So, these past 15 months, I have been going through a divorce. It finally ended last week, and I ended up with primary custody of my 2 year old son.
Let me say right off the bat that I am not here to badmouth my ex-wife and I don't want anyone here to either. If you call her profane things, I will delete your posts, and hell, I may even ban you. I purposefully did not post anything here for the last 15 months, in part because I did not want the risk, however slight, that whatever was said here ended up being read in court and getting misrepresented. While there is even less risk of that now, I still post this knowing that whatever is said here could be read in court where custody could be in dispute at some point in the future. Furthermore, my son could read this one day. So yeah, I doubt either of those scenarios will be the case, but I am operating under the assumption that if they are the case, I am okay with that.
That said, I would like to tell my story. Without getting into every detail, in February 2016, my wife is 3 months pregnant with our son and she takes medical leave. She has our son in August 2016. In July 2017, I attend a doctor visit and learn she has not been telling me the truth about her medical condition. I later learn since at least March 2016, she was not telling me the truth about a variety of medical conditions which served as the basis for her staying on medical leave. That night after I attend the doctor visit where I learn she has not been telling the truth, she leaves me and takes our son and refuses to let me see him.
I try to reconcile over the next 2 weeks. Towards the end, I spend the weekend with her and my son at her parents. Basically, she and her parents were using me to live beyond their means and later beyond my own means while she was, "sick." And she made it clear that I needed to continue to let her do what she pleased with my money, I needed to believe that the doctors were lying in some conspiracy against her, and if I didn't, she would keep my son from me. So I filed for divorce as soon as possible just to be able to see my son.
If that sounds crazy, that is because it is. For the last 15 months, while the child custody evaluation was going on, I paid her child support, had to continue to pay for her medical insurance, car insurance, and phone. I always fought for more time with my son than the standard visitation time while the child custody evaluation was on going, and I always got more time. She eventually went back to work in March 2018 without really providing evidence of what was wrong with her in the first place or why she was able to return to work.
I fought more hard on this case than anything in my life. I pulled multiple all nighters working on my case. I had hundreds of pages of documents from text messages, pictures, facebook posts, emails, medical documentation, you name it. And at the end of the day, it paid off. The fact of the matter is my ex-wife has some issues, my home is a better place for my son, and I did everything in my power to bring that to light. At the end of the day, that was brought to light, which is why I have primary custody now.
Some of you are probably wondering how I turned out on the division of assets. I won't go into specifics, but somehow that was not a point of contention. She didn't try to take me to the cleaners and she didn't. If every divorce could work out like that, it would be nice.
Our current situation is tenuously amicable. We both love our son, and at times she seems to at least work with me there. At other times, she is very bitter and I wonder if she might do any number of crazy-ex-wife things - baseless CPS calls, false police report, talking bad about me to my son, whatever. But at the end of the day, I am trying my best to co-parent with her, and I know that will be extremely important in my son's development. I know without a doubt that he loves both of us, we both love him, and he knows we both love him. I also know the most common thing that messes up a child with divorced parents is when parenting becomes just another theater of the war that is their failed marriage. So I am trying ultra-hard to not get into that cycle, to reinforce the idea with my son that both his parents love him, and to encourage the idea that he can be happy whether he is with me or with his mother.
So, in a nutshell, that's the 800 pound gorilla off my back. Feel free to AMA, but there may be some places where I will have to draw and not share on too much detail.
Let me say right off the bat that I am not here to badmouth my ex-wife and I don't want anyone here to either. If you call her profane things, I will delete your posts, and hell, I may even ban you. I purposefully did not post anything here for the last 15 months, in part because I did not want the risk, however slight, that whatever was said here ended up being read in court and getting misrepresented. While there is even less risk of that now, I still post this knowing that whatever is said here could be read in court where custody could be in dispute at some point in the future. Furthermore, my son could read this one day. So yeah, I doubt either of those scenarios will be the case, but I am operating under the assumption that if they are the case, I am okay with that.
That said, I would like to tell my story. Without getting into every detail, in February 2016, my wife is 3 months pregnant with our son and she takes medical leave. She has our son in August 2016. In July 2017, I attend a doctor visit and learn she has not been telling me the truth about her medical condition. I later learn since at least March 2016, she was not telling me the truth about a variety of medical conditions which served as the basis for her staying on medical leave. That night after I attend the doctor visit where I learn she has not been telling the truth, she leaves me and takes our son and refuses to let me see him.
I try to reconcile over the next 2 weeks. Towards the end, I spend the weekend with her and my son at her parents. Basically, she and her parents were using me to live beyond their means and later beyond my own means while she was, "sick." And she made it clear that I needed to continue to let her do what she pleased with my money, I needed to believe that the doctors were lying in some conspiracy against her, and if I didn't, she would keep my son from me. So I filed for divorce as soon as possible just to be able to see my son.
If that sounds crazy, that is because it is. For the last 15 months, while the child custody evaluation was going on, I paid her child support, had to continue to pay for her medical insurance, car insurance, and phone. I always fought for more time with my son than the standard visitation time while the child custody evaluation was on going, and I always got more time. She eventually went back to work in March 2018 without really providing evidence of what was wrong with her in the first place or why she was able to return to work.
I fought more hard on this case than anything in my life. I pulled multiple all nighters working on my case. I had hundreds of pages of documents from text messages, pictures, facebook posts, emails, medical documentation, you name it. And at the end of the day, it paid off. The fact of the matter is my ex-wife has some issues, my home is a better place for my son, and I did everything in my power to bring that to light. At the end of the day, that was brought to light, which is why I have primary custody now.
Some of you are probably wondering how I turned out on the division of assets. I won't go into specifics, but somehow that was not a point of contention. She didn't try to take me to the cleaners and she didn't. If every divorce could work out like that, it would be nice.
Our current situation is tenuously amicable. We both love our son, and at times she seems to at least work with me there. At other times, she is very bitter and I wonder if she might do any number of crazy-ex-wife things - baseless CPS calls, false police report, talking bad about me to my son, whatever. But at the end of the day, I am trying my best to co-parent with her, and I know that will be extremely important in my son's development. I know without a doubt that he loves both of us, we both love him, and he knows we both love him. I also know the most common thing that messes up a child with divorced parents is when parenting becomes just another theater of the war that is their failed marriage. So I am trying ultra-hard to not get into that cycle, to reinforce the idea with my son that both his parents love him, and to encourage the idea that he can be happy whether he is with me or with his mother.
So, in a nutshell, that's the 800 pound gorilla off my back. Feel free to AMA, but there may be some places where I will have to draw and not share on too much detail.