Custody Battle and ex has a serious PD (likely BPD with secondary psychopathy)

[VIDEO: "What is parental alienation?"]

 I’m worried about my upcoming custody case with my ex. I’m pretty sure she has a severe cluster B personality disorder with secondary psychopathy and I am worried that, as a man, it won’t matter how well I can prove that it has resulted in her being dangerous/negligent with our son. This is a long one, but here is the full story -
The first year was frustrating but rewarding. Our child was beautiful. She and I kept our amazing sexual chemistry and still shared many of the same interests. My work was picking up and I was making more and more money. Still, there were hiccups. I attributed it to a prolonged post-partem depression, but she’d sleep through most of the day, would ignore our child, and when she would drink, she’d act out in concerning ways, like running down the street at night and hurting herself. Still, I was determined to make it work.
As his second birthday came around, her issues started to become more pronounced. With our son’s increased mobility, her sleeping in until noon was becoming a problem. I found him with a burn on his hand from a space heater while she slept through his morning. On more occasions than I can count, I’d come downstairs to find him sitting in the living room, in silence, looking lost and desperate for attention with the “Are you still there?” message on the screen from Netflix or whichever other streaming service she’d left on while she slept the day away. I’d come down to see him trying to wake her and literally hear her say, “Stop!” and shake him off. I started trying hard to fill in the gaps early in the morning so she wouldn’t feel so overwhelmed when she woke up. I started waking up at 5am every day to do all the laundry and all the dishes, let her dogs out, change our son, feed him, and make her breakfast to gently wake her with before going to my office to work, but none of it made a difference. I made sure to come down between my conference calls to check in on them and gently wake her again, knowing that she would fall asleep once I’d left, but rarely did she stay awake after a third or even fourth attempt. I made lunch every day and would block off time in my calendar for her to get out of the house and go to the coffee shop, to meet up with friends, or spend time at the beach, but all to no avail. It eventually became a serious issue in our relationship as it was becoming apparent that he was speech-delayed towards the end of age two and I’d continue to find him in dangerous situations while she slept. On one occasion, I found him playing with broken fluorescent lightbulbs he’d broken after he’d climbed behind the dryer and washer. On another, I called off a meeting with a customer as I’d heard him wailing in what sounded like pain for more than two minutes and as I ran down the stairs, I found him in a pile of dog feces with a broken plate spread throughout it and cuts on his legs and feet while she slept ten feet away. I started getting angry at this point and begging her to help me understand how and why she could let this happen when she knows how important it is that he have engagement in his life, that she wanted this life, and I was doing everything I possibly could to provide for them both while giving every spare minute I had to giving her free time and to lighten her load.
As year three came around, everything just felt terrible. Nothing was changing. There was nothing I could do to get her to care more about our son or our life than whatever it was she felt compelled to do. She had started drinking much more heavily and had started going out three or four nights per week while leaving me home alone with our son. She’d started smashing things in the house when we’d argue and accusing me of cheating on her when I had not. I took her to Greece on a business trip and made sure to have several extra days while we were there to explore and have fun, but as soon as we got back, she jumped right back into being her same old self.  She'd now started smashing things in fits of rage and screaming at the top of her lungs on a regular basis before becoming depressed and saying how much she hated herself but as far as her being completely checked out of our family, that never changed.
I had started drinking at night when left home alone with our son and on one business trip, while drinking in my hotel room, I sent something gross to someone I used to know about their boob job they posted on social media. My girlfriend saw it and that was all she needed to let loose for what has now seems will be forever, despite it only really having been a little over a year since we’ve broken up. I owned up to it, let her look through my phone to see that it wasn’t a regular thing that I was doing, acknowledged how it had hurt her, etc… It didn’t matter… She immediately went to someone who I used to date and slept with her in front of that girls’ boyfriend, putting on a show for him. When I told her that it would be alright and we can work through it, she came home and felt terrible about herself. I told her, “We aren’t what we do once or twice but what we repeatedly do. I love our family and I love you but I feel like we talk about the same things over and over again and it is making me miserable that you can’t seem to invest any of yourself into helping me to raise our son and build our life together. What I sent when drunk was gross and what you chose to do in response was terrible, but I love our family and we have a bright future if we work together and get therapy and focus on what is important.”
One thing I’d failed to mention is that over the previous years, I could never count on her to make a car payment, schedule our son’s doctors appointments, or run an errand. Nothing ever got done unless I did it, and during this third year, it picked up to a terrible pace. Despite letting her animals out and feeding them regularly, if I was out of town and came home (I was only gone maybe four days out of each month), there would be old piles of dog poop that she never bothered to pick up. Every dish in the house would be dirty, etc… She’d started going out even more frequently and now with other men. She’d bring them home with her at 4am and wake our son and me up with loud music and more drinking. We’d agreed to try and limit having people over after 2am and for her to be home by 4am so I didn’t stay up worrying or wake up to our son crying due to the noise but on the very night that we agreed to it, she started messaging me crazy things in broken English. At around 4am, not wanting to start a fight, I just told her, “I’m not sure what is going on but it sounds like you are with people we know… just be safe” and I went back to sleep. I woke at 5am, as usual, and she wasn’t there. Checking outside, I saw that our van was in the driveway but it was turned on. Looking inside, I saw her asleep in the driver’s seat. I knocked on the window repeatedly, but she could only barely lift her head. I went inside, got the spare key, and unlocked the door and after turning the vehicle off, carried her inside. Once inside, I realized she was so intoxicated that she couldn’t speak. I ended up calling off of work to watch her and our son as she remained too intoxicated to get up until noon that day.
These sorts of things continued happening. Our son was getting even less attention. When she was awake, she’d be out in the garden, leaving him to watch television alone all day while I worked, so I was making a greater attempt than ever to break my meetings into chunks so I could spend every minute in between with him. It only took a few more weeks before the next big blowup happened. Being suspicious of her constantly being out with other men while I was home with our kid, I (wrongly) went through her phone and found a message from a local bartender that had a message from her saying, “omg, I’m so sorry. I was so drunk, I don’t even remember last night”. He replied, “It’s no big deal, we were just having fun.” Reading into this, I confronted her about it, and at 1:30am, she left to go back out and drink some more. I messaged her asking what she was doing while, yet again, I was home alone with our kid. She responded, “At someone’s house you don’t know, ”. I warned her that I was not going to take this anymore, and a few hours later she came home and said she was leaving and taking our son. She told me that she was high on acid and I could smell the liquor on her and I told her there was no way I was going to allow that. She dove at me, cutting up my arms, biting me, and then just began smacking me repeatedly in the face. I’ve never struck a woman and wasn’t about to start with the mother of my child, so I just stood there and took it and after about a dozen of those, she tried to grab our son again and walk out the door. I followed her out telling her I’d have to call the cops when the postwoman who works at the post office next door was pulling into work. It is a small island and everyone knows each other so she tried to intervene. Hearing all that had just happened, she advised my ex that she would definitely be found in the wrong if the police were called due to her assaulting me and trying to endanger our son. With that, my ex drove off and eventually her father came to pick her up from the island and take her back down to Columbus.
I let it sit for a while until we talked again and told her that she clearly had some serious issues and I wanted her to get some help. I got her a therapist and scheduled an appointment with her general practitioner because she said she couldn’t do it. Her GP prescribed her some medications and eventually, she wanted to move back home with us to work on things. Upon getting back, it didn’t take long for her to get back to staying out drinking constantly. She would drink on her medications that she was told not to drink on. She would forget to take them in general, and so I started setting the timers on my phone to remind me to remind her. Through this, I’d find her cutting herself in the bathroom and before long, she was back to smashing things in fits of rage and at one point, she ran into something with our van while drunk. She’d stopped eating and was losing lots of weight. She’d ask to go through my phone all of the time, and I’d let her, only for her to ask again the next night, and the night after. Immediately after doing so, she’d usually go back out to drink some more so she could sleep through most of the next day before going outside as soon as she woke up to work on her plants while I worked and stayed with our son.
About two weeks after moving back in, she kept me up all night asking me if I’d been sleeping with someone while she was gone. I told her no (which was true) but it didn’t stop her from going down a list of people she thought I might have been with -
1.) An older woman who I’d known growing up (a friend of my parents and grandfather) with kids who were around our age. I had never spent time with this woman as an adult, so I am not sure why she was a suspect.
2.) My ex had gone through the Facebook page of the small island we lived on, found a stranger who had visited the island the year prior, went through their friends list, and found a new stranger (who we’d also never met) who she thought was my type who lived 200 miles away and questioned me about sleeping with her.
3.) The sister of a woman with another family on the island who would occasionally visit the island. She was sure I must have been sleeping with this woman because I couldn’t remember her name, which meant that it must be true because “it was a trick” to throw her off my trail by pretending I didn’t’ know her…
For the rest of the night (several hours) she’d hug my arm and speak in a soft and gentle voice (picture an NPR radio host mixed with someone talking to a scared puppy) -
“It’s ok, you can just tell me. Tell me who it is.”
“I know you just want to tell me, so why don’t you do it? It isn’t a big deal. Just tell me.”
(after I’d get frustrated and tell her we’d been at this for an hour or more, and I’d been alone with our son for weeks and not having strange women into our home while I did) – “OH! So you did? Oh, well just tell me then!”
“Well, the internet says that if somebody gets defensive, it means that they did it, so just tell me already, haha. It isn’t a big deal or anything.”
It reached a point where I’d seriously thought she’d lost her mind because no matter what I’d say, she would just return to the same question and go back through her list of suspects (old woman, stranger neither of us had ever met, family member of a family friend, etc…)
Finally, I called her mom (who is a nurse at a state prison) and told her that I thought something was seriously wrong and we needed to get her help. Up until this point, my ex had actually asked me to help her get in to see a real psychiatrist, but when I’d call her GP, they’d just refer us to therapists and were horrible about getting back. I was convinced that her mixing of medications and street drugs and alcohol had permanently damaged something and her losing weight, cutting herself, and now this was too much.
As I sat with her through the night and she continued to question me. She did ask me something that I felt was sincere -
“I can tell that there is something wrong. I think you’d feel better if you told me how you feel.”
And so I did -
“You have made our lives a living hell. There is always something wrong. You always think you have cancer or that I’m cheating or you are wrecking our car or trying to drive off in the night with our son. You never can give him even the bare minimum while I give absolutely everything in me to give you everything you need. You wanted to be a graphic designer so I bought you a $2000 laptop that you never use. You wanted a better phone and to start taking photographs so I bought you a $1200 flagship phone and you just use it to play games while our kid sits by himself, behind on his speech. You leave me here with him while I give and give and now you are accusing me of something in the most dehumanizing and undignified way, pretending I’m a search engine that isn’t giving you the page you want, rewording and asking the same thing again and again. I’ve been miserable here alone without you trying to care for our kid and as soon as you get back, you throw everything into turmoil all over again. I can’t live like this and I’m starting to hate you.”
Her response? -
“Well, I think you are just deflecting now, so why don’t you tell me who you slept with?”

