In some cases the court can mandate child support even if the custodial parent doesn’t push for the non-custodial parent to pay it. More in situations where the custodial parent may be seeking government assistance to raise the kids, when there is a non-custodial parent with the ability to pay towards the support of the kids.
And some of us think that is also unfair and would like to see the laws changed.
Is that the norm or an outlier?
Also, if parents agree and neither one goes to the courts to force payment, how would the courts even know? Doesn’t it require one parent to initiate forced payment of the other? I’m thinking that even if the court somehow mandates it at the point of separation, if neither parent ever forces the issue, the non-payment just stays off the books and no one will know to intervene
Do you mean that I shouldn’t have bought my wife something for our 38th anniversary tomorrow or that the ‘death do us apart’ clause will eventually kick in?
She is not doing any “supporting”.
It’s entirely possibly that she cannot or that the custodial parent simply isn’t interested in pursuing the matter.
My mother left me and my siblings when I was 18, so full disclosure, I’m not objective here. But that experience has left me feeling that a mother who abandons her children is among the worst of humans, approaching some level of wrong that requires calling on religion or the supernatural to adequately describe.
Note that I’m saying a mother who “abandons” her children, not a mother who gives the child up for adoption (often the most loving, generous thing she can do for the child), or a mother who works out a living arrangement that truly is best for the children even if it means she no longer sees them.
My first reaction upon reading the OP was that you don’t know the circumstances of what happened and so you don’t know whether she can be understood as a woman who valiantly and properly admitted she couldn’t be a mother, or whether she is a selfish, cruel human being who can inflict lifelong emotional pain on children and carry on without looking back.
Even if you think you know she’s the former, it’s only because she told you, right? That’s her spin on the whole thing and I’d wager the father would tell you a very different story. Or maybe she cares so little that she’s not even spinning a good version of events for you.
Don’t let yourself fantasize that she acted responsibly in a bad situation and orchestrated the best exit she could. She may have been like my mother, who sent my 10-year-old brother to school one morning and was gone when he got off the school bus that afternoon. He found an empty house, with only his things left behind. No note. He was terrified.
My 17-year-old sister, who was living with relatives at the time, had to go to the house and explain to this little boy that our mother was gone and we didn’t know if we would ever see her again. Then she called me at university and told me I couldn’t come home on spring break because there was no home to come to.
We found out that she had run off to Florida with some worthless guy she had just met.
Something like that fucks with a kid’s head for the rest of his life. Whether you’re 5, 10 or 18, it doesn’t matter. Your mother, that one person in the world who is supposed to love you and care for you even if no one else does, just walked away. What does that tell a kid about himself? Even if the father is wonderful, the rest of the family supportive, that kid will always think of himself as someone whose own mother couldn’t love him. As he gets older, he’ll realize it’s even worse. Not only did she not love him, she didn’t mind hurting him.
If I found out a woman I was dating had abandoned her kids, I’d have to stand up and walk out right then. Even if a casual acquaintance revealed that about herself, I would never want to talk to her again.
If she abandoned her kids – and that’s the word you used to describe it – her heart is a cold stone and I don’t see how any feelings for you could be sincere.
Honestly I’m much more fascinated in your story than the OP’s scenario. Where was dad? Did she ever reconnect or explain herself? Leaving the kid by himself in the house to run off with a guy sounds deranged. Were any drugs involved?
I can’t agree with this. The whole point of giving them up is to ‘give them up’. No good will be served by contacting them.
My parents divorced when I was very young, so I never knew them together. He’s a good guy who let us believe some of the things my mom said about him because he didn’t have the heart to tell us that her promiscuity was why they split. I didn’t learn the truth until I was in my twenties and found documents that detailed some of her exploits, including a car crash that killed her lover and mangled her pretty bad when I was 4 years old. We lived with my mother and a series of husbands, stepfathers, sort-of husbands, and guys that just came and went. My little brother was the son of one of those men. (This was the late 60s and 70s, so I think kids pretty much stayed with the mom automatically in a divorce.)
