I’m surprised at some of the harshness towards Jim. Try this on:
You’re in your early 20’s. You are in love with a woman who is married to somebody else. She’s “a little bit pregnant”, with what may be your child.
One day she comes to your door, says she’s going back to her husband. She asks you not to contact her further. She says as far as anybody will ever know, the child will be her husband’s.
You’re hurt, heartbroken, and not at all experienced in the ways of the world. Do you stalk her? Take legal action? Make everybody miserable? Ruin her chance for reconciliation with her husband?
I, at 20, and not knowing what I know now, would have walked away from the whole mess. Can anyone here honestly say they would have done otherwise under the circumstances?
Actually, no, that’s not how back child support works. According to our lawyer and the judge who ordered my husband’s ex to pay us back child support, it is considered a re-payment of monies that the custodial parent already spent on the child that should have come from the non-custodial parent. So that entire $21,000 would belong to the mother, not the child.
(Well, ok, that’s how it works in Texas. But I sort of doubt it’s different in Tennessee.)
Which makes me think he oughtn’t pay a cent of it, because it was her own fault that she wasn’t getting child support in the first place.
It’s my understanding that no waiver or contract to absolve a parent of responsibility can be enforced.
It’s called terminating parental rights and unless I’m totally mistaken, that’s exactly what it does. My mom had my dad’s rights terminated when I was a kid. On one hand, it completely released him from child support, but the reason she did it is so he couldn’t get custody of me if she died before I reached adulthood.
Per what stretch and others have mentioned it sounds like the legal strength of the demand for years if back child support is questionable at best, given that the child was born with another father listed on the birth certificate, and was thus established as the child of that marriage.
Based on the facts you have related, if Jim’s atty is telling him to settle with all due speed, either the atty is incompetent and out of his area of expertise (possible), or there is much more to this lost/found child story than you have been told by Jim.
What about Jim’s new kid? If all his money is being sucked up in support for the first kid, then who supports the second kid? To coin a phrase, would the courts take bread from the mouth of kid 1, to feed kid 2?
If she was married to this other guy, then he is legally the father of said child. Jim could not assert his parental rights back then because he had none. IIRC, she has to sue her ex for child support.
Which she may already have done. Personally, this sounds like a shakedown. She’s expecting Jim to follow his conscience and his lawyer to ignore his job.
Jim should fight this in court. He should win.
Afterwards, he can make any arrangements for the child he deems appropriate.
I agree that the situation kinda sucks, I’m just posting to whine about all the lay people who seem to think that stuff they heard + their own sense of right and wrong gives them superior legal insight into the situation. Whatever.
IANAL either, but here in AK, there’s a time limit on how far you can go back if the child was otherwise taken care of. I think it’s around 3-6 years. I can’t quite remember.
I can’t imagine that they could just arbitrarily charge someone with coughing up 20,000 some odd dollars, (and expect to get it! you can’t get blood out of a turnip for pete’s sake), and then nearly 700 a month after that. Holy cow!!!
Some additional info: Jim is now 41 years old…this all happened when he was 30. The woman had been separated from her husband for 4 months before Jim ever even met her. When he did meet her she told him she was separated and going through a divorce with her husband. They started dating. They dated 6 months and then she got pregnant. This entire time she was meeting with a lawyer, working out her divorce, etc. as far as Jim knew. He now wonders if she was still bouncing back from him to the husband all along.
Jim totally takes responsibility for this being his child and wanting to pay support. He would have paid support from Day One but, remember, the woman moved shortly after telling Jim she was going back to her husband and to never contact them again. He has no problem paying the current child support…it’s the back amount that gets him because this woman has made it appear that she has tried to contact him for the last 10 years and that just isn’t true.
He has been at the same job for 18 years. He lived at the same address the woman knew up until 5 years ago when he met Sarah. His family all still live in the same area and have the same phone numbers, etc. If she had wanted to contact him, she could have, easily.
I think their lawyer is a moron but they are concerned that if they caught the judge in a bad mood or this woman turned on the tears that they would have gotten a worse deal. I think they should have fought it out in court.
I also think Jim should push establishing a relationship with his daughter. She has had a rough life and she probably needs a good influence right now.
I’m not saying Jim is a saint but he is a good guy and I feel for him having to pay for his actions 10 years ago at this point given his situation with Sarah and the new baby on the way.
