Guardianship

[Wishing-and-Hoping]

I am reposting this massage that I had originally posted on another board. I am new here so I am still learning to get around!


My daughter (age 32, I'll call Susan) was diagnosed with BPD a few years ago. We have had suspicions of something being "off" for her entire life.

She has two children with different fathers. The oldest son ( I'll call Sam) is 10. His father has never been involved in his life. The younger son (I'll call Brian) lives with his father (I'll call Art) who is the custodial parent.

When Art and Susan split a year and a half ago, Susan and Sam moved in with her father (I'll call him Bart) and I. Brian (younger son) stayed in his home with his dad. After a few months, Susan began to ignore Sam and my husband and I were assuming full responsibility for his care including making breakfast, getting him to school and back, homework, etc. often, Susan would go days without seeing him. In Sams life, Susan had previously left Sam with us twice for 8 months and then for 1 year. Both times, she came back to get Sam and have him live with her again after she had met "the love of her life". We had no choice but to let him go with her.

Her last husband, Art, is a good man and father. He has always treated Sam as a son and even though he has no obligation to do so, he continues a relationship with Sam as his dad.

Susan has done some horrible things to both Art and Bart and I. Bart and I finally filed with the court for guardianship of Sam, which we received in January 2014. Because of Susan's behavior of keying her husbands car and putting sugar in another persons gas tank, she spent a week in jail in March. She lost her job, but unbelievably was hired in a better position at a different company.

Because she is making more money now, she is taking everyone to court to try to get her kids back. We have a hearing coming up in March because she has filed to have our guardianship terminated. Sam has come a long way in a year and a half. He has ADHD and has been seeing two counselors. He used to throw terrible tantrums but doesn't anymore.

We had a short hearing a few months ago to set a date and Susan was making all sorts of accusations that are not true. I am so worried that a judge who is not familiar with BPD will believe what she says and place Sam with her. We do have two other daughters that will testify on our behalf but I just don't know how far Susan will go.  

Does anyone have experience with the court system and people with BPD?  It would be the absolute worse thing for Sam to go back with her. Sorry about the length of this post!

[david]

You have guardianship now and that is a positive for Sam.

You need to document everything that has and is going on. Have a short paper with all the reasons you were given guardianship to begin with. Have another paper from that point forward showing why Sam needs to be with you. All the positives with Sam from that point on holds a lot of weight in court. Negative things his mom has done since guardianship would also be useful.

I document all communication with my ex by email only communication. That eliminates he said/she said in the court.

Kids need stability and it appears your daughter is unable to provide that. Make sure you can show the hows and whys.

Also have some visitation for mom. If you think supervised visitation is best then that is what I would ask the courts for. What is the situation with mom seeing Sam now ?

[Wishing-and-Hoping]

His Mom sees him now a few times a week more or less. The judge told her at the hearing that we are the guardians and she needed to stop texting and calling (she called 60 times in one night, unanswered). We have a good relationship with her soon to be ex. I watch his our other grandson before and after school and he picks him up at our house. He continues to have problems with our daughter. She will either not follow the court order concerning time she is to see her son or play games with drop off times or places. She calls the police whenever she thinks she is wronged on either her ex or us. We both have court papers so they can never do anything but it's frustrating and embarrassing to have the police at our home for no reason. When she is having problems with her ex, he contacts us and we know she is in what I call a manic state. We know from the past that when she doesn't get what she wants from her ex, she then tries to see our gs. When we know she is in this state of mind we don't let her see him. The first year, we had protection orders from her so the visits were supervised but now, the judge said its up to us. We try to set a schedule but we also let our gs decide if he wants to go. We do encourage him to see his Mom as appropriate. The last few times she has seen him, he has come back saying "My mom says I'm coming to live with her".  I asked how that made him feel. He said "Really bad, I don't want to leave". We explained to him (in terms we hoped he could understand) that we are working with the court to try our best to keep him with us. She also bought him an iPhone for Christmas even though we told her he was too young for a phone. She installed snapchat on it and an app called Life 360, so she could see where he is all the time. We of course deleted those and keep the phone so we can monitor its use. She texts him and tries to call him. He doesn't show much interest in the calls or messages though. It makes me so sad that our daughter can't even see that he is better off with us and that she cannot be the best caregiver.

[ForeverDad]

It takes new members here a long time to figure this out but courts don't generally care about a diagnosis unless maybe when murder is involved.  My custody evaluator, lawyer, magistrate, judge, GAL, son's various therapists, etc never tried to put a label to my ex's behaviors.  And they certainly didn't want me to "play doctor".  They went by the documented behaviors.  That's why it is good to journal or write in a log or diary.  Giving dates, locations, and other specifics will not be ignored as hearsay or 'he-said, she-said' like "he always... ." or "she always... ."

It's hard when the court and other professionals view both sides as feuding and sharing the blame.  Their default preference is to avoid viewing one parent as the loser and the other parent/guardian as the winner.  Fortunately you have a past history with the court and the court saw good reason to assign you as guardians.  Don't give that up.  Your GS's improvement, as can be documented by his counselors, is clear.

One comment about mother's time with her son.  Try to keep any visits relatively short.  Here's what happened in my case.  My ex got majority time in 30 MINUTES, leaving me with 22% time.  Over the next 8 YEARS I got custody and reduced her time to about 27-29% during the school year and 50% during summers, it was that hard to get changes.  My points:

(1) Your court too (hopefully in this case) will likely be reluctant to make big changes, not wanting to change "what works".  Encourage that reluctance.