[demosthenes2010]

 I’m worried about my upcoming custody case with my ex. I’m pretty sure she has a severe cluster B personality disorder with secondary psychopathy and I am worried that, as a man, it won’t matter how well I can prove that it has resulted in her being dangerous/negligent with our son. This is a long one, but here is the full story -
The first year was frustrating but rewarding. Our child was beautiful. She and I kept our amazing sexual chemistry and still shared many of the same interests. My work was picking up and I was making more and more money. Still, there were hiccups. I attributed it to a prolonged post-partem depression, but she’d sleep through most of the day, would ignore our child, and when she would drink, she’d act out in concerning ways, like running down the street at night and hurting herself. Still, I was determined to make it work.
As his second birthday came around, her issues started to become more pronounced. With our son’s increased mobility, her sleeping in until noon was becoming a problem. I found him with a burn on his hand from a space heater while she slept through his morning. On more occasions than I can count, I’d come downstairs to find him sitting in the living room, in silence, looking lost and desperate for attention with the “Are you still there?” message on the screen from Netflix or whichever other streaming service she’d left on while she slept the day away. I’d come down to see him trying to wake her and literally hear her say, “Stop!” and shake him off. I started trying hard to fill in the gaps early in the morning so she wouldn’t feel so overwhelmed when she woke up. I started waking up at 5am every day to do all the laundry and all the dishes, let her dogs out, change our son, feed him, and make her breakfast to gently wake her with before going to my office to work, but none of it made a difference. I made sure to come down between my conference calls to check in on them and gently wake her again, knowing that she would fall asleep once I’d left, but rarely did she stay awake after a third or even fourth attempt. I made lunch every day and would block off time in my calendar for her to get out of the house and go to the coffee shop, to meet up with friends, or spend time at the beach, but all to no avail. It eventually became a serious issue in our relationship as it was becoming apparent that he was speech-delayed towards the end of age two and I’d continue to find him in dangerous situations while she slept. On one occasion, I found him playing with broken fluorescent lightbulbs he’d broken after he’d climbed behind the dryer and washer. On another, I called off a meeting with a customer as I’d heard him wailing in what sounded like pain for more than two minutes and as I ran down the stairs, I found him in a pile of dog feces with a broken plate spread throughout it and cuts on his legs and feet while she slept ten feet away. I started getting angry at this point and begging her to help me understand how and why she could let this happen when she knows how important it is that he have engagement in his life, that she wanted this life, and I was doing everything I possibly could to provide for them both while giving every spare minute I had to giving her free time and to lighten her load.
As year three came around, everything just felt terrible. Nothing was changing. There was nothing I could do to get her to care more about our son or our life than whatever it was she felt compelled to do. She had started drinking much more heavily and had started going out three or four nights per week while leaving me home alone with our son. She’d started smashing things in the house when we’d argue and accusing me of cheating on her when I had not. I took her to Greece on a business trip and made sure to have several extra days while we were there to explore and have fun, but as soon as we got back, she jumped right back into being her same old self.  She'd now started smashing things in fits of rage and screaming at the top of her lungs on a regular basis before becoming depressed and saying how much she hated herself but as far as her being completely checked out of our family, that never changed.
I had started drinking at night when left home alone with our son and on one business trip, while drinking in my hotel room, I sent something gross to someone I used to know about their boob job they posted on social media. My girlfriend saw it and that was all she needed to let loose for what has now seems will be forever, despite it only really having been a little over a year since we’ve broken up. I owned up to it, let her look through my phone to see that it wasn’t a regular thing that I was doing, acknowledged how it had hurt her, etc… It didn’t matter… She immediately went to someone who I used to date and slept with her in front of that girls’ boyfriend, putting on a show for him. When I told her that it would be alright and we can work through it, she came home and felt terrible about herself. I told her, “We aren’t what we do once or twice but what we repeatedly do. I love our family and I love you but I feel like we talk about the same things over and over again and it is making me miserable that you can’t seem to invest any of yourself into helping me to raise our son and build our life together. What I sent when drunk was gross and what you chose to do in response was terrible, but I love our family and we have a bright future if we work together and get therapy and focus on what is important.”
One thing I’d failed to mention is that over the previous years, I could never count on her to make a car payment, schedule our son’s doctors appointments, or run an errand. Nothing ever got done unless I did it, and during this third year, it picked up to a terrible pace. Despite letting her animals out and feeding them regularly, if I was out of town and came home (I was only gone maybe four days out of each month), there would be old piles of dog poop that she never bothered to pick up. Every dish in the house would be dirty, etc… She’d started going out even more frequently and now with other men. She’d bring them home with her at 4am and wake our son and me up with loud music and more drinking. We’d agreed to try and limit having people over after 2am and for her to be home by 4am so I didn’t stay up worrying or wake up to our son crying due to the noise but on the very night that we agreed to it, she started messaging me crazy things in broken English. At around 4am, not wanting to start a fight, I just told her, “I’m not sure what is going on but it sounds like you are with people we know… just be safe” and I went back to sleep. I woke at 5am, as usual, and she wasn’t there. Checking outside, I saw that our van was in the driveway but it was turned on. Looking inside, I saw her asleep in the driver’s seat. I knocked on the window repeatedly, but she could only barely lift her head. I went inside, got the spare key, and unlocked the door and after turning the vehicle off, carried her inside. Once inside, I realized she was so intoxicated that she couldn’t speak. I ended up calling off of work to watch her and our son as she remained too intoxicated to get up until noon that day.
These sorts of things continued happening. Our son was getting even less attention. When she was awake, she’d be out in the garden, leaving him to watch television alone all day while I worked, so I was making a greater attempt than ever to break my meetings into chunks so I could spend every minute in between with him. It only took a few more weeks before the next big blowup happened. Being suspicious of her constantly being out with other men while I was home with our kid, I (wrongly) went through her phone and found a message from a local bartender that had a message from her saying, “omg, I’m so sorry. I was so drunk, I don’t even remember last night”. He replied, “It’s no big deal, we were just having fun.” Reading into this, I confronted her about it, and at 1:30am, she left to go back out and drink some more. I messaged her asking what she was doing while, yet again, I was home alone with our kid. She responded, “At someone’s house you don’t know, ”. I warned her that I was not going to take this anymore, and a few hours later she came home and said she was leaving and taking our son. She told me that she was high on acid and I could smell the liquor on her and I told her there was no way I was going to allow that. She dove at me, cutting up my arms, biting me, and then just began smacking me repeatedly in the face. I’ve never struck a woman and wasn’t about to start with the mother of my child, so I just stood there and took it and after about a dozen of those, she tried to grab our son again and walk out the door. I followed her out telling her I’d have to call the cops when the postwoman who works at the post office next door was pulling into work. It is a small island and everyone knows each other so she tried to intervene. Hearing all that had just happened, she advised my ex that she would definitely be found in the wrong if the police were called due to her assaulting me and trying to endanger our son. With that, my ex drove off and eventually her father came to pick her up from the island and take her back down to Columbus.
I let it sit for a while until we talked again and told her that she clearly had some serious issues and I wanted her to get some help. I got her a therapist and scheduled an appointment with her general practitioner because she said she couldn’t do it. Her GP prescribed her some medications and eventually, she wanted to move back home with us to work on things. Upon getting back, it didn’t take long for her to get back to staying out drinking constantly. She would drink on her medications that she was told not to drink on. She would forget to take them in general, and so I started setting the timers on my phone to remind me to remind her. Through this, I’d find her cutting herself in the bathroom and before long, she was back to smashing things in fits of rage and at one point, she ran into something with our van while drunk. She’d stopped eating and was losing lots of weight. She’d ask to go through my phone all of the time, and I’d let her, only for her to ask again the next night, and the night after. Immediately after doing so, she’d usually go back out to drink some more so she could sleep through most of the next day before going outside as soon as she woke up to work on her plants while I worked and stayed with our son.
About two weeks after moving back in, she kept me up all night asking me if I’d been sleeping with someone while she was gone. I told her no (which was true) but it didn’t stop her from going down a list of people she thought I might have been with -
1.) An older woman who I’d known growing up (a friend of my parents and grandfather) with kids who were around our age. I had never spent time with this woman as an adult, so I am not sure why she was a suspect.
2.) My ex had gone through the Facebook page of the small island we lived on, found a stranger who had visited the island the year prior, went through their friends list, and found a new stranger (who we’d also never met) who she thought was my type who lived 200 miles away and questioned me about sleeping with her.
3.) The sister of a woman with another family on the island who would occasionally visit the island. She was sure I must have been sleeping with this woman because I couldn’t remember her name, which meant that it must be true because “it was a trick” to throw her off my trail by pretending I didn’t’ know her…
For the rest of the night (several hours) she’d hug my arm and speak in a soft and gentle voice (picture an NPR radio host mixed with someone talking to a scared puppy) -
“It’s ok, you can just tell me. Tell me who it is.”
“I know you just want to tell me, so why don’t you do it? It isn’t a big deal. Just tell me.”
(after I’d get frustrated and tell her we’d been at this for an hour or more, and I’d been alone with our son for weeks and not having strange women into our home while I did) – “OH! So you did? Oh, well just tell me then!”
“Well, the internet says that if somebody gets defensive, it means that they did it, so just tell me already, haha. It isn’t a big deal or anything.”
It reached a point where I’d seriously thought she’d lost her mind because no matter what I’d say, she would just return to the same question and go back through her list of suspects (old woman, stranger neither of us had ever met, family member of a family friend, etc…)
Finally, I called her mom (who is a nurse at a state prison) and told her that I thought something was seriously wrong and we needed to get her help. Up until this point, my ex had actually asked me to help her get in to see a real psychiatrist, but when I’d call her GP, they’d just refer us to therapists and were horrible about getting back. I was convinced that her mixing of medications and street drugs and alcohol had permanently damaged something and her losing weight, cutting herself, and now this was too much.
As I sat with her through the night and she continued to question me. She did ask me something that I felt was sincere -
“I can tell that there is something wrong. I think you’d feel better if you told me how you feel.”
And so I did -
“You have made our lives a living hell. There is always something wrong. You always think you have cancer or that I’m cheating or you are wrecking our car or trying to drive off in the night with our son. You never can give him even the bare minimum while I give absolutely everything in me to give you everything you need. You wanted to be a graphic designer so I bought you a $2000 laptop that you never use. You wanted a better phone and to start taking photographs so I bought you a $1200 flagship phone and you just use it to play games while our kid sits by himself, behind on his speech. You leave me here with him while I give and give and now you are accusing me of something in the most dehumanizing and undignified way, pretending I’m a search engine that isn’t giving you the page you want, rewording and asking the same thing again and again. I’ve been miserable here alone without you trying to care for our kid and as soon as you get back, you throw everything into turmoil all over again. I can’t live like this and I’m starting to hate you.”
Her response? -
“Well, I think you are just deflecting now, so why don’t you tell me who you slept with?”

