the difficult years after her divorce that their financial picture would improve if she remarried and someone could help share the financial load. During those years, her parents helped with major expenses. Her only “frill” was putting the children in a private Christian school.

Now, she says, she and her children see a system that seems to play favorites.

“The kids are seeing a judicial system that’s laying on their stepfather, who’s doing the best he can and being good to his kids. My oldest says, ‘He (Wood) doesn’t have to pay. They’re not doing anything to Dad.’ ”

Sturla, who spent most of his 16-year career in criminal prosecution until coming over to the family support division last year, said he sympathizes with Taylor’s plight and doesn’t doubt that inequities exist in the complex and emotion-charged child support system.

Hefty increases such the one that Taylor’s husband has been ordered to pay is the result of a state law that went into effect last year and that tried to add uniformity to the state’s payment system. It doesn’t allow for flexibility, Sturla said, leading to many complaints like Taylor’s.

Beyond that, Sturla said, enforcement of so-called “deadbeat dads” continues to be a major problem. Quick statistics: Orange County has about 45,000 outstanding orders for child-support payments. At any given time, between 50% and 55% of those orders are being honored by the fathers. That figure put Orange County first among the state’s 13 largest counties in the most recent published study, Sturla noted.

“So you can see that if the best is only a little more than half, there’s a big problem there,” he said.

The difficulty is that the child-support caseload has increased 120% in the last four years, Sturla said, while staffing has increased only 20%. Caseworkers who once handled 600 cases now have about 1,200.

Various factors work against enforcement, Sturla says, such as the difficulty in verifying employment or income for certain workers. As a result, he says, “the people who probably are hurt the most are the good people, the people working day in and day out, doing their child support. . . .”

A ray of hope, Sturla said, is that the county has hired an accounting firm to study the problem. In addition, a new state law takes effect in January and may lessen the immediate impact of the often-huge increases mandated by the 1992 legislation.

All of this has a very hollow bottom-line sound to Taylor.

Her husband is paying; her ex isn’t.

“I’m furious,” she says. “I think an injustice has been done to my kids and me. It’s been a very stressful situation; I think there’s been emotional harm all the way through. We’re not the intact family we could have been and we’re not getting any better because of this. The system did not continue to work for us. I had them look at me (after the jury trial) and say, ‘We can’t do anymore.’ ”