In our circumstance, Susan did not need court approval to move, although she was supposed to Give Greg like 30 days notice, which she NEVER did, not once. Yes we brought that up to the judge, he didn’t do anything about it.
One time, the time she moved back to California from North Carolina, she gave Greg no notice. One day, he called his kids, their phone was disconnected. He hadn’t heard from them for days. He finally tracked down her mother-in-law’s number and reached her, she told Greg that Susan had packed up the kids and flew them back to CA after they got into a disagreement. She abandoned the boys’ possessions, clothes, and even her car, because she wasn’t getting along with her MIL. She never told Greg she was moving them again. We didn’t hear from them for days until she was back in CA and got a phone and decided to call and let Greg know his kids were alive. :rolleyes: That was not a fun 5 days for us.
Oh and Shayna, I already explained in an earlier post my theory about why Susan would move around so much.
Shelter is not binary. A house can be one bedroom or 6 bedrooms. If Greg’s kids had full use of their support they would be able to afford a house with a bedroom for each child. Instead, they all three share a (very cramped) room. Which for teenagers, and especially the almost-15-year-old is not ideal.
Other things that are not binary are things like water, electricity, food. Having extra inhabitants in the house will result in a higher use of these resources thus a higher bill. Also gasoline for the car. Susan uses extra money for gas to transport her youngest three and her boyfriend around. This is all funded on Greg’s kids’ money, which could be going toward sports teams, summer camps, lessons, tutoring, entertainment, toys, etc. They don’t get these things. They don’t get new clothes or nice shoes. They look like ragamuffins.
Yes. They have not been able to join sports teams because the fee is too expensive. If they had full use of their child support, they would have been playing pee-wee soccer and baseball for years now, developing self-esteem, friendships, skills and memories.
They should be getting tutoring. It’d be nice if they could go to summer camp, an experience I think every kid should get to have. They don’t even have bicycles. They have very shabby clothes and shoes. The youngest gets it the worst, he wears double hand-me-downs. The money Greg supplies is more than enough to have all of the aforementioned things.
I’m not going to lay out the details of Greg’s income, but you forgot the taxes that are taken out of his income, his retirement savings, his health insurance premiums. Generally in our tax bracket, federal taxes alone are at least 25%. So add those additional things and then you’ll have a more accurate number.
Good advice, except for the transportation. There is no public transportation. He would be flying in to either Oakland, San Francisco or Sacramento. The Kids live 1.5 hour drive from each of these airports. So that’s a pretty expensive cab ride. The smallish town they live in does not have a public transportation system, at least not one I saw when we lived there 4 years ago. Besides, I seriously doubt Susan would let her kids get on a public bus with Greg. She’s throw a shit fit, call her lawyer and move to have the visitation ended.
So, IOW, whatever suggestions have been made to remedy the debacle, none of them are going to work??
Seriously OP, go home, cuddle your partner and thank your lucky stars that the chaos is over. Stop thinking about what ‘could’a’ or ‘should’a’ been. The kids are none of your business anymore, and should be left to the mercies of their mother.
You’ve done your darndest, and alas it wasn’t enough. Anything more would be akin to bashing your head against a brick wall.
There are a few things that don’t add up here and one big important point you’re missing.
First of all, if Susan has no money, etc how on earth is she just up and moving across the country several times? Just randomly buying plane tickets for how many? Really?
And you ask why Susan is so angry and hateful, etc? Have you thought to look at it from the perspective of a mother who has raised those children basically by herself since their birth? And how long has Greg been trying to take them from her? Have you considered what a threat he is to her and the threat she is constantly living under? That he will take her children away, across country. He has more money, a better house, a good job. Don’t you think she’s scared to death that he’s going to win and take her kids? Here’s a father that had little to nothing to do with those kids, by your account, most of their lives, he moves 3000 miles away and then he wants to take the kids from her. You have no idea what that would feel like to a mother. And any time he picks them up, her knowing that he’s seeking custody, she will have a raw, horrible feeling that he is just going to take them. It may not be rational, it may not be true, but there it is. When I was first separated, every time my ex picked up our kids, there was a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that he was going to take them and not bring them home to me- and he lived a few miles away!! Maybe she’s not the best person or the best mother or the best of anything, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t love those kids and will fight tooth and nail to keep them with her because they’re HER KIDS. Maybe if Greg stopped threatening her and stopped taking her to court where he is, in fact, forcing her to spend money she does not have, maybe they could build some trust and she would be more likely to allow visits without all the shenanigans. If someone were legally trying to take my children away, it would be a cold day in hell that they would be picking them up and taking them somewhere. You could not threaten her with anything that would be worse than that.