[demosthenes2010]

Continued...

When her mom came to get her, I was furious and I wrote our couple’s therapist saying that I was done and I would not put up with this ever again.

Once she moved back to Columbus, she decided to become a stripper. I advised her that with her drinking issues, this would very likely turn into a disaster but she wouldn’t listen. She told me that her mother said, “Men just don’t understand that it is just a job. You’ll be fine. Go get your money.” So, she did… and within the first month, when it was her turn to have our kid, she would just leave him with her dad. She started getting phone numbers of men who worked there and would message them all of the time. We were broken up so I left it alone, but we’d talk daily, and she told me how much she hated it there but she was making hundreds if not well over a thousand dollars per night. When I had to go to Indianapolis for a conference, I stopped in town and on my way back, she wanted me to go back out to Indianapolis with her to get a car. We got the car, and within a week, I got a phone call at 1am (when I was back up on the island) of her just screaming obscenities, calling me a bitch, saying she hated me, etc… I asked her what was happening and what she’d done. Between sobs and screams, I learned that she had gotten too drunk at work and management had asked her to go home. They took her keys because they couldn’t let her drive and called her an uber. She told the uber driver to turn around and take her back, stole her keys, cussed out management, and tried to drive home. She apparently hit something on the way because by the time she got home, the tire wasn’t just gone, the entire rim was ground down to nothing with the front end in pieces. Upon pulling in, it was apparent (according to her father) that everyone in a two block radius could hear that something was wrong and the neighbors dog was outside barking. She punched it in the head, starting a fight with the neighbors, before going inside and smashing everything in her room and calling me to scream. I couldn’t believe all of this and kept trying to tell her to calm down. I told her she has a kid and there will be serous consequences to this if she gets caught or if her accident (that she couldn’t remember) had hurt someone. Her mom came to pick her up from her dad’s and that was the end of that terrible night. Over the next two weeks, she would call me with a loaded gun to her own head while home alone with our son threatening to kill herself, and I’d immediately call her dad to rush home to her and get him. She would call me saying she couldn’t control her emotions and had been banging her head against the wall. She would call me screaming that she was hearing voices… it was just terrible.

With her car destroyed and her job lost, she decided to move back up to the island again. This time roughly the same thing happened… drinking, neglect and endangerment… it all becomes a blur at some point. She was going to move back to Columbus and I was to follow right behind so we could see if a change in setting would allow us to get her better medical help and if we could get her a more stable job and if maybe being around friends and family in the Columbus area would help. Two weeks before the last ferry off the island, she wrote me from Columbus to say that she didn’t want me moving into the place she’d found. I told her fine, though she left me in a real bind, and put out feelers for a place in Columbus that I could rent without me being in the area to tour it first so I could be near my son to help raise him and still get all of our things off the island within the two week window I had. I found a place and moved down. Once down, it felt a bit easier at first, with us having separate homes. She started stripping again, though, and when I told her how awful of an idea that was, she shouted back, “I’m going to do what I want for as long as I want until I’m done doing it!”. All I could say was, “I know…” as it was one of the truest things she’d ever said to me and while terrible, it was refreshing to get her to just acknowledge it. Just before Christmas 2022, I was playing an online game late at night. It was on an account I’ve had for over fifteen years so there are well over 100 people on my friend’s list who I have never met. The vast majority of them I’ve actually never even messaged and are just people who had been on a team with me once and added me randomly. She picked a random name on the list and said, “Who is that? Looks like a girl. I don’t believe you… who are they?”. I immediately said, “I am not doing this with you. I have not slept with anyone else since we’ve started dating while you are literally stripping for other men every night and drinking with them after having already physically cheated on me at least once. You can leave if you want to be that way.” She left, and two days later, slept with someone else at a New Years party. She lied about it, but I found out. A few days later, she slept with someone else at another party. I confronted her about the lie and all she could say was, “Well, how did you find out? Who told you? Are you some crazy person stalking me? I know you slept with someone else on NYE, so who was it?”. I told her, as usual, that I was loyal and had still not slept with anyone else since we’d started dating years before and told her that she just couldn’t stop destroying our family and was now openly lying about it to me when she was sleeping with other people.

A few weeks later (now in January of 2023), I told her how unfair it had all been. I told her how it had changed who I was as a person and that I didn’t like the person I’d become. She wanted to try and make it work and I told her it was the last time and I could not keep living like this. We went on another work trip as a family so she could rockhound (a hobby of hers) with our son. On the drive, I told her how I didn’t like that she was in touch with men from work. Men paying her to strip for them should not have her personal contact info. I asked her to ask her brothers or father how they would feel and rejected her “It’s just business” or “I’m just trying to cultivate regulars” excuse that she would repeatedly use. Sure enough, I found out that she was sending dozens of video/picture messages per day to some guy from the strip club while she was staying at my house. That guy’s girlfriend confronted my ex at the club to ask her wtf was going on. My ex lied to me (again) until I broke into her phone and showed her the messages. She promised to stop, and for a few weeks, things seemed at peace.

On a trip to my parents’ house in Georgia in Feb of 2023, we stopped at a rest stop on the drive down and her phone lit up with a message from “Forest”. I had just hired a lobbyist named Forrest and used it as a segway to ask her if she knew anyone by that name. She said no. While at my parents, though, she was hiding her phone under her pillow and sitting in a corner with it dinging all day. I (again, wrongly), went through it and found nude videos she had taken in my parents’ house. I confronted her about it and she just outright stated that she never took any videos or photos while there. At this point, I had nearly lost my mind with the gaslighting, lies, and manipulations. We sat in a tense silence for much of the drive back to Ohio. I’d already planned a Valentine’s Day thing for us so we went through with it and went to a show, stayed in a suite I’d gotten us, met up with some friends for a game, etc… It was like old times with us laughing and having fun and wild sex. Less than two weeks later, she broke up with me.

I told her I understood, that I’d always support our son, that I wished her the best, and that we’d both move on with our lives. Within two weeks, however, she’d stopped taking him to the preschool we’d signed him up for, had stopped paying for her cell phone on my plan, broke her phone and asked me to warranty replace it (which only costs 100 bucks if she mailed the old one back), and was missing his doctors’ appointments. I confronted her about this and she said I was just a psycho who didn’t want her to live her life. I told her I guess we didn’t have any agreement on how we’d raise our son, so fine, I’d write some stuff out and she could review it and say if it worked or not. I wrote out an informal coparenting plan and she agreed to it all. It just had basic items like, “We each pay for our own bills, we sell the van (that I paid for) and split the proceeds, we each pay for our son’s bills based on our own income percentage, etc…”.

The day she came over to look at it and the spreadsheet I’d created to track our joint bills for our son (insurance, tuition, her cell, etc…), she sat on my lap, kissed me, and told me that we should both be alone for a while to focus on helping our son through this transition and to learn how to coparent well without either person getting hurt feelings. I agreed to her suggestion and the very next night, she stated that she needed me to cancel my plans with friends (the first I’d had in weeks) so she could work because she needed to make money. In an attempt to be a good and flexible coparent, I obliged, but she went out to the pool hall with some guy instead. She then spent the entire weekend with him, dropping our kids at her parent’s place for the duration of her custody days (which, by the way, was only 30% of that month and the two proceeding months). I confronted her about it and she denied it. “I wasn’t even there to see him, you think you know so much.”

I later learned that the person she had tricked me into canceling my plans for so she could go sleep with him for three days after literally sitting on my lap and convincing me to agree that we’d be single for a few months to focus on our responsibilities was “Forest”.

After she realized that I knew she had tried to weaponize coparenting to trick me into being alone for three months while she pursued a relationship with someone she told me she didn’t know (who I later found out visited her at the strip club and who she had slept with the night we broke up), my guard was up and I was upset.

