Custody Modification Case

 

Case #3- Custody

Before I continue with Adam’s juvenile case, I really need to tell you about our custody case, because the two are about to be intertwined in the story.

As I shared, I filed for full legal custody of all 4 kids on the
Monday after I had discovered the abuse. I hired the smartest attorney I knew, and she was extremely helpful and sympathetic. As soon as John was notified of the case against him, he hired an attorney and the fight began.

Things move slowly where we live. The courts are overbooked and there aren’t enough judges/courtrooms to hear them all.  It was 4 months before our first hearing. Nothing much happened, and the judge pushed it off for a few months. Another hearing, another “nothing to report” from my attorney.  The judge encouraged us to hold a pre-trial conference where our 2 attorneys and the 2 of us would all meet to discuss the issue and try to come up with ideas for settling it.  I went into this event prepared and calm and stayed that way. However, it was the first time I’d had to sit with John in a room since the event. I couldn’t even look at him. It made me physically ill to have to hear his voice.

Not only did John deny ever knowing about the abuse, but he was also pushing for MORE time with the kids and MORE control than he had ever had. You’ve got to love the confidence of a mediocre straight white man.  He was totally in the wrong, but instead of admitting it and trying to get out of it together and move forward, he denied it and tried to look like the “good guy” by asking for more than he ever deserved.

That conference went nowhere.

We had a Guardian Ad Litem (GAL) assigned to our case, and this girl, who I will call Tiffany, came to our house at some point in this period. She sat at the table and listened to my answers and my point of view. However, when I got to the part where John had told me he knew about the abuse, she was stunned. She had already met with him and didn’t have any idea that it was a factor in the case. He didn’t mention it, but instead tried to focus on his new story- that I had “abandoned” Adam by sending him away and that I didn’t love him the same as my other kids.  She asked me a lot of questions about that, and then she interviewed the 3 kids privately.

Her original findings were that there shouldn’t be any changes made to the custody and that we needed to work together to heal. She also made a comment that my “affection” for Adam seemed different than for my other kids.  That comment kept me awake for several nights. I ended up calling her, and most of her comments were based on the things John had said, which she wouldn’t explain to me. (And I’m sorry- when your child does something so heinous that it sickens you, probably, for a certain amount of time, you might feel slightly less affectionate towards them).

As the months dragged on, we had a good change of direction. Our GAL Tiffany had gone to the child advocacy center and viewed the video of Honey telling her story.  After speaking with Adam, she sent a message that the two of them were very clear and very united in the details of how John found out about the abuse, multiple times. She stated she was leaning towards believing them and believing John had lied about his knowledge. 

This went on and on until about 10 months in. At that point, there was a pre-trial hearing behind closed doors in the judge’s chamber.  (We had never been involved in any of the pre-trial proceedings- we were told that the lawyers and the judge would work through it). I got a wonderful phone call that afternoon, in which my attorney told me the judge had indicated that if we went to trial, he would most likely find in my favor. He had strong words for John’s attorney, telling him that his client needed to “get his head out of his ass” and stop ignoring problems in his own home.  Now that we had the upper hand, my attorney drafted a settlement offer that included me getting full legal custody of the kids and changing a few other small things that would help me move on without as much interference from John.

I went to my parents’ house and told them the news. We celebrated. I felt peaceful for the first time that year.  

Around this time, Adam’s court case would be finished. That story is next, but I made a mistake at this point. Most people knew we were going through hell. Most people knew that Adam had suddenly disappeared from our family and that John and I were fighting. Several people close to us knew the whole story. I had shared very vague information on Facebook but refrained from sharing details because of the juvenile case against Adam. 

As soon as Adam’s case was settled, I posted a more in-depth update on what was going on. My Facebook is private, not public, and I had nothing but amazing support and encouraging words come from that post- not just for me and Honey, but also for Adam. Several people who knew Adam closely reached out and offered to pray for him and asked that I tell him they were thinking about him. The focus of the post was on John and the fact that our family was going through something so difficult and life-altering.

But the next day, I had a flurry of emails from my attorney. Someone had screenshotted my post and sent it to John, who sent it to his attorney, who sent it to the GAL, and somehow it was twisted to look like I was trying to get people to judge and attack Adam. I took the post down immediately. It was up for 36 hours.

The worst thing about betrayal is that it never comes from your enemies.

Someone I had trusted enough to be Facebook friends with went behind my back to John. The other possibility was that John had been using Adam’s Facebook account that was signed into and saved, to view my posts. I was still “friends” with Adam, though he wasn’t using his account anymore.

John was so angry that he was losing the case, and now he had some ammo against me that was black and white. He fired his attorney and hired a despicable woman who is known for attacking and trying to destroy women in custody/divorce cases. She immediately filed a countermotion against me and applied to have me subpoenaed for a deposition.

The countermotion was so unbelievable, I truly thought the judge would see it and throw it out. It was wild. It stated things like I didn’t “take physical care” of the children, and that I had “shunned” Adam. I had “publicly humiliated” Adam and “wished him harm.” It requested full legal AND physical custody of the three youngest kids. But worst of all, it requested that the children be sent to a private location for “Psychological Deprogramming” because I had turned them against John so profoundly.

Never, in any of my filings or emails or anything had I asked that the kids not see John. I had never asked for them to be taken away from him. Despite thinking what he had done was despicable, I still thought the kids would be happier getting to see him.  And I had certainly not been turning the kids against him. Honey knew I thought the fact that he was trying to gaslight her and change the past was a bad thing, and the kids ALL knew that I valued telling the truth, which they ALL knew John wasn’t doing.  But we didn’t discuss it much. In fact, when Honey came home the first time after John had tried to gaslight her, I told her he made up a new story because he “wished he had done the right thing the first time.”

Surely, this countermotion would get thrown out. But the judge let it stand, and I was put through a 5-hour deposition to answer for myself - I will talk about that later.

But the worst part of all of this was the judge who had been with us for 10 months and who was leaning in my favor- well, he retired.  We were scheduled to meet with him and the new judge taking his place once before he officially left. On that day, I was informed that the new judge had a sick kid, and she couldn’t come to the meeting.  The hearing was rescheduled to January (now, almost a year in), and the old judge would be gone by then. The new judge would have read his opinion but was in no way bound by it.  All of our progress seemed to evaporate into thin air.

It was just like starting completely over, only now, despite having pages and pages of evidence against John for all kinds of parenting mistakes and bad treatment of the children, somehow my one Facebook post became the focus.

In our world, it seems like the person who does the heinous thing isn’t crucified as much as the person who TOLD everyone they did the heinous thing.

I wished I had made it clearer in my post that I placed all fault on John and hidden a few more of the details so that they would have nothing against me. But surely, one 36-hour Facebook post wouldn’t sink me. Surely.

It certainly seemed like a drop in the bucket compared to the extensive black-and-white evidence I had against him, gathered for years before this event, “just in case.” Surely the testimony of a victim and a perpetrator who both (separately) told the same story would be the most damning. Surely no one would think a stray, short-lived, well-intentioned but maybe ill-advised, Facebook post (about events that were TRUE) would be anything compared to ignoring abuse going on right under a person’s nose.

Surely.

As my grandma would say, “Don’t call me Shirley.”