Okay, you need to stop focusing on what you WISH could happen and start focusing on the few things that are REALISTIC and IN YOUR CONTROL. The way I see it, there are two things that you can control:
Greg’s court-ordered visitation with his sons. If it means getting a part-time/weekend job to pay for it, then so be it.
His reaction to Susan’s vitriolic emails/letters/phone calls. He should tell her that he will ONLY respond to communications regarding the children. If she wants to discuss visitation, the kids’ school, sports, etc., then he’d be happy to listen. If she wants to discuss the past, she can see a counselor because he won’t be responding to anything other than issues related to the kids.
If she sends him letters full of vitriol, he should return them to her, with no comments. If she sends him hateful emails, he should reiterate, politely yet curtly, that he will only respond to issues related to the children. Rinse and repeat until she gets the message.
Jeebus, OP, do you hear the stuff that comes out of your keyboard about this woman? Everything you say about her drips with contempt and venom, even when you claim you’re acknowledging her good points. With friends like that, Greg doesn’t need enemies to alienate his children. Hell, he’s probably doing a decent enough job on his own.
Think about this from their perspective for a few minutes. Greg never showed any signs of wanting to be their full-time day-in-and-day-out Daddy until a couple of years ago. He was gone a lot of the time when he and Susan were married, he seemed content to let her have custody, he up and moved across the country without them. (Yeah, he had reasons, but kids don’t give Fuck One about reasons. They care about the practical outcome of the matter, and the practical outcome of this matter is that he was never their primary parent.) Susan has always been the single stable factor in their lives. No matter where they were living, no matter what Greg was off doing, she was always there taking care of them. And then out of the seeming blue, Greg decides he wants to be a full-time father and drag them across the country where they’ll only see her once or twice a year. He spends 2 years and tons of money dragging her into court over and over and over again to achieve this aim. Oh, and he’s gonna make them live with a woman who looks down her nose at every single aspect of their life, including and especially their mom.
Be brutally honest: If you were these kids, would you feel all warm and fuzzy toward Greg? Or would you want nothing to do with either of you?
I have to agree with all of this. nyctea scandiaca, in the OP, you say that the therapist’s evaluation was dragged on for too long, but how would you feel if the therapist did a rush job? You also say that this was dragged out for 2 years solely due to Susan’s refusal to believe that her husband molested someone. I don’t know a family court judge anywhere (and yes, I do have some experience with these situations, having been an evil therapist in the past) who would allow that kind of delay to happen.
While I know full well that there are still judges who have favorable biases towards mothers, I don’t think it’s as dramatic as you have made it sound. I personally know 3 men who have full custody of their children and one who has a 60% award. I think, more importantly, the judges look to primary connection and who has been most consistent in the kids’ lives.
Like it or not, feasible or not, if Greg wants this to change, he’ll have to do some of the things you keep shooting down. Monthly visits, etc. If Susan truly has done any “brainwashing”, certainly time in the father’s presence would clue the boys in to his character and motivations.
See, this isn’t actually what I meant at all. Almost all of these are about what you’d like other people to do. They’re wishes, not objectives. An objective is about what YOU want to do.
This is important, because what other people do isn’t within your control, whereas what you do is. So the more you focus on what you want other people to do, the more frustrated and helpless you feel, and the less you actually get done.
Think of it this way: ‘I want my dream job to lower its requirements so that my qualifications would be enough to get me in’ isn’t an objective. It’s a wish. Focusing on it will make you miserable, because there isn’t a way you can actively move towards it. On the other hand, ‘I want to complete the course that will qualify me for my dream job’ is an objective. It may be a difficult one, but it’s something you can work towards.
Look for an objective that starts with ‘I want to…’ rather than ‘I want [other person] to…’
From what you say, it sounds like your objective might be something along the lines of ‘I want to help Greg find ways to be as much as possible of a father to his children’ - or ‘I want to move Greg, me and his kids towards being a real family.’
If it’s something like that, then you can find concrete ways to move you towards that goal - whether it’s researching possible jobs that are even a chunk closer to his kids, or brainstorming incentives that might encourage Susan to move closer to you, or finding him a webcam that’ll let the two of you have video chats with his kids, or picking a subject you’re good at and offering to help one of the kids with his homework by video chat, or…you know what would be useful a lot better than I do. But the objective thing will help you ditch the energy-sucking ‘I want X to be different’ stuff, and focus on the stuff that can be useful.
I don’t know if this portion of your argument is quite fair. Wasn’t it the plan for Susan to follow, therefore his move was not to move across the country without them. At least, that was my impression of the move situation.
My first though is that you and Greg should move near Susan. Yea, I know he has a good job where he is, but so what? What’s more important?