As April rolled around, she had not paid any of her bills for our son, had not returned her broken cell phone for the warranty replacement (which now added an 800 dollar charge to my bill), had regularly been not taking our son to school, still had medication being flown to the island she no longer lived on being charged to my account, had pawned my tools for money, and had continued trying to use coparenting to manipulate me. At one point she asked me to agree that nobody we were dating should meet our son at first so as to prevent him from being confused during this period of transition. I later learned that she had already had “Forest” around him on multiple occasions before even asking me this. In her typical style, the first time she made it clear that she had no intention of keeping to the agreement she’d asked me to enter into was when I pulled up to her house to pick our son up and “Forest” was in there with him.

I told her that it was clear that she didn’t care about anything but what she wanted, never would, and that all I ask was for her to not bring “Forest” to my house. It was humiliating enough that she had cheated on me with him, had him around my kid, etc… just don’t bring him to my home. The very next time she came to drop our son off at my house, guess who drove them there?

At this point, I lost my cool, and with over two months of back bills for our son, her cell phone, etc… being paid by me when she had a perfectly good job, I told her that I was not going to be her credit card while she ran around town drinking, taking vacations, and neglecting our kid. She had missed more doctor’s appointments and I’d have to pay the missed appointment fee/reschedule/take him myself. I’d get calls from preschool asking me where our son was because it was their policy to check in if he had not been in attendance for more than a few days. This, despite the fact that we’d agreed that he desperately needed (actually have a text from her saying “desperately”) the time at school so he could improve his speech. That is when I found out that she had essentially quit her job to just go out and party for months straight.

Shortly after that, she moved in with Forrest (how you actually spell his name) in Plain City. At this point, with a 1400/month preschool, her 800 dollar cell phone, her cell service bill, his health insurance and copays, etc… all being on me, I had to take him out of school to get my finances in order. I met with my client and asked that we arrange a bonus structure for my work. I was only gone for a week but me not being there to watch our son and her actually having to be a mom pissed her off and she decided to accuse me of being “absent” despite the fact that as I’d mentioned above, I’d had the vast majority of parenting time up to this point and was the only one to ever enroll him in school, get the vaccination records and paperwork filed, the only one to find him a new primary care physician, and the one to get him enrolled with a speech therapist to undo the damage done by her neglect. I came back happy with the extra money I needed and enrolled him in school again, this time at a better place.

Almost immediately after enrolling him, she went on two vacations after selling the family van and keeping all of the money for herself (of course none of it went to our son’s bills). One to New York for 9 days, during which I watched our son the entire time, and the second time, taking our son with her new boyfriend to Disney. Of course, she waited until the month I paid a 500 dollar enrollment fee and 1600 dollar tuition to do it and had him out of school for the entire time, having given me no warning that she intended to do this and so wasting even more money that could have actually paid for an entire month of school starting the next month.

She started messing with my custody days, intentionally picking our son up from school on days when we’d agreed I’d have him and feigning ignorance about it. When I’d confront her, she’d state that she was the default custodial parent according to Ohio law and could do whatever she wanted and I should just be happy she wasn’t going after me for child support.

This struck me, as she had previously held a job where she was making more than me on most days and had just decided to quit it when she started dating this new guy after giving me hell for months when I’d asked her to not work it when we were together and it was destroying our family. I have screenshots of images she’d sent me saying, “When you make your month’s rent in one night” with a pile of money on her and she knows it, yet she is going to go after me for child support after literally stealing from me, loading up my cell bill with over 1000 dollars in service and hardware, pawning my tools, wasting even more money on airdropped medicine to an island she doesn’t live on, missed doctors’ appointments, etc…?

I told her there is no way and I’d fight it to the death. She said that I’d “better just keep him in school” because she was getting a part time job and needed him to have care during the day and oh, by the way, “he is going to go to kindergarten from my boyfriend’s house” 45 minutes outside of the city we’d moved to and there is no point in me getting a lawyer because “he is going to school out here whether you get a lawyer or not”.

[demosthenes2010]

Continued...

With that all said, I decided to go and do just that. I got a lawyer and they pretty much repeated what she had said regarding child support. I guess, in the State of Ohio, even if I have custody for 28 days out of the month and she has him for 2, it is a 10% deduction on your child support responsibilities. What does that mean?

While paying 1600/month in pre-k (he was just bumped up from preschool)
And 600/month for our joint healthcare (of which roughly half is his)
Any other medical bills (I recently had to pay for an out of network anesthesiologist for a minor operation that was 750 dollars)
I’d still be paying her over 1500/month in child support, even if I have him for the vast majority of the month.

I went to get a second opinion from another lawyer and they backed up what she said. In the State of Ohio, she could stab my dog to death, be a nazi posting hate content all over, and as long as she has any custody days at all, I have to pay 90% of what the chart says, even with me covering literally all of his other bills.

She can quit her job that she refused to quit when we were together after agreeing to pay her share of his bills with the money she was making there and it doesn’t matter.

She can steal from me, load up my accounts with her bills, lie, manipulate, neglect him, and endanger him, and it doesn’t matter.

I cannot afford to pay almost $4000 per month… nevermind that, I cannot live with paying someone who physically abused me, cheated on me repeatedly, destroyed my things, kept my son and I living in terror, etc… 1500 per month for the next fifteen years. It is the most humiliating thing I can imagine.

I have tried so hard to avoid this happening. Once, when confronting her about it, she stated, “I don’t know why you are bothering, just go for sole custody then” before immediately changing her tune to, “You’ll never get custody. No way. It’ll never happen”. Later when asking her why she is putting me through this when I told her to just go live her life so long as she gives our son what he needs and doesn’t take advantage of me, she responded with, “Hahaha, no way. I’ll never tell you. You’ll never know. No way.”. On another occasion, she just said, “I can’t be bothered with this. It’ll just make me feel bad.” as if acknowledging what you do is worse than the fact that you do it in the first place. When we once had a conversation on the phone, I told her, “I don’t think you understand. If you make me go to court to get sole custody, I’m going to bring up the car accident and the circumstances around it. I’m going to explain that you intentionally reduced your income so you could party and take vacations while leaving me to take care of our kid.” To that she responded, “What, you mean when I swerved to not hit something? What job? I don’t know what you’re talking about?”. I am almost certain she was trying to goad me into saying something she could use against me while secretly recording the conversation.

I never wanted to take it to this point because I believe a kid is better with both parents but after trying to literally keep her from killing herself or letting our kid kill himself for years, after she beat the PLEASE READ out of me, after she has ruined and smashed so many things in our lives, after the cheating and the manipulation and the lies and the endless destruction and mayhem, if she is dead set on having her cake, eating it too, and making me pay for it, I feel like I have no option left but to fight despite what the lawyers say about me inevitably having to pay her money and there being a 50/50 chance I can send our kid to school from my place.

I don’t know if it is going to work, but I intend to –

1.) File Assault or DV charges against her in Ottawa County (there is a two year statute of limitations).

2.) Report her for insurance fraud to her insurance company and the authorities (at the amount she claimed for her car, it is a felony).

3.) Get massive amounts of testimony from the people who were around during the most troubling times to testify to everything I’ve said, including the postmistress from next door from the night she beat the PLEASE READ out of me and tried to drive off with our kid while intoxicated.

4.) I’ve put together over 300 pages of evidence proving everything I’ve said above and dozens more instances of her terrible actions along with videos and transcripts pulled from information requests from Snapchat and Facebook with the original emails to prove chain of custody and their validity, etc…

5.) Request a full evaluation by a forensic auditor and I intend to request that they run the full DSM V diagnostics.

If I let her get away with this, I will never own a home to raise our son in, I will never be able to retire, and I will have to watch as she slides in and out of terrible behavior when she inevitably destroys her current relationship and tries to drag our son around to yet another man’s house in yet another school district. I won’t watch our son go through that and I won’t let her ruin my life anymore.

Still, my real fear is what do I do if I lose? I literally can’t afford to live in this country if I am paying around 3k per month in taxes, 4k per month in child expenses, 1.5k per month in rent, 500 per month in car payment/insurance/maintenance, plus food, etc… Do I just move away? I can’t abandon my kid, but I literally can’t afford to live anywhere but a hovel in a bad part of town if she wins. It feels like this is the fight of my life and all of the experts are telling me I’m going to lose no matter what. It isn’t fair that someone as terrible as her, who is hell bent on manipulating, stealing, and destroying the people who have supported her the most or who she is supposed to support the most (our kid) can play the system to just keep on vacationing forever and drinking forever while abandoning their kid and turning me into their wage slave… it just doesn’t make sense. I don’t know if I am going to survive this. What do I do?

[ForeverDad]

I'm presuming you're filing for divorce?  Or if you're not married then filing for a custody and parenting order?

Unless your ex opposes whatever outcome you request in your filing with domestic court, the court will likely approve your proposed solution.  Notice how I phrased that.  Even if court and other professionals around the court don't notice at first, eventually they will perceive that you are solution-oriented, especially for your child.

That is a key factor.  You can complain about the discord with the immense history of past adult conflict but won't arouse much concern for complaints that aren't considered actionable abuse.  After all, you're an adult, you always have the option to leave the relationship.

No so for a young minor child.  Court and children's services (CPS) know children don't have much of a choice in determining their lives so children get much more attention than adults.  While you can list all your ex's misdeeds in respect to you, give PRIORITY to (and list first) the pattern of actionable (endangering and neglectful) parenting behavior.

If you give a sense of "woe is me, why should I pay", courts may largely ignore that since they're used to dad's not wanting to pay child support.

If she is not paying anything for child expenses, then can you petition the court to have someone handle any child support payments so her obligations get paid and then she only gets the rest?  I doubt whether you're allowed - on your own - to deduct your expenses from child support.

About your state's handling of child support... You probably need more legal consultations with other more *experienced* family law attorneys.  Here's why.

