This is new. She started it after her arrest for assaulting me. She was due to leave town and I had sent the kids with a friend to an undisclosed location to keep them away from the violence, plus she wanted to trianglulate the kids. So she raged because I was keeping her kids away from her but they had just returned from a week long trip over xmas. She keeps repeating in text email and voicemail that the kids need to hear her side of the story not just my lies.
The DV assault is what changes everything -- you have some leeway there because of it. Does your L think you should be trying to create regular communication between the kids and their mom?
I moved to an undisclosed location, too, when things boiled over. My L told me to put S12 in contact with his dad immediately (we left on a Friday, and they had their first conversation on Sunday evening). That turned out to be very important advice because N/BPDx repeatedly accused me of kidnapping S12. Almost every hearing, he brought it up. My L would just counter by saying, "The minor child spoke to you within 48 hours of moving out with his mother, who contacted you within 5 hours to tell you that S12 was safe and she was filing for divorce."
Your case is very different than mine, but just wanted to share what my L told me in case it's useful to you. I would imagine that your judge is going to be very interested in the status quo, if you can document that. Since the kids have their own devices and your ex can communicate with them at any time, but they choose not to, is there a way you can document that? In court, your testimony about what your children said or did will not be allowed. You will need communication between you and your ex to make information explicit. For example, you would need to include emails as exhibits that you wrote, "You has not lived with the family for 6 years and only came home every 3 or 4 weeks, and regular communication was not a priority. The kids have a lot of access to their phones and Internet, and you can contact them at any time, and if you want to arrange a specific time for them to be on, you can let them know, and they will respond if they are available."
Your ex is likely to accuse you of parental alienation -- in my case, it was a relief to have so much documentation in which I attempted to support the communication, and N/BPDx routinely sabotaged it. Again, not sure if that will count for much since there is DV, but there are also a lot of members here who experience blatant bias towards mothers in custody disputes, and even in cases that seem very straightforward about who is disordered and abusive, unbelievably unfair rulings do happen.
