Just saw this on Facebook:
Giving some people another chance is like giving then another bullet for their gun because they missed you the first time.
Be careful who you give a second chance to, some people do not deserve them.
I like your father.
I figured everyone would say I was crazy for giving her money, which I am, but it was only $20. It was part of our, um, negotiations yesterday. I picked a halfway point and said be there at 2pm and she said ok then texted a few minutes later saying she had calculated everything and she wouldn’t have enough to get there and back. I replied “I’ll give you $20, be there at 2pm” and she agreed. I figured she’d forget about it, but of course she didn’t.
So anyway, 500 miles later and everything’s back to normal. The kiddo is back and was complaining about bedtime like always, even after I let her stay up an hour and a half later than usual. “But dad, I’m almost a preteen! And preteens don’t have a bedtime, I shouldn’t either!” But she went to bed, she knew that was a silly argument.
As far as future visitation, I read our court order for the first time in a while and it’s very basic, but it’s simplicity is also pretty restrictive. It doesn’t get into much detail because it was written when her mom was living in yet another state. It says that she’ll get every other weekend plus 24 hours a week if she moves to TN, and she gets something else if she visits TN. If she visited TN, it was assumed that she’d stay with her mom (kid’s maternal grandma), so it says “all parenting time is to take place at the maternal grandmother’s or at the mother’s residence if she moves to Tn”.
I’ve never tried to restrict visitation and don’t even want to, but obviously sending the kid out of state isn’t going to happen again, and there’s really nothing else in the papers unless she comes here and visits the grandmother (and I don’t think they get along so well anymore) or moves back here.
So do I. But it’s an entirely separate issue from non-payment of child support. Personally, my impulse is to say that the OP ought to go back to court and see if this stunt can get supervised visitation only, but I don’t know if that’s best for the kid or not.
I don’t know if the mother planned for things to turn out this badly; I suspect she just didn’t plan at all; if she had any kind of ulterior motive, it may have had something to do with squeezing money from her ex, or from her relatives in Florida, which may have been easier to do with a kid in tow. But I don 't think she had kidnapping on the mind.
It can’t be harder to deal with a stupid, disorganized person, than with a smart, evil one, because the smart, evil ones are usually at least predictable. The ex sounds more like one of those people who goes into things with the best intentions, but no plan and it all falls apart. That’s why I asked if she might be bipolar. It sounds like the kind of thing bipolar people do (IME)-- undertaking an extensive trip that requires money and planning, with none of either.
One might call that ransom.
I’m glad your daughter is home safely.
StG
My boss’s son had custody of his daughter. The ex-wife had a visitation and absconded from Washington to Florida and became a Jehovah’s Witness. The son couldn’t get his daughter back. He gets her for a couple/few weeks in Summer and some time at Christmas.
Ulitimately this is what worked best for me. Sorry you’re going through it Fubaya I can relate.
Does becoming a Jehovah’s Witness have something to do with this?
I have no idea about her being bipolar, but I think that was the situation this time, just no planning. It doesn’t explain why she cut off communication for 24 hours when my sister was close and could have picked up our daughter though. It would have made everything easier for her. Maybe she was just mad that I wanted her back on time instead of her plan which was more along of the lines of ‘whenever she felt like it.’
However, in the past, she did disappear and move several states away with our daughter on more than one occasion and it would take weeks to find her. She did 13 interstate moves in one year, but she had custody and there wasn’t anything I could do until she stayed put long enough for me to get her into court. So now, every time something unexpected happens when she has our daughter, I have to wonder if it’s something understandable or the start of her trying to disappear.
It might have, if her church was presented to the judge as her “support system,” and a demonstration of her having ties to the community. If her lack of stability was an issue in the father getting custody the first time around, then establishing a community, and showing a commitment to it (if she was on committees, and had character witnesses from the church saying she was dependable, blah, blah), then yeah, converting to any religion and remaining an active member of the community could have worked in her favor.
Probably also a judge who raised an eyebrow at placing a girl with a single father as well, and those aren’t too hard to come by, not with every incidence of molestation making headlines-- by which I don’t mean that fathers are likely to do that, just that media bias in reporting makes people, including judges sometimes, think they are.
Also, I am not advocating the position that people who join religions are more entitled to custody of their children than people who are not. I’m just trying to explain what the judge’s thinking may have been.
I am glad you have your daughter back. That’s the main thing IMO.
Ohio maxes out at 6, too. Meh. Unless you think the state should force the father (or mother) to give away every dime he/she makes, rendering him incapable of supporting himself, there has to be a maximum allowance.
Besides, both parents should share the blame if they bring a bunch of kids into the world that they cannot support.
Some states have a means of calculating child support where each child is entitled to 17% of the non-custodial parent’s income, but the 17% for the first child is subtracted before the 17% for the next child is figured. Then all the percentages are averaged. Someone who fathers a lot of kids can end up with very little to live on, but not nothing.
I think there’s a computer program to figure it out; you input the father’s income and the number of children, and it spits out the number each one is entitled to.
It looks like this:* income* * .17 = n1; income - n2 * .17 = n2; income - (n1 + n2) * .17 = n3; (n1 + n2 + n3)/3 = support-per-child
If I misplaced a decimal, or subtracted when I should have added, it’s because my last math class was more than 20 years ago.