I am familiar with your state.  A certain father, let's use the initials FD, was in and out of that state's systems for 8 years.  FD's court 15 years ago definitely defaulted to preference for mother.  His ex was in one court facing a Threat of DV charge but she went to domestic court and got temp custody and temp majority time.  FD got only alternate weekends and an evening in between... and paid child support (CS).  When they exited the divorce FD moved up to equal time and equal custody, termed Shared Parenting.  FD actually had to pay a little more in CS.  A few years later he got full custody (became Legal Guardian).  He still paid CS.  (When he called the child support office to report he was improperly lists as non-primary parent, the staff informed him that was locked into the state's computer program, the payer of CS was automatically listed as non-primary.)  It was only when he got majority time a couple years later that the CS order was stopped.

One aspect is that family courts are granted discretion in their decisions.  This may be to your advantage.  If you can document your honest efforts in contrast to your ex's continued pattern of egregious, endangering and neglectful actions, then court may, in its discretion, rule favorably for you.  The usual rules may say one thing but they have flexibility since every case is different.

If your ex disputes what you file then almost surely you will end up taking an in-depth Custody Evaluation.  It will almost surely include the cursory psych eval overviews and go far beyond into how each parent handles parenting.  It's not cheap and likely will take many months.  Be sure you get a reputable and experienced custody evaluator (CE).  FD's was a child psychologist and totally trusted by the court.  A lousy, biased, gullible or inexperienced CE is to be avoided, of course.

So right now, what is your current level of parenting?  Do you now have that 28 days per month you mentioned above?  At the very top of your priority list is that you obtain a similar majority custody & parenting "temp" order.  Don't let anyone tell you that's not crucial in your overall case.  Court may lean toward their usual "mother is in charge" temp order policy.  You need to get the best (least bad) temp order possible.  Why?  FD was stuck with his supposedly temporary order for two years while the divorce case lingered on.  Many of our supposedly "temp" orders were quickly started but slowly exited.  That's half an eternity in a child's years.

Likely the path before you is not quite as disastrous as you've been told.  But you do have to beware of unexpected legal traps and pitfalls.*  We here have "been there, done that".  Take advantage of our hard-earned collective wisdom.

* An excellent and highly recommended handbook here is William Eddy's "Splitting: Protecting Yourself While Divorcing Someone with Borderline or Narcissistic Personality Disorder" (2021 edition).  If you haven't read it, get it now.  It is ridiculously inexpensive.  It's like having a top notch lawyer in your pocket.  His web site is HighConflictInstitute.com with many books and even references to professionals.
https://www.unhookedmedia.com/stock/p/splitting-protecting-yourself-while-divorcing-someone-with-borderline-or-narcissistic-personality-disorder

[demosthenes2010]

Thank you for your help!

We were never married but lived together for almost five years from before she was pregnant through his first three years of life.  I have already filed and will be asking for sole custody.  My first hearing date is on 4/22.

I've done a ton of studying and I will definitely only be focusing on those things that directly impact my son and his wellbeing or how she has made it difficult to coparent together.  I'm going to keep the personal mudslinging out of it and leave all of the infidelity out of it.  I intend to break it up into very specific sections that cover very specific concerns with multiple examples and pieces of evidence to back up my testimony per section.  There is a guy online, Father X, who appears to have been in a very similar situation to mine and he does a great job of showing how to organize your evidence and strategy for the hearing.  While it looks like the state he is in has slightly different criteria for determining "best interests" than mine, it is still a good tool to use when thinking through and organizing this all.

I actually don't intend to bring up support at all and was going to just focus on the custody aspect of it and let the facts speak for themselves.  I figure that if I get sole legal and physical custody with my residence as the primary for his education, the child support would logically not be needed for her, though I am not sure if I am naive in that.

The child support calculator takes your income, subtracts whatever you have been spending on childcare and healthcare, and then sums the remainder from both parent's income.  It then runs a calculation on that to determine what 18% of the total would be and takes it from both parents based on their percentage of that summed amount.  So, if I made 100k last year and spent 20k on childcare and healthcare, it would adjust me down to 80k.  If she just quit working and can claim 10k (she never put her stripper money in her bank account or paid taxes on it), then it will say, "ok, 90k total, so a total of roughly 16k of that needs to go to the child.  Since 80k of 90k is 88%, we'll multiply 88% times 16k and that is how much dad pays."  As a result, even paying a theoretical 20k already on child costs from an income of 100k, I would still be on the line for another 16.  That means 36% of my total income would be going towards child costs with almost half of that going directly to the mother.  When you add taxes on top of that, it means my take home is reduced to half of my earned income and I've quadruple checked on the laws of Ohio with lawyers and in forums... the most you can get deducted from that is 10% if you have over X number of custody days per year.  That means that at most, my 16k in additional child support on top of all of his bills I'm paying would only be reduced from 16k down to 14400...

I fully intend to push hard for an in-depth custody evaluation that absolutely should include a psych eval.  I want it to be as early in the process as possible so the facts it reveals provide context to my testimony and hopefully help dull some of what will, undoubtedly be, a slew of lies and mischaracterizations on her part.

I appreciate your guidance on the temp order.  I thought that requesting a 50/50 temp order might show that I am not a hard ass who is trying to take him from her but rather that I am trying to insulate him from the chaos and instability and danger she adds to his life.  I can see how pushing for majority time from the start would help establish consistency in my request and I will follow your advice on that.

The truth is, she loves making him birthday cakes and taking him trick-or-treating and to play centers with her friends and their kids.  I don't want him to not have a relationship with her.  I don't think he'd ever forgive me if I tried to do that unilaterally instead of giving him the opportunity to see her for himself and make that decision on his own.  I also don't think it would reflect well on me to try.  My intent is to go in and request that I be allowed to care for his educational, legal, and healthcare needs, as I have been doing successfully, with him going to school from my residence, with the understanding that I have zero intention of fostering anything but a healthy and loving relationship between them.  I will stick to that promise 100% and in the end, maybe the contrast between the examples we each set for him may turn out to be a good thing for him to see and a silver lining to all of this.

I truly appreciate your feedback and help.  Anything else you can suggest would be wonderful.

[ForeverDad]

If you've read my past posts, I've often stated that one of our good qualities - our commendable  sense of fairness - is our nemesis, too easily sabotaging us in legal scenarios.

Take for example your thought to start off with a "fair" 50/50 temp order.  Sounds nice but court could care less how nice either of you are or are not.  (You do have to behave decently of course.)  So if you have a recent history of majority parenting time and decision making, then be sure that gets included in the temp order.  Sadly, if you "gift away" to much then you'll waste a lot of effort, time and money to get it back.  Don't invite an uphill struggle if it can be avoided.

Your first posts were lengthy and I confess I skimmed some of it, but many of your experiences were mine too.

• Partner seemed to have postpartum-like depression, alternately ignoring then overwhelming child, moaning and groaning in bed, etc
• Son was slow to speak
• Partner eventually had few friends, drove friends and my family away

She also has alcoholism and drug abuse issues.  If you ask for drug testing and/or monitoring, be aware that if court is reluctant then you may have to ask that both of you be under such testing until patterns are evident.

If she at times is that drunk and drives, then that becomes a major issue to report if she drives with son in her car - or even parents - while intoxicated.

Between sobs and screams, I learned that she had gotten too drunk at work and management had asked her to go home. They took her keys because they couldn’t let her drive and called her an uber. She told the uber driver to turn around and take her back, stole her keys, cussed out management, and tried to drive home. She apparently hit something on the way because by the time she got home, the tire wasn’t just gone, the entire rim was ground down to nothing with the front end in pieces. Upon pulling in, it was apparent (according to her father) that everyone in a two block radius could hear that something was wrong and the neighbors dog was outside barking. She punched it in the head, starting a fight with the neighbors, before going inside and smashing everything in her room and calling me to scream. I couldn’t believe all of this and kept trying to tell her to calm down. I told her she has a kid and there will be serous consequences to this if she gets caught or if her accident (that she couldn’t remember) had hurt someone. Her mom came to pick her up from her dad’s and that was the end of that terrible night. Over the next two weeks, she would call me with a loaded gun to her own head while home alone with our son threatening to kill herself, and I’d immediately call her dad to rush home to her and get him...

This in itself would have gotten action from children's protective services or police and a case would have been started to determine whether to remove her access to the gun, if not more.  But that was then and this is now.  While it needs to be a part of the history reported to the court as background, if reported now they may possibly say what emergency responders might tell you, "Please call back when it's an ongoing emergency."

She started messing with my custody days, intentionally picking our son up from school on days when we’d agreed I’d have him and feigning ignorance about it. When I’d confront her, she’d state that she was the default custodial parent according to Ohio law and could do whatever she wanted and I should just be happy she wasn’t going after me for child support.

One of our members would often state he knew when his ex was lying, when she opened her mouth.  Your ex was only partly right.

While courts often do favor the mother (sight unseen) unless there is a court order stating otherwise then there each parent has equal but "unspecified" parenting rights.  She without an order or court-entered agreement, "possession is 9/10 the law, more or less".  Once she picked him up then she was in physical possession.

When I disputed her possession or she disputed my possession, the police simply stated, we won't do anything except ensure the immediate incident ends, resolve this in court.

So all indicators from back then and until today are ... resolve this in court.  She may feel she is in charge, but domestic court is The Real Authority.

[EyesUp]

@demosthenes2010,

That's a helluva story. Sometimes long posts invite long replies, and you're already getting good advice from @FD, so I'll just ask a question and offer a few bullet points:

- I assume you're on your son's birth certificate.  that said, are you 100% certain the child is yours?  get a paternity test. 
even if it doesn't make a bit of difference in terms of your commitment to your son, now is the time to check this one off the list.  if you're not the biological father, the legal situation may be more complicated. 

- the context and detail you've shared here is helpful.  it's helpful for you to journal everything and get it down in black and white, and it's helpful for us in order to provide support.  that said, you cannot present to court this way.  no judge is going to read this, or give you time to present it.  you need to boil this down to only the most egregious behaviors and incidents, e.g., "day/month/year.  partner was intoxicated, physically assaulted me, attempted to take son and leave the home while intoxicated. a neighbor witnessed and intervened." 