But… he should *only *do this if he believes he can once again develop a genuine, personal relationship with his children by being near them. Greg should *not *move out there if it is a “lost cause.” In other words, Greg should not move near Susan if she has brainwashed the children to such a degree that it would be impossible for Greg to have a normal relationship with them.
If Greg believes it’s a lost cause at this point, he needs to stay put and keep paying. Yea, it sucks. But courts are heavily biased against fathers. There’s nothing you can do about it, unfortunately.
It’s probably not fair from an adult perspective. However, it’s not reasonable or fair to expect a child to look at things from an adult perspective. It’s hard to say about the move based on the OP’s commentary–it seems to have been a mixture of Susan planning to move and DC being the only place in the country Greg could possibly have a career. Either way, from the kids’ perspective, it amounts to the same thing. He went, they didn’t, and so he’s even less a part of their lives than he was before.
I must say (as someone who has a similar career to and therefore probably makes about the same as Greg, and so is familiar with the general disposition of taxes, etc.) I’m still a little confused by how the numbers work out – I can see how they do if Greg is contributing substantially to his retirement fund. However, maybe he could dial it down for the next couple of years. A couple of years won’t kill his retirement savings, and his kids are more important, right? We have always contributed religiously to our 401K’s and IRA’s, but when the Little One came along we realized that always contributing, which is something that before she was born was VERY important to us, was a thing that might have to go by the wayside sometimes if we were going to try to do the best thing for her. (And yes, before you bring it up, I know that you lose 25% of that to taxes that otherwise would be sheltered. Yes, it sucks. But that still leaves more disposable income now at the time he needs it, even if less money overall.)
And maybe I misunderstood, but I got the impression from a previous post that you (nyctea) were working as well. Are you willing to support Greg financially in trying to visit his kids? Or (equivalently) by helping pay his rent so that he has more disposable income with which to visit his kids?
Shayna has lots of good advice for making the trip cheaper. They don’t have to eat out. They can eat spaghetti from a kitchenette or he could even stay in a Motel 6 and buy sandwich stuff… go to parks and on hikes or play frisbee together for entertainment… whatever it takes. I’ll just add that it sounds a bit to me like you’re saying, “Well, if he can’t go 12 times a year like you suggested, it won’t work.” Obviously 12 times is better than fewer, but if he can only go twice a year, that’s better than once. If he can go three times, that’s better than twice. And if he can only go once a year, hey, that’s better than once every two years. And so on.
And even if after making all the cuts he can, all he has is $500 net take-home income after rent, he can still make it once a year at $1k a pop (says the former grad student who was on a similar income) if he must spend that much (although again he really shouldn’t have to). Yeah, he’ll have to live like a grad student. Yeah, it won’t be pretty. Yeah, his life will suck. So the question is, is it worth it to him to live like a crappy grad student to see his kids once a year? It’s fine if the answer is no. I’m not sure I would be able to do it for kids I hadn’t seen for quite a while and who hated me by now anyway. But it is his choice.
Anyway, my sympathies. The fact that he has to choose whether to live an incredibly crappy life or never see his kids at all, with no better option in there, is pretty awful, and I feel for him (and you).
nyctea, I do really feel for you and Greg. The outcome of that custody fight was not fair - but it is. There isn’t a lot you can do now about it. As eclectic wench says, look towards the things you can control. Also, the things you are willing to control. If Greg isn’t willing to make the sorts of sacrifices that might get him to be able to visit a few times a year, that’s fine, just admit it and move on to what YOU (you and Greg) ARE willing to do.
And honestly, it may be easiest and best at this point in time for Greg to back off, admit that the kids lives are what they are, and let go. Then reestablish a relationship when they are adults. My father’s biological father chose that route - and my father as an adult - recognizing that his mother could be a difficult person - listened to him, gave him credit for what he said, and created a relationship with him as an adult. There was truth in what his father told him - that trying to stay involved in his son’s life was creating far more stress for his son than stepping back. It allowed my grandmother to let go of her “bad first marriage” and stop bad mouthing him (other than to tell stories that he abandoned her - the truth appears to be that SHE left), giving my father the opportunity to establish a relationship less poisoned.
I have a couple of questions which I don’t think have been answered on the thread.
How regular is Greg’s contact with the boys now? Including emails, phone calls, IMs and visits, how often would they be in touch?
What do the boys say they need more of from Greg? i.e. we’ve heard yours, but what would their ‘perfect world scenario’ be?
Accepting your explanation that Greg’s income is completely used up by either child support, living expenses or tax/retirement, why can’t your income (which I assume is not contributing to child support) be used to help contribute to a once-a-month cheapie trip for him back home to see the boys?
If only I were as good at doing it in real life as I am at explaining the theory on a message board, dang, I would rule.