BPDFamily.com

We are in the midst of the stress of preparing for a guardianship hearing for SS21, who has special needs. DH's ex (uBPD) filed for sole guardianship of SS21 and so the hearing is to determine if she will be sole, if DH and his ex will continue to be joint, or if DH will be sole. Here's a post about that https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?topic=288949.0 . The hearing is next week.

Wading through the huge volume of documents preparing for the hearing has been almost a full-time job. I have been helping DH and his L by going through the documents to try to identify holes/misrepresentations in uBPD's stories. Years ago, DH said he would no longer take phone calls from his ex, which resulted in most of her communication being through email. There is good in that, including reduced drama and having records of what she said. The bad side is that she uses her emails as "facts": in other words, I said it in an email, therefore that is what happened. In fact, she has included a number of emails she sent to her past L in her filing, which has provided some interesting reading as we get to see how she positions things she has done with her own L. Not sure why her current L let her do this but can only imagine uBPD demanded it.

Going through all of the documentation, I finally had to do up a timeline to help us keep straight on what was happening when. We've had some pretty crazy stretches of time where lots was happening, and just relying on uBPD's emails isn't the best for knowing the whole story.

Regardless of who is the guardian going forward, I think we need a better system to track what was happening when. For example, it would have helped us now to know what DH was doing at certain times because if he didn't do something by email, we don't have a record. So if he called a support agency, we aren't sure unless it was also mentioned in an email. We don't expect this one hearing to be the end of things, unfortunately. If DH is sole guardian, she can file her concerns at any time. If she is sole, we expect her to exploit her position (e.g. block SS21 from seeing us, stopping him from finding work, etc.) If they continue as joint, the same old problems are likely.

Does anyone have ideas of how to keep some type of short summary of events that are happening so we could refer to it later? I don't see this as something we would use in court down the road (although if there is something that would work for that, I'd be interested in that too!) More just some way for us to track events and DH's side of things. Ideas?

Hi NG,

This might not be exactly what you guys are looking for, but one thing that's helped me remember what happened on some random day in the past is receipts. I'm a receipt keeper (kinda OCD... .) and when I need to jog my memory about something weeks or months+ ago, I'll sometimes check out the day's receipts. "Oh, that's the day we bought pool toys & went to the lake" or whatever. Online bank statements could help that way too.

In terms of then having a record... .Excel spreadsheet? Gigantic Word document? Doing them both. Excel or some other grid style program might help you sort docs/events a bit... .Ok, here are the events with no email correlation, here are the phone calls mentioned in an email, here are when the official letters came in the mail... .

Anyway, a lot of this might be old hat to you, so sorry if it's repetitive. And you're right, it's totally another full time job -- I hear you there!

Hi NorthernGirl,

I used Google calendar to keep my events organized. I had a special "label" called "Legal" and I entered items of significance, like hearings, appointments, high-value emails (it used to be you could link emails to events in Google calendar, though I can no longer figure out how I did that), voice mails, school interactions, etc.

And then, when I wanted to see it in a timeline, I printed it out in agenda form. And voila, it was all there in chronological order.

It's pretty easy to add things to Google calendar, but it also smunches everything down, so if you have a lot of events in one day, or a long entry, it's not that easy to keep track in calendar view. The magic is all in the agenda view  :)