- lawyers charge by the hour, and every time you send a long email or tell a long story on the phone, it's going to cost you. it may feel therapeutic to get it out - but that's what we're here for - or your own therapist, if you have one (you should - sounds like you're paying for insurance - use it) - focus on the legal stuff with the atty.  what I'm saying is:  don't send this whole story to your atty, you'll pay $200-300 for the atty to read it.  you need to send the atty the boiled down version

- it's great that you've got a lot of documentation - get this into a concise format for your atty.

- I don't have experience in OH, but I do have a lot to say on legal approach, etc.  If you want that sort of input, let us know.  If you're seeking emotional support - that's good to know too.  Let us know either way.

- final thoughts for now:  status quo is important.  maximize your time with your kid.  for court, time is measured in overnights.  the court is less likely to order a 50-50 parenting time situation if the kid is with you 70% or more of the time and there are a bunch of legitimate concerns about mom.

- if your son is in danger, report it.  any time you don't report it, the court will largely look past whatever claim you might have - "she was intoxicated" etc. - because if there was a real safety issue (DV, drugs, etc.), you'd call.  it sounds like there's a lot of history - but few if any records (maybe a traffic violation with car damage?), and witnesses that may be difficult to depose or get credible testimony from (bartender?).   without getting too deep into my own story, there were two 911 calls with my uBPDxw in the prior 12 months before our first pre-trial hearing.  those calls compelled her to settle because her atty knew it would come out - and not in her favor.

More to say, but I want to focus on what's most helpful to you.  So - tell us - how can we best help here?

Hang in there.

PS, do you have a voice recorder?  Have that thing running 24/7, or at least anytime she's on the phone or in your presence. 

[livednlearned]

Really good input from FD and EU.

I would only add that courts weight documentation from third-party professionals much more than us or family members. You have a lot of story and only parts of it will courts care about.

What you do have is a pattern of behavior that you can document. Separate out what is backed up by evidence by third-party professionals to see what that story tells. It will go further.

My lawyer told me in one of our meetings, "What you're describing sounds awful. Why would a judge want to give you what you're asking for if you let your child be exposed to that behavior?"

Meaning, we walk a fine line between describing what happened and implicating ourselves. Because at the end of the day, you kept trying to make it work with a very mentally ill, substance abusing person who endangered a child's safety. If you can afford it, get counseling. Let the court know you tried the best you could and made mistakes, and you are learning that you can't rescue a person intent on hurting themselves. Courts love counseling.

If this ends up with a custody evaluation ($$$) that tends to be the source of truth for a lot of courts. Hopefully you don't have to go there, but if you do, there's lots of good advice from people here on how to navigate that path.

And if I were you, I would let go the insurance fraud. Don't waste your time and effort on being spiteful or vengeful. Even a hint of that and you look like you're just fighting to fight. Courts hate that stuff, even if there's cause to set a wrong right.

Instead, come forward with solutions. My solutions were to have my son's father enroll in a substance abuse program, take a parenting class, take an anger management class. We asked that he show proof of enrollment within 30 days, and report back to the court when he completed each.

It's very hard for someone with BPD to follow through on these things for reasons you can probably well imagine. It takes a lot of emotional regulation and a sustained period of time to work on getting better. Being told to do something they are not willing nor able to do is not a road to recovery or expanded custodial time.

That invites a judge to say, Ok -- we'll do it this way. Mom can do these things and demonstrate through third-party professionals that she is reasonable and ready to parent.

In the meantime, you get a period of time to build status quo while mom goes back to doing what she does.

Our cases tend to come together over time. Judges are considered the supreme witness in a case so they're essentially watching and witnessing your behaviors through these court actions. Some people get lucky and can tell the whole story through documentation and avoid the protracted time spent dueling in court but many of us have to watch the paint dry and hope we get a reasonable person overseeing our cases.

And like FD said, get a good lawyer. Some judges rule on technicalities and that's like shooting a hole in a perfectly good boat. You can have all the documentation in the world but lose on a technicality because your lawyer didn't understand how things worked, and that does happen. There were judges in my county who were renown for defying common sense, like giving sole custody to a recently recovered heroin addict simply because of a technicality. It makes their job easier to do this because it's more like math, a less messy way to look at messy human affairs.

[demosthenes2010]

@foreverdad she is in a period of her life right now where I honestly think she is doing "ok" and probably isn't risking his safety through drinking and excessive drug use.  With that said, I know that the judge is likely to order drug tests as part of the screening process against the testimony I am going to have to bring, so I am prepared for that.  I'm also intending to bring witnesses who were there for this period of our lives who had to do things like message/call me to come get her at 2am because she was starting fights with strangers at the bar.  Many of our mutual friends who would see her out had many concerns with her behavior during this time and are more than willing to testify due to what they know seemed like a neverending nightmare that she exposed us to and I am hoping that their ability to say, "These are all of the instances where we had serious concerns and I can corroborate that it was at least four or five days per week for months on end" will lend some weight to the 300 pages of documentation and testimony I will bring.  This does not necessarily show that she is still doing these things now, but it does reinforce that there was a severe and ongoing pattern of behavior (one that I obviously know is eventually going to come back because she has untreated BPD) and that seems better than me just showing pages of messages where we are discussing her issues and she appears to be directly acknowledging them, videos of her slumped over unable to speak at 10am on a Monday while I call off of work to watch her and our son, etc...

The matter of "that was then and this is now" is something I have been seriously kicking myself over.  As time has progressed, she has gone from actively endangering our son and neglecting him to one where she appears to just revel in punishing me for existing and being a living memory of all that she put him and I through.  Her behavior now seems to be entirely based on a desire to humiliate me, to take from me, to try and elicit emotional responses from me by calling me and trying to gaslight me into thinking that none of it ever happened or I'm a crazy psycho narcissist for not just letting everything that she did go, and that I must be trying to trick her somehow when I honestly am just trying to remain as close to "no-contact" as possible.  Had I taken action on this even as recently as just six months ago, I think my case would have been much stronger but now, all I can do is show the years of abuse/neglect/etc... and then hope that a forensic evaluator can show that she is still suffering from this personality disorder that wrought so much havoc on our lives, I am still the only one handling literally all of his needs both financially and logistically, and that while it is nice that she likes to celebrate birthdays and go on trips with him, it takes more than that to raise a child. I'm hoping to show that her decision to move 45 minutes away and still cannot account for what she did shows that not only will coparenting be made more difficult by this (essentially necessitating that our son go to school and primarily live with one of us), but she has essentially made it a near impossible task through her recent attempts to weaponize coparenting, and her BPD issues WILL resurface as they are untreated.  I'm hoping that if I can succinctly prove every single one of my relevant accusations through a detailed history backed by photos/videos/open criminal cases/testimony from witnesses, get a full psych eval on both of us that proves she is suffering from severe BPD with a comorbidity of X/Y/Z, get an expert witness to testify that without ongoing treatment this is going to come back and be an issue that impacts our son's stability and safety, outline how I am already providing a great home and have him enrolled in pre-k at Columbus city schools for this fall, and show how she has been unwilling to hold down a job for over a year after promising (I have it in writing) to help provide for him while loading my accounts up with thousands of dollars in bills that she had no right to burden me with, that it will all come together as an overwhelming picture of someone who is not stable and will not be stable until they take action in their life to take accountability and get treatment.

@EyesUp I am on my son's birth certificate.  It is difficult to explain, but he is definitely my son... she was taking birth control consistently except on a trip we took to Florida where she became pregnant (she conveniently didn't warn me of this when she did it), she is very white and I am half black and my son's complexion (while not impossible to come from someone else) is an exact blend of ours, he looks exactly like a cross between our two very different families, and we were in the process of moving up to the island for the month between the trip to Florida and when she took a pregnancy test (it only took us three weeks to know).  So, unless she was having an affair during her idealization phase between us driving all over the country and packing to move/actually moving in that three week period of time when we were attached at the hip every single day with me working from home and her not working or leaving the house, it is my kid who also happens to look exactly like the two of us smushed together.  That, by no means, is a scientific way of determining this, but with everything else on my plate and her not contesting it, I am going to go with it for now.

Regarding the journaling, I have a perfectly constructed timeline backed up by text messages and photos with good metadata on them from the specific days that each thing occurred.  One good thing about being part of a digital generation is I have hundreds of messages spanning multiple years that perfectly back up everything I've said along with video and photographic evidence and I am an IT professional who understands how to prove the veracity of what I intend to submit to the court so any lawyer who tries to question the validity of the data will have to contend with my meticulous attempts to prove chain of custody and my ability to prove the exact date images/videos were created and the exact device that created them (I can prove the exact phone model and serial number that created the videos and images I intend to submit and the exact dates/times they were created).  That, combined with multiple witnesses who grant further weight to my claims at strategic time throughout my testimony will, I hope, show that I am 100% prepared to provide multiple pieces of "proof" for every single thing I present.  I also intend to break it down into very specific sections that show things like the moral fitness of the parents and contrast the difference, the financial responsibility of the parents and contrast the difference, the ability and willingness to meet the child's developmental needs and contrast the difference, etc...

I do have a therapist and have the receipts to show how I have been in therapy for the last nine months.  I have also thought long and hard about how they have actually helped me and am prepared to show the work I have done on myself.  I've also been reading a lot of books over that time to try and help me work through the emotional toll this has taken on me and I intend to strategically highlight the lessons I've learned from them as well by namedropping the books themselves and the things they've taught me.  While this is not "evidence", I do intend to utilize it to provide concrete proof that I am fully invested in working through the issues that prevented me from addressing this toxic situation head on in the past and to show that I have remedied many of the problems I've had that contributed to... well, all of it.

