Mornea, the judge sealed the DCYF report and wouldn’t release it to my lawyer without her there–then she just conveniently wasn’t there for him to read it. I certainly don’t think that was intentional on her part, but it was/is very frustrating for me. All I know is that the judge told my lawyer the report says the allegations were unfounded and also told him that the restraining order wouldn’t be continued in light of that. Everytime he’s gone to court to read it, either she wasn’t there or was too busy for him to wait a couple of hours for her to unseal the report for him. He decided it would be best if we dropped the order in time for the boys to spend a little time with their dad–it makes me look cooperative. It’s been about a month since they’d seen him. It wasn’t supposed to last this long, but when we went to court earlier in the month, my ex’s lawyer was out sick that day and we had to continue the restraining order to another date. I suspect the allegations were termed unfounded because my son had no marks on him and my ex denied the incident outright.
No therapy has been ordered, but once things calm down a bit and we get back into the school routine, I’m going to look into it for my son. I, too, am worried about the effects of his father denying what happened to my son.
When I spoke with my ex to arrange this weekend’s visit, he was fine. It was almost as if nothing had happened. This is unusual. I was expecting some kind of attitude from him because that’s how he usually gets when I’ve questioned his parenting. But he was civil and pleasant. I kept our contact short and just made the necessary arrangements. Unfortunately, with the restraining order dropped, this means our divorce final stands–and that states that the boys have time with their dad. It’s quite a liberal agreement with no times or days spelled out. If I tried to restrict his access, I would have been in contempt of the order and my lawyer didn’t think it was a good idea to do that. We’ll be going back to court (hopefully soon!) to work out a more detailed visitation schedule.
My son is seven, but he’s a young seven if you know what I mean. He really can’t remember on his own to monitor his bowel movements–which is probably part of why he becomes impacted. The general course of treatment for encopresis is to clear out the impaction, and keep him on a regular course of a mild laxative for about a month to give his intestines time to shrink back to their pre-impaction size. When he’s all stretched out inside, his body isn’t able to send him the signals that he needs to use the toilet–this is how the accidents occur and also why they aren’t his fault. He dosen’t even know he’s going to have an accident until it’s already happened. But this past month, it’s been very easy to monitor him because he’s been with me all the time. So we put a chart on the fridge and he puts a star up every time he’s had a bowel movement. When the chart’s full and he’s been accident-free, he gets a special treat of his choosing. This has kept him motivated to go every day, but we still remind him throughout the day. Given that this needs daily monitoring, I have to trust my ex to follow through on the few days that my son is with him. And when he picked up the boys for the weekend, he did ask about medicine for Georgie, so we did discuss that and I just hope he kept to the schedule.
And plain_jane, I’ve been documenting everything for over a year now. This was the first (and hopefully the last!) violent incident, but I’ve been keeping track of the times he tried to talk the boys out of spending time with me or going on vacation with me–stuff like that.
Thank you everyone for all your support! It’s really helped me through this awful month. Now I’m just hoping that it’s all going to get better!
