You need to stay out of your parents' business. Did your mother stay home to maybe give birth to you and your siblings? For your father to complain about that NOW is kind of late. and there's nothing lazy about a woman wo chooses to chase around a pack of toddlers so you need to stop thinking in those terms. You should not be judging your mother for decisions made when you were a baby. If your father really disapproved of those deisions, he'd have divorced her years ago.

Now, if you truly fear your mother, get out of the house. Call CPS for younger siblings' safety. Get on your own two feet if you're an adult and stop relying upon your parents (and sticking your nose in their business).

Your Dad needs to be consulting a lawyer, not you. The lawyer will tell him that he has nothing to worry abou twith the mineral rights that he inherited. California is a community property state. Your Dad will need to figure out what his work issues are, whether the injury qualifies for worker's compensation or some kind of disability payments, or whether he's goign to be able to return to work sometime. Whatever the financial arrangements, they're going to be tougher for everyone concerned if your Dad loses his job.

The assets will be split in half, which includes his retirement account and pension eligibility. But if his maximum income is a disability payment, then that will be the income that is used when calculating whether either owes alimony to the other. If your mother is now working and your dad is determined to be permanently disabiled, it may even end up that she owes alimony to him.

But this is not for you to figure out, it's for his laweyr to do. Send him to a laweyr and you step back.

Try to find a way to understand that your mother may not be all as evil as you claim. A problem handling money, a decision to stay at home for half a marriage while children are being raised, a disagreement about how to plan for the future, retirement, etc., is not by itself any indicator of violence, but if she has truly been physically violent in the past, you need to protect yourself and your siblings, and let your Dad handle his own adult decision about his marriage on his own.

And if your mother has not actually been physically violent, please understand that there are two sides to nearly every story, and your exceptionally one-sided presentation suggests that maybe you've been allowed to take sides in a situation where you should have been helped NOT to do so.

Both provided 50% of your DNA and 50% of your upbringing, and both deserve an equal portion of your respect. If your mother is truly evil, then you need therapy, and a lot of it, because you will not have a correct point of view on how to be in a normal family. But if, as I suspect, you made a choice to choose up sides in the divorce and have chosen your Dad's side because he is ... whatever, more econonically generous or whatever... well, this is a wrong thing and you need to allow for the possibility that your mother is not quite that evil.

No child, not even an adult child, should ever be in a position to say their own mother is evil.

Now, I want you to know who this advice is coming from. I am the stepmother of some wonderful children whose mother is diagnosed as a narcissist. She spends every dime she can get her mitts on and hasn't saved up a dime for the kid's college, and if she had her way, we'd be giving all out money to her for her version of fun and we'd have nothing left to save for the kid's college either. She is the sports/stage mother from hell. Truly. She regularly beat their father (physically) and after years of that, she realized it didn't work very well and switched tactics, berating him and treating him like dirt. She said demeaning things about him in public, called him not a man, moved out of the bedroom and started sleeping with the daughter years before the separation (and continued sleeping with her till she was a teen adn it was an embarassing little problem we all had to deal with after the divorce was final). She flashes her teen sons, suggesting when they see a pretty girl on TV that if they want to see boobies, that they should look at hers instead.

It's trashy, nasty, abusive. My husband left, told all the right people about what had happened, but because it had been so long that she had been doing it and she was promising never to do certain of those things again, the authorities thought it would be better fo rthe kids to just go to counseling rather than have to testify agains tthier mother. Her parting shot, about half a year after the separation, was to accuse thier father of violence and keep the kids away from him for another 6 months... the kid who was the supposed "victim" of his violence is an adult and says he believes she exaggerated the claim of violence because the divorce was going bad for her. Oddly, he came up with this on his own because my husband never spoke to him about the situation at all, being unable to be in contact at all with a person named as a "victim" in a crime being charged against him. The case was delayed, delayed, etc. by prosecutors and finally prosecuted only when the ex wife insisted, nad they they dropped it after my hsuband proved he went to counseling.

TRULY, this woman is evil.

But do you think we've ever given the kids any inforamtion that would let them think that thier mother is evil? She may be mistaken about certain financial budgeting principles, she may be wrong about what the judge said, or whatever, but we will NEVER make the children choose between her and their fahter. We will never let them get to a point where they have to call her evil.

She tried to do that to them, in the 6 months that she had kidnapped them. And they were ordered into therapy for it. After a few sessions, they realized that their Dad did not suddenly snap or go crazy, that is not how crazy works. They understood that they did not have to choose up sides, not one side or the other, and it was wrong for anyone to say they should. And they were told that if she told them that he was evil or crazy or abusive, that she was mistaken and they didn't need to be angry at her for it, just understand that not everything she says is totally accurate (they already knew this, it was not news to them... they're not stupid!)

I explained this background so you'd understand. You should not be in a position to even think these things about your mother, unless she has pysically beaten you repeatedly. And I doubt she has, or else you'd not be living with her, she'd be in jail, and you'd not be worried that she would snap when your father finally shares with HER what he's obviously shared with YOU... that he intends to divorce her. for him to share this with you, to share wit you that he worries that she's going to snap, to share that much of his money worries with you. IT's wrong, it's VERY mistaken. He should not have done it.

YOu need therapy to help you get over this, but remember, your mother is the same woman who baked cookies for you as a toddler or held your head while you were throwing up theh last time you had the flu. She's the person who went to all the parent-teacher things while your Dad was working and she probably did a few other good things for you as well.

In a few more years, you'll be old enough to understand that NO one is ALL good, and NO ONE is ALL BAD either. Heck, even my husband's ex, she's a lot of fun and does parties really well. She makes people she likes feel like part of the gang and ... well, the kids love her house, which is like disneyland every day. As bad as this is for her mothering skills, she is NOT a bad person. NO ONE is ALL BAD.

You need to get that thought of your mother out of your head, and your dad is not the person to help you do this.

Get him to a lawyer, get yourself to a counselor. And good luck.