As for the emotional support, I really did need a lot of that about nine months ago, but I am serious when I say that I put in the work and handled it.  I know you guys don't know me, but I can honestly say (without gassing myself up), that I am the kind of person who has always worked very hard on myself, am very introspective and self-critical, and who dedicates themselves to things completely when it is time to do them.  I am an executive at a software vendor and help to manage and spearhead various complex problems across a wide range of disciplines and pride myself on being relatively self-aware, passionate, and competent when dealing with people and problems.  While this situation did tear me to pieces and it was a lot of work to pick myself up and take an honest accounting of where we'd all landed and how we got there, I almost immediately started down the path of trying to wrap my mind around the details and put in a massive amount of time and energy not only digging deep into myself and how I contributed but into my ex and how her patterns of behavior play out and what might explain them.  I'm hoping that my ability to demonstrate this nuanced and comprehensive understanding of us both and my willingness to lay bare exactly where not only she went wrong but where I did as well and the numerous steps I've taken to correct my problems will speak volumes of my fitness as a parent and my character as a person.

I VERY much appreciate the status quo comment and you reiterating what FD said about the initial custody order.  I spoke with my lawyer yesterday about our strategy and brought this up to her and she concurs that this is the right path to take.  Again, had I done this nine months ago, her worst behavior would be much more recent and relevant and his time would have been overwhelmingly spent with me, but in my attempt to get her to be there for him and to step up and do what's right by telling her what I was going to have to show in court if she made us go there, I think she hasn't actually changed at all but has rather started trying to remedy the easy things like just having him an equal amount of time.  Again, at this point it is going to be a matter of showing the years of issues in detail, showing that she still doesn't handle any of his education or healthcare, showing that the distance will be a issue, showing that she has intentionally destroyed our ability to coparent, showing that I do want her in his life (and so will foster a good relationship between them), showing through a professional that her issues are not resolved due to the nature of them, and so asking that in light of all of this I would like to have sole legal and physical custody until such time as she has addressed them.  It is going to be a tricky one for sure...

As for the "on the record" vs "off the record" stuff, as I said above, I am lucky to be born of a generation where we talked about everything through messaging apps and that historical data can be requested from the service providers (meta, snap inc, etc...) in its entirety in an archive emailed directly to you by the service provider.  The messages we sent discussing these issues were often comprehensive and are pretty damning.  That, combined with images of the physical damage she caused me while attacking me, a few videos taken during some of her most explosive and awful behaviors, an open investigation by the Ohio Insurance Fraud Task Force on her felony insurance fraud, and a case I've filed in Ottawa County for Domestic Violence that appears to have caught the interest of the prosecutor and a Lieutenant up there, (I'm hoping) should provide a pretty reliable record of things.  With that said, you are right that I spent far too long trying to save my family and save her.  I was raised by parents who never gave up on each other or on us and I've told my ex before when she was at her worst that while I am no longer religious, my favorite bible verse is, "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres." and I was fully determined to help the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with and save my family.  I invested in therapy for her (which she regularly missed), scheduled her doctor's appointments to help her get treatment (which she also often missed), and set alarms on my phone to help remind her to take her meds (which I have digital records proving she would regularly just stop taking because she "just don't care anymore").  I'm hoping I can show that I was trying my best to get her treatment and to insulate our son from the worst of it while keeping our family together because I thought both he and she would be better off if I could but that I understand I made a mistake and that I cannot change someone else or save someone else and that was a hard lesson to learn.  Maybe the judge will understand.

What I could most use now is help understanding how to navigate the complex legal situation I'm about to enter into.  I know it is going to be expensive and that any missteps could cost both me and my son.

That's where @livednlearned's response comes in -

That is what I'm currently in the process of doing.  As I noted above, I am carefully analyzing all of the verifiable messages I have against the witnesses I have against the photo and video and other types of documented evidence I have to segment out each into factors that directly impact our son's well-being.  Once I have a list of those accusations I can actually prove organized "by type", I am going to use the most damning at the start of each section and end of each section with the bits that I lack evidence for in the middle.  I am hoping that by starting with hard evidence and ending with hard evidence that the pieces in the middle will mentally be accepted by the judge as well.  I am not going to lie or misrepresent anything but I do want the truth to matter whether I can prove it or not and this seems like the best way to attack the problem using psychology so the judge accepts them.  Then, I am going to gather evidence that shows how I am addressing each of those aspects of my son's well-being in positive ways.  I do not want the judge to rubber stamp this and so I am willing to spend the money necessary to have multiple hearings if it means that each section is carefully considered so that by the end, the judge is like, "Jesus, this guy has got pages and pages of proof and countless witnesses showing that this woman is seriously going to continue to be a problem as she has been" while also thinking, "and every single time we sit down, he has more evidence of how he is literally doing every single thing he can to counter that bad behavior and help his son".  All of this kind of hinges on the report from the evaluator, specifically the psych evaluation, as I already know that she is going to be on her best behavior from here on out and has moved into her new boyfriend's $700,000 house which will look great to any GA who goes to visit.  If the psych evaluator looks everything over in its entirety and agrees that I am balanced and intelligent and willing to raise our son safely and in a stable environment but finds that she clearly has very serious issues that are almost certainly going to come back, then that is going to be my key expert witness factor in the case. 

I addressed the matter of "why would a judge give you what you're asking for if you let this continue before?", the custody evaluator, and my counseling above, so I will not repeat it here, but I definitely hear you and it is a concern of mine that I have a plan to address.

[demosthenes2010]

Regarding the insurance fraud, the good thing is that it is an anonymous tip line that I reported it to and they have assured me after they reached out that if they proceed, they will not bring me into it.  At this point, it is going to be an example of her willingness to do anything to get what she wants regardless of who it hurts or how damaging it might be or how immoral it might be.  Part of my case will be to show that her dangerous and impulsive actions are not solely aimed at damaging me and I intend to use numerous peer-reviewed studies to show that children exposed to these sorts of things suffer in the long term from having that sort of parental figure in their life.  I don't want to be petty with the insurance fraud thing, but it is literally felonious behavior and it shows that she is not only willing to endanger herself and anyone else on the road by doing something absolutely crazy like driving a car home without a wheel with the front end throwing sparks and car parts along the highway, punching someone's dog in the head, and smashing everything in the house while screaming like a banshee, but that when she sobers up and wakes up in the morning, she feels entitled (as she does to everything) to take from others via a lie to make herself whole afterward.  That point is something that I can prove between the two of us repeatedly but when it becomes criminal to that level and impacts the public, I think it could (if framed correctly) really show that she is too morally unfit to have custody of a child.

I do very much like the "solutions" mindset.  I saw someone on Youtube say that you want your lawyer to do the "dirty work" of having to confront what your ex did and you should stay focused on the job of proving that you are absolutely the best (and in my case, I honestly believe, the only) good choice for your child's placement.  What I am doing now is preparing what I need to get my lawyer ready to fill their role.  I only intend to address her actions briefly during my testimony and only when asked very specific questions by my lawyer.  Otherwise, my evidence is so comprehensive and she is so unable to literally EVER tell the truth, that if my lawyer has 13 "best interest sections" to go over and starts off asking broad questions like, "Have you ever endangered your son?" or "Do you consistently ensure that your son gets the healthcare and educational opportunities he deserves?" and she lies, they are going to have a dozen pieces of detailed evidence to grill her over and she will, due to her inability to emotionally regulate, fly off the handle at multiple points in this process only further proving that she is incapable of being a balanced and stable adult capable of raising our son.

If there is an opportunity to offer a closing statement of any sort or anything along those lines, I will tell the judge (and mean it), "I don't think mom doesn't love our son and I don't want her to not be in his life.  I have done my best to be absolutely transparent about my own shortcomings and what I have done and will need to continue to do to be the best father to him, but I cannot stress enough that she is not on this path.  The professionals have said x/y/z, I have shown x/y/z, and until she addresses these things, I do want her to celebrate birthdays with him, and to take trips with him, and to pick him up from school on days when she can make the drive, and to take him trick-or-treating, and split holidays so he can celebrate with her and her family, but these behavioral issues she has (whether they are currently not at their worst or not) are not just gone because she isn't currently beating people and destroying things.  This personality disorder doesn't go away like a sore throat caused by a specific infection never to return unless you "catch it again".  This is a pervasive and severe personality disorder that absolutely will rear its head again and I will, as I have done in the past, continue to provide for our son and protect him from the worst of it but I can't do that if I don't have the authority to do so.  I swear on my life that I will always try to foster a healthy and loving relationship between my son and his mother but I am asking you to give me the ability to provide him with a stable and safe home where he can thrive not just now, but into the future, and the authority to protect him from her issues if they do come up again.  Her inability, throughout this hearing, to take accountability for the consequences of what she has done only further proves that she is still wrestling with this.  I sympathize with how difficult it must be to have emotions so strong and impulses so strong that you literally feel like you are going crazy and cannot control what you do as a result, but I cannot fix her.  That is the biggest lesson I've learned through this process.  I can't fix her, you can't fix her, and she isn't putting in the effort currently to do the work to help fix herself.  As such, I am asking that I be granted sole legal and physical custody on the condition that I keep my word and foster their relationship until such time as she can prove she is capable of getting consistent help, holding down a full-time job, and being there for him.  Until she can do that, I don't see how we can begin to coparent as she has proven on numerous occasions that she is more than willing to use coparenting as a tool to exercise her own desires, her malevolence, and her aggression instead of utilizing it as a tool to give our son the best chance he can have in this world." (or something like that).

As for the lawyer, I previously had some pretty serious reservations about her, but while I make a decent amount of money, it isn't enough to get the best of the best.  As such, I am doing all of the heavy lifting I can to create easy to navigate documents with clear paths for her to take during questioning based around the aforementioned "sections".  I'm hoping that if I essentially create the perfect study guide focused only on those aspects that are relevant to the case and we get two hours to sit together and go over it all, that the rest will be primarily procedural, which I do actually have faith in her ability to navigate.