There were no drugs involved, though she drank a bit. This wasn’t a side effect of substance abuse. She had legitimate mental issues and I’m sorry she had to deal with that, but none of them justified what she did. And her final abandonment wasn’t the first time we saw that she valued being with a man – any man, preferably a new one – far more than being with her children. Each time she met a man or left a man, she uprooted us to move to a new home – a fairly nice middle class home when a man was paying the bills, a ratty apartment when she was on her own. I lived in 14 different homes in the same county before I left for college.
Did she come back? Yes. And that’s the hardest part of the whole story. Twenty-five years after she left, when my siblings and I had dealt with it in our own ways, and when I had my own happy family, my sister received a phone call notifying us that our mother was in a hospice about two hours away, dying from late stage lung cancer. She wanted to see us. She needed our help in making arrangements.
We were dumbstruck. We had suffered through all the emotions of having her leave, and over years we each grieved and mourned her loss. But we came to a certain peace and moved on. Then she reappeared in the most tragic circumstances, and it was like a ghost entered our life. We had mourned her loss, we had assumed she probably was dead, forgiven he r to the extent we could. Then suddenly here she was expecting us to be good children, to comfort her, to help her through her last days.
It was one of the most trying times of my life. I didn’t want to hate her, I didn’t want to slam the door in her face and make an old woman’s last days worse than they had to be. But I also felt it was so unfair for her to impose herself on us in these last days, to put the burden on us to be the good children who stand by mom and take care of her after denying us all those years.
Getting in the car to go see her took all my resolve. But I had decided that no matter how much she might deserve it, I couldn’t deny a dying woman her wish to see her son. I went and played the dutiful son, saying all the right things, telling her I forgave her, pretending that I was glad to see her again. But I wasn’t. The mother I remembered had left and died 25 years ago. This was a woman I didn’t know, just a woman I was trying to be nice to. I didn’t cry at her funeral.
How many people are better off for taking up with these people who have been asked to “take a hike”?
How many people are better off for taking up with someone who’s children’s lives are “infinitely improved” by their absence?
I agree with people’s sentiments about harshly judging people with little knowledge of their situation, but OTOH, how hard do you really need to stretch your charity here? Ther have been inciteful comments upthread by people who have been on the receiving side of this situation and by those who have met people like this.
Basically, the OP just needs to keep his eyes open in this situation, and consider well what he wants from this relationship.
You can accomplish all that by naming the step a legal guardian. Please correct me if I’m mistaken.
That’s a heartbreaking story. I can see why you feel the way you do.
However, those are the laws - for both him and her. You don’t get to pick and choose which ones to follow just because you disagree with them.
But I believe there have also been cases where the child has come back and successfully sued for back child support, even though the custodial parent never wanted it. Generally, when they see college tuition bills.
It’s a shitty thing to do, and probably reflects poorly on you as a person.
But if the kids are safe, well-provided for and loved by a real family, it’s probably not the absolute worst thing you could do.
My father probably wasn’t ready to be a parent, and he stopped being a part of my life early on. I had a loving, caring extended family and I don’t think I am much worse off for it. A clean break bests custody battles and head games.
Some of them - a ward doesn’t have the same inheritance rights as an adopted child and if I leave a trust fund to be shared by my grandchildren, my child’s adopted child will get a share while his ward does not. And my employer (or an organization I belong to) is free to restrict some benefits (like free tuition or scholarships) to children and not give them to wards. Additionally, becoming a legal guardian requires a court proceeding in some states, and that will require either the consent of the other parent or a finding that he or she is unfit. Courts often retain some supervision over those granted legal guardianship, but not over finalized adoptions. There are some states where the custodial parent can give temporary legal guardianship to a stepparent without the other parent’s consent or court hearings - but that doesn’t mean the stepparent will get custody if the custodial parent dies. Custody may still go the the other parent. Legal custody ,guardianship and adoption are all different and have different effects.