I think the daughter and Sarah are the true losers in this. The daughter has missed out on having her real dad in her life. Sarah was an innocent bystander who has gotten invovled in this through being married to Jim. Thank God he told her all this from the get-go because I don’t think she could have handled hearing all this fresh right now. She has always known he possibly had a child out there.
The paternity test was not given until after they got the letter from the attorney recently. Jim always assumed the child was his but he thought there may have been a chance the woman was with him and her husband and the child could have been the husbands.
Thank you for your opinions and comments. It is just a yucky situation all around.
I hate to sound harsh, but Jim did know for ten years that he had a child with this woman. In all that time, he apparantly made no effort to find out how the child was, if there were anything she needed, if she were happy, healthy, and safe. That all seems very irresponsible to me. He could have had his parental rights terminated when the child was born easily enough, but he didn’t for whatever reason. Maybe it was too much of a hassle, perhaps he didn’t want to upset the mother, he could have been worried about the husband finding out, or he could have had any of a myriad of other reasons. At any rate, he has been rather irresponsible up to this point. Yes, the woman should have contacted him sooner, but similarly, he should definitely have contacted her.
Actually, Amberlei, he did try to contact her for several weeks, and was rebuffed.
The mother asked to be left alone. If he had pressed it, I bet that people in this thread would be screaming “Stalker!”.For all he knew, his daughter was being raised in a nuclear family, since he obviously didn’t know about the divorces. He wanted to be respectful of the mother’s wishes around her child-rearing. I think that’s commendable, and it’s something that women have been trying to get men to do since Women’s Lib.
Jim never even knew if this child was a boy or a girl. The woman literally told him one week to butt out and she moved a month later. During these weeks he contacted her and tried to talk to her with her adamantly refusing to bend her position. She was going back to the husband. If Jim wanted to do what was right he would leave them alone.
Jim assumed things with the husband worked out and that he had done what was best.
And, Jim grew up without a father…has no idea who his father is so he can relate as far as that aspect goes.
Originally posted by GaWd
Damn, you ain’t seen nothing! I see this stuff* every single day.
Sam
*- and worse-much, much worse
I really can’t tell, but let’s just say that Men are assholes and women are pure eeeeevil.
Obviously it’s not always like this, but our family law practice sees a fair amount of trickery, manipulation, and stuff like the OP to leave me speechless half the time.
The question in question: If the woman was married at the time of the birth, is the woman’s husband legally considered the father? If so, would Jim have ANY parental rights and/or obligations?
Hypothetically, of course…
BTW, what state was the birth in?
For all you know, she’s got the guy pegged as a sap she can take advantage of.
Hell–that may be why there was no marriage or contact in the first place–she didn’t want the guy to know she was knocking boots with every dude in town!
I doubt that any of the lawyers on the board would feel safe offering an opinion on something this touchy. I’m certainly not a family law expert, and this is something that varies widely from state to state, and may be somewhat inconsistently interpreted within a state. But people (fathers) do sometimes get seriously screwed in situations like this, because the state puts the best interests of the child first, even if it seems grossly unjust to the father. (Mothers more rarely get shafted in such cases, only because they’re far less likely to not even know about children that they have - that birth process tends to stick in your memory).
It’s worth checking out the qualifications of the lawyer Jim consulted, and maybe getting a second or third opinion. But at the end of the day, it wouldn’t really surprise me if his advice was dead-on, even though it sucks big time for Jim.
I went through something somewhat similar. I would recommend that Jim make an effort to communicate with his daughter. If he has her email that would be perfect. She probably won’t make much effort since she really doesn’t know him. He doesn’t need to push it - “Hi, how ya doing”. Something like that just to get communications started.
If she hasn’t been poisoned by her mother (and Jim will know whether she has pretty quickly) I would bet that a relationship will develop that they will both cherish.
If that happens the money will mean nothing.
The best thing in my life is my daughter and I pay for her housing and schooling - she lives in Baltimore so public school is out of the question- although I have no legal obligation. It’s a bit of a burden but compared to not having contact with my daughter it’s not even a consideration.
If Jim and his wife develop a relationship with the girl they’ll end up thinking of the money as just another household expense.
I also don’t think Jim did anything wrong. He tried at the time. You gotta do what you think is best for the child and the way the woman presented it at the time that’s what he did.
I do think the lawyer caved pretty quickly.