Initial Court Date

CalisMom26

as mine looms on the horizon, I am curious if anyone else on this board has gone to their initial appearance with an XH or BD (yeah, not a fan of that term) that they just could not communicate with AT ALL prior to going to court and how that affected what played out there

 

I have tried to work with DD's father, but he is very manipulative and downright "crazy" in reagrd to every single factor of this entire custody/placement/CS "battle".

so far it has been a complete battle of the he said/she saids

what happened for you and how did you handle this? I am afraid its going to come down to the courts making all the decisions for us

mdotm0904

i have no advice for you because i'm in the EXACT same situation. And it's my fear that the courts will end up deciding everything because he's really unreasonable and his idea of compromise is "give me what I want and do what I say." We just got our initial court date today, at least it's after the holiday season so I can enjoy DD's first Thanksgiving & Christmas without his foolishness.

 But just wanted to say hang in there, i know what you're going through

CalisMom26

I have been following your posts, and I see that, yes, we are in very similar situations.  It sucks, but at least we have our DD's 

mdotm0904

Exactly. She makes everything so worth it!

blissfullyignorant

I've given up trying to communicate with my DS father. It just doesn't work in our situation and ends up with him asking inappropriate personal questions. We communicate entirely through our attorneys at this point. We did agree to meet together (with our lawyers) and try to come to an agreement. Our attorneys did all of the talking. They would talk, then we would separate for a few minutes so we could speak with our attorneys, then they would talk again.

We came to a temporary agreement and agreed to get a child-family investigator to do an evaluation and write a recommendation to the judge. That way when the judge makes his decision on custody (because we will never be able to agree on a perm. agreement) he will be able to use the evaluation. It makes me feel better that the judge will have the report from someone who has met with us, seen our homes, and seen us interact with DS. It still sucks that a stranger will have to make the decision for us but it's as good as I can get.

mdotm0904

that's a really good idea blissfullyignorant. i wonder if this is something i can bring up at our scheduling conference in january. like you said, it sucks that strangers have to make this decision, but at least the judge wouldn't be doing it totally blind, they'd have some sort of background from a neutral party to help out.

FyreFlyeRush

My first situation was a little similar, but ended up not mattering because BD didn't show up for our paternity hearing. The courts gave me everything, and hit him for the max. When we went back five years later, they still held a grudge against him. They lowered his CS payments, but cranked his back so much, he ended up paying more than if he hadn't tried to protest.

I'm interested to see what happens, tho. Keep us posted. I think I'll be in your situation this time next year. This BD is weird. (I have HORRIBLE taste in men!)