But my point was that the custodial parent and stepparent don’t decide they want the stepparent to adopt because they want to relieve NCP of the child support payments. And it doesn’t have to be that they want NCP and family out of the kids lives. It may be that the NCP agrees in order to get out of child support obligations, but that isn’t the stepparent’s motivation.
I certainly would have nothing to do with her in the future. Probably should be sterilized.
The only “positive” thing you said was that she was beautiful.
Dude, that isn’t enough. Trust me.
Remember, no matter how beautiful a woman is, there is someone somewhere, that is tired of her bullshit.
She abandoned TWO kids? That’s not normal. If given a choice between my spouse and my child, there IS no choice.
I have already explained this to my wife, in case it ever comes up. She will lose. 
My child is my responsibility, (and my wife’s, of course). I don’t get to just walk away from my responsibilities because I don’t love my wife any more, or my life sucks, or who knows what the reason is. My child is a part of me. My wife? She is the mother of my child. If necessary, I could replace my wife. Not that I want to, or anything, but there is a different level of connection and responsibility to me. I could never replace my child.
I don’t know… Maybe this woman’s kids are much better off without her in their lives. But if that’s the case, you have to find out why.
OP, my advice is to be very cautious about what you may be getting into. Your date could very well be a narcissistic sociopath, and while those types of people may be interesting to date, they generally don’t make happy long term mates. I speak from experience, having been married to a sociopath for 15 years.
I suspected there was a problem on our honeymoon. I tried to hold my newlywed wife’s hand at the Outer Banks, North Carolina, walking from our car to Publix Supermarket and she said, “Don’t do that, I don’t like it.” That was the last time I tried to hold her hand. The edict was clear: sex was permissible; intimacy was not.
I was further assured there was a problem when I saw my wife breast feed our first daughter. It reminded me of a robot breast feeding an iPhone. She had a look of disgust on her face and she demanded, “Get her off me!” It was bottles from that point on.
When my oldest daughter was ~8 yo, she asked me, “why does mom only say she loves me in front of her friends?”
~6 years ago, my wife abandoned my daughters and I (“I just need some time alone, but I’ll be back”) and never returned. At that point, I didn’t really want her to return, but I was worried about my daughters.
When my youngest daughter was 8 yo, I was concerned about her feelings dealing with a non-responsive, rarely seen mother, and asked her how she was coping. She said, “Don’t worry dad, I never had a mother and I don’t need one now.”
My oldest daughter had a tougher time when her mother made no effort at all to see or speak to her. It broke my heart hearing my daughter spend hours on the phone, saying things like, “how can you do this to me, mom, I’m your daughter?” Well, she eventually did toughen up and now, at age 14, treats her mother as cold as her mother treats her. Luckily, she is as sweet as ever to everyone else. She’s also intellectually gifted and will go far in life.
When I filed for divorce, my now ex told me, “you can have the kids, I’m taking the money.” And, that’s exactly what happened.
I have primary custody of the kids by decree of divorce, but in reality I have sole custody. She doesn’t even try to take them on her alternate weekends or once weekly out for dinner, even though she and her boyfriend moved right next door to us. She treats her 3 dogs better than her kids.
Sociopaths have no real empathy for others, but they thrive on appearing empathetic to their circle of friends. My ex incessantly brags online about her 3 rescue dogs, her rescue boyfriend (alcoholic who she snatched from Death’s scythe) and our 2 donor egg children (I’m the biological father; she gave birth, but thankfully didn’t contribute DNA). She even posts photos of the girls on Facebook at exotic locations, saying, “remember how much fun we had there, girls?” Then my girls tell me, “mom wasn’t even there that day, our nanny took those pictures.”
Sociopaths lie, all the time. They really, truly don’t care about anyone but themselves.
So, OP, I don’t know what your situation is. But, your stating that you’re dating someone who abandoned her kids at least dings my “sociopath” meter. Caveat emptor. Hopefully, your girl is not a sociopath. But, if she is, she won’t be your soul mate…unless you’re a sociopath, too.