(2) We always had confrontations and conflict, usually at exchanges.  So I wanted to object to the latest order, I wanted to lump her half-weeks together into alternating weeks during the summer so we would have fewer exchanges and fewer confrontations.  My lawyer nixed that, he pointedly asked, "After all these years you finally got majority time during the school year, do you want the court to think that longer visits with his mother is okay with you?"  So I didn't mess with the order.

My son is nearly a teenager, all these years he's rarely talked a long time with either parent, usually just a few minutes.  He's recently started to call his peers, other neighbors and schoolmates, the bane of online games and sites, but still not much with either me or his mother.

It sounds like she's established a history of conflictual behavior, every indication is that the court is willing to let you make the decisions about contact, keep it that way.  Understand that any peace offerings to her will be perceived as weakness - weak boundaries - and invite more entitled demands.  So don't be guilted into making concessions you're not comfortable with.  If it's a court decision or order, you have no choice but to obey.  If it's a settlement, stick to your boundaries, they will protect you and your grandsons.

[livednlearned]

Sam has come a long way in a year and a half. He has ADHD and has been seeing two counselors. He used to throw terrible tantrums but doesn't anymore.

This could be gold. Ask your L, but I think you can have the counselors write (what I think is called... .) a professional affadavit. Basically a professional opinion that the child has progressed and done well since being in therapy under your guardianship. It's cheaper than having them come to court to testify, but your L will have a better idea if this will be enough. And maybe written testimony from teachers about how he is doing well and responding well to structure, consistency, stability, and routine since being under your guardianship. Family members don't carry as much weight as third-party professionals from what I can tell.

You make a very compelling documented case for how well Sam has been doing since being with you. And then you propose a very reasonable solution, like "we propose to continue guardianship because Sam is doing so well, as we just demonstrated for your honor, and ask that his mother participate in anger management and parenting classes for a year, maintain stable employment and living circumstances during that time, and in the meantime have supervised visitation. Upon completion of those classes, Ms. BPD can petition the court to modify the terms of the guardianship." That's similar to what happened in my case. I went into a hearing asking for full custody and no visitation. The judge said he couldn't prevent visitation, that was too much. But my L proposed that he could not write any more abusive messages to me or S13, and asked that N/BPDx get substance abuse treatment, take anger management classes, and get a psych evaluation. N/BPDx did none of that. When he violated the abusive message thing, we went back to court and asked to terminate visitation and the judge granted it.

Supervised visitation can be set up in any number of ways, so it doesn't necessarily mean that visitation will occur in your home, or with you.

Anyway, going in with a reasonable solution makes the judge's job easier. If you do that, the court recognizes that you're the stable party, can problem-solve and do grown up things that your BPD daughter struggles to do.

It's probably different depending on where you live, but since you already have guardianship, the judge is going to understand that something serious is going on with BPD mom. Not to mention dad #2 is the custodial parent of Sam's half brother, so if you can get information on how that went down, that's good information to have too. Did they start off with 50/50? 

Your daughter is going to have to prove that she can turn things around, and if you have documented evidence that Sam is doing great, and BPD has only her story, the judge will (in all likelihood) go with the status quo. Your job is to make your D show that she can rise to your standard of care for Sam, and that she has x period of time to demonstrate she can do it. The burden is on her, in other words. Unfortunately, given the nature of BPD, she is not going to comply. Fortunately, that means Sam gets to grow up under your guardianship.

[Wishing-and-Hoping]

We do already have letters from both counselors. One of them is the director of a prominent children's behavior clinic in our area. We also got him in an IEP in his school,so the next three years he will get extra help due to his ADHD. He is involved with scouts ( his step dad helps with events like pinewood derby), has a best friend that we have over often, takes classes in subjects of interest to him. We have lived in the same house for 15 years, our daughter has moved 5 times in the last year.  We think we're in a good position for getting her request for termination of our guardianship denied, but I just want to make sure we're thinking of everything. We are in the process of hiring an attorney that specializes in family law. Our daughter has an attorney that is very aggressive. At the hearing, she was turning my words around and kept misstating what I said. We don't have much experience with the law so we're not sure what to expect.  Everyone's suggestions were very helpful, Thanks!

[david]

My attorney told me when we finally do go to court that ex's attorney will try to twist things around and also bring things up that do not pertain to custody. He told me he would be objecting a lot when this happens. Eventually the judge will get tired of the other attorney and put a stop to it or the attorney will stop bringing up things that do not matter. That is your attorneys job. Let your attorney know your position on things and that is his job to defend. Some attorneys like to get along. That may or not be what you need. Don't have enough info. You need to figure that out.

[livednlearned]

One thing I learned is that there are family law attorneys who are expert in what they do, and very good at it. But not all of them are good trial lawyers. Meaning, they may not have as much experience in the courtroom, litigating in front of a judge. I don't know how you can find that out about your own L, but maybe you can ask your L if it's ok to tag along so you know what to expect in court. And then see if you get a sense how he or she does in front of a judge.

It might not give you enough information, but I learned a lot just sitting in courtrooms these past 4 years. Over those 4 years, I learned that law students often come and sit in the back to observe. My judge liked to call them up to the front and ask them, "Who is the most important person in the court room?" They always answered "you" or "the client" and the judge loved to correct them and say, "the clerk." And the second most important person? The bailiff. 

After 4 years watching him do that to law students over and over, and me being there so often the security detail downstairs thought I was a lawyer, I was so tempted to feed the answers to the students and help them pass the exam