The money is going to be hard.  One reason I waited until now is that I have always seen his preschool as education while my ex has seen it as free child care allowing her to go do whatever she has wanted while not working.  In waiting until Spring to cancel it, I am hoping that with him enrolled in public school pre-k for fall, I can explain that I needed the extra funds to fight for what is in his best interest in the long run and that he deserves a summer break before starting back in school again so if I was going to do this, now was the only time I could afford to without disrupting his education.  I will, realistically, have about 1500/month to spend on this entire thing and have a reserve of about 10,000 put away to cover the larger expenses that might come up in hiring experts.  I'm not sure if it will be enough as I can easily see how, even with me putting in all of the leg work for my lawyer, this could balloon to over 20k over the next six months, which would strain my ability to afford to keep fighting.  In addition, she has filed for child support in the county she just moved to, so there may be jurisdictional issues as I filed for custody in the county we both moved to originally.  As I do not have legal parental rights until court ordered, the entire thing may be moved to the county she lives in, which would make things more difficult.  The Administrative child support hearing is scheduled for 4/11 and I have 30 days to claim my right to a Judicial hearing.  The rescheduled Judicial hearing will likely be scheduled after the start of our 4/22 custody hearing, but that is entirely dependent on whether or not she accepts being served via certified mail.  If she misses the 4/22 date, I may need to then pay to have her served directly in which case even if I file for a Judicial support hearing in the other county, we may run into timeline issues.  In other words, if the support hearing starts before the custody hearing, she may have grounds to move the whole thing there and if I lose the support hearing, it may become a situation where I am paying her lawyer (via support payments) and mine at the same time, draining my reserve even faster.  I am trying desperately to avoid that but it all comes down to technicalities and timelines...

[ForeverDad]

@foreverdad she is in a period of her life right now where I honestly think she is doing "ok" and probably isn't risking his safety through drinking and excessive drug use.

I like to remind our newer members that our sense of fairness can sabotage us.  Yes, a good personality quality can trip us up.

For example, you mentioned that right now you could say she was "ok".  That is at this moment in time.  However, if you say or testify to that then the court could hear "ok" but ignore the "right now".  Do you see where you could sabotage your goal?

This is similar to other posts when we have to discuss fear in abuse cases or just poor behavior patterns:

It's tough this holds me back:

-When she is regulated she is a good mother. Clearly loves the kids. If she gets upset/dysregulated often tells them to go away, or "leave me alone" which is one of her favorites, or tells them they have a bad attitude, or they are being jerks. I don't like the name calling. But when she is cooking with them, or doing Picnics etc I think she is a good mum. Oldest is 7. I wonder as they get older will she start giving them accusations too?

"Warning, Will Robinson!"  (Do you know that Lost in Space reference?)  You just said something problematic.  Yes, all of us here have Nice Guy and Nice Gal inclinations to be overly fair but this otherwise excellent quality could sabotage you in the years to come.

You say, "When she is regulated she is a good mother."  Court and lawyers hear only, "she is a good mother."  Do you see the gap?  If she is sometime NOT a good mother, then the reality is... She is NOT a good mother.

Here's an example lawyers will tell their clients when testifying about fear and abuse... can you see the parallel perspective of court's view of "fearful" as applied to "good"?

Another concept of wisdom I've learned here:
Be careful to avoid saying you're "not fearful" sometimes.  If you're fearful of what he might do then it makes sense that it would pervade your entire life while together.  That he sometimes is less bad doesn't matter, that hovering anvil is still hanging over your head, so to speak, all the time.

The gist of my point is that if he or his lawyer can get you to say there are times when you're not "fearful" then the opposition may push that the legal perspective may not kick in and be considered actionable.  Does that make sense?  Essentially, if you're asked whether you're fearful, the answer is yes, all the time, because you never know when the next incident may occur.

Why is that a risk for us?  Our natural impulse is that we are so inclined to parse a question and say whether in a moment of time we're not living in fear.  Just trust that the overall environment you live in is the sum of it all, not little pieces that are less bad.

This is no criticism on you or your otherwise commendable qualities.  Rather, it's how they can sabotage you in cases such as ours where the offender cycles back and forth - predictably - between good and bad behaviors.

If you say something like that then court may be inclined to set the bad aside until the bad happens - again - but by then you'd have to contest an order and that could take weeks or months to wend its way through the court process and by then she would have cycled back and forth who knows how many times?

[EyesUp]

@demosthenes2010,

My comments are going to focus on legal strategy, since that seems to be how you're thinking about things.

If I follow correctly, you're headed into a custody hearing in April.  Never married, so this is entirely about custody.  You've got jurisdiction issues, as well as some background insurance and a DV case.  It sounds like you're in Canada - If that's right hopefully someone who knows Canadian custody matters will chime in...  

Generally speaking, a judge is not going to take all of your documentation as evidence without some validation process.  A judge is also not going to review thousands, or hundred, or even dozens of emails / texts / chats.  They don't have time for this, and your attorney should tell you this.  If your attorney is allowing you to compile all this material with the assumption that it will be presented, they are setting you up for a long process - with a ton of billable hours.  $10k is optimistic.

If you present this material, the judge might order some 3rd party review - which you will have to pay for. That will take a lot of time, and money.

Questions:
- Does your X have an atty?  If yes, have there been any conferences between the attys?
- Do you think your atty is a negotiator or a litigator?  You need a litigator.  The way to win in a case like this is to retain an aggressive atty that will leverage all the material you've got BEFORE the hearing
- Has anything been agreed or stipulated at this point?  Or do I understand that X agreed to certain things via text, but then would not follow through?  Keep in mind, the only thing that counts is a signed and executed formal legal document - otherwise, anyone can change their mind. Simply showing that she didn't follow through on a text message agreement won't win points...  don't get caught up in that.
- How does the insurance issue pertain to your custody case?  A: It doesn't.  Crack addicts get custody.  Plenty of people have legal issues outside of custody - it doesn't mean that they are bad parents.  If your atty is spending time on this vector in order to paint a picture for the court, I get it - but don't overspend on this one.
- What are the most recent issues you can identify.  Work backwards: past 30, 60, 90 day.  Then past 6 months.  Then past 12 months.  Then past 2 years.  Consolidate your list of events, concerns, etc., in concise chronological order and also in concise ranked order of severity in terms of neglect/abuse.  
- Do you understand the legal definitions of abuse in your jurisdiction? Generally speaking, violence and drug use are easier to document because there are clear laws prohibiting these things.  Emotional abuse is much, much more difficult to address.  Has your kid been through any counseling or evaluation at any point?  Do you have any associated reports?  

If I was in your position, I would prioritize as follows:
- Go for emergency or temporary orders.  not sure how this works in your jurisdiction.  I would not wait to walk into a standard custody hearing, instead I'd go in ASAP in order to ensure that my kid remains in my pre-k/school/district for continuity.  This might also help pre-empt the jurisdiction issue.
- Next tackle the jurisdiction issue.  Unclear from your comments if your atty has a strategy on this.  If I understand, your kid is still primarily with you and still in the same pre-k.  Is there any basis for your X to file elsewhere?  In my area, you'd file where the family/child resides or resided for the prior 1-2 years.  A change of venue would require a documented change of circumstances.  Does your X have documented new employment, family, or some other significant reason to move?
- In parallel with all of this, a litigator might be able to depose your X.  This process gets certain statements entered into the official record, and also begins to lay out the case - In theory this can encourage your X's atty to consider a path to agreement instead of a trial because this is when your mountains of "evidence" can influence how the other side is thinking... a huge journal, a list of witnesses, etc., may make your X realize that she's facing significant expense, and exposure - and that the best course of action is to stipulate or formalize an agreement rather than face a judge and lengthy process.

From what you've presented here, you're gearing up to present your life story. The story predominantly states what your X does wrong.  I hate to say it, but the problem is that the judge might not care. The courts see people who hate each other every day, and they cannot tell, immediately, who is credible. You may think that you have overwhelming evidence, but the court may not see it that way. In the absence of documented abuse, the mom is still the mom, and the judge is not a psych evaluator - at best, the judge can order a psych evaluator (again: time and money).

The other approach is to focus on what YOU do RIGHT.

Show that you provide the most stability, pay the insurance, do the doctor appointments, keep things on track with school... swoop in on a moment's notice no matter what to provide and care for your kid.

Show that you are super dad.

When the judge sees that you are clearly the defacto primary parent, the judge is more likely to order some version of status quo...  

That said, dads still get the short end of the stick almost everywhere, and this argument can be an uphill battle.  A litigator will know exactly how to play it to both expose or threaten to expose the ways in which the other side may not be credible, without even mentioning words like "BPD".

Here's an approach:  If you're the primary parent, and your X claims that she has a stable job, etc., is she prepared to pay child support to you?  An aggressive litigator will make that possibility clear to your X.  She will hate that.  It's another way to motivate her to come to some agreement...

Do you know what judge has been assigned to your case?  Does your atty know the judge?  Any insights into your judge/magistrate/whatever and the judge's history may be beneficial.  That's how a litigator will approach the situation.

Final comment for now:  You are the CEO of your case.  Not your atty.  Your atty works for you.  All the legwork you've done so far is hugely helpful, but only if used effectively.  Ask your atty how s/he plans to use it.  Is it ready for presentation to the court?  Is it clear, concise, digestible, credible?  What needs to be done to prepare for the hearing?

If your atty doesn't have clear, crisp answers, carefully consider if you have the right representation.

Hope you get to spend some time with your kid this weekend - hang in there.

[kells76]

Quick thought on this specific issue:

Generally speaking, a judge is not going to take all of your documentation as evidence without some validation process.  A judge is also not going to review thousands, or hundred, or even dozens of emails / texts / chats.  They don't have time for this, and your attorney should tell you this.  If your attorney is allowing you to compile all this material with the assumption that it will be presented, they are setting you up for a long process - with a ton of billable hours.  $10k is optimistic.

If you present this material, the judge might order some 3rd party review - which you will have to pay for. That will take a lot of time, and money.

If I'm remembering correctly, at least one member here has had success with summarizing extensive documentation on a "summary sheet" or "cover page", and then asking if the other party objected to what was summarized on the one page. So instead of everyone involved having to read through thousands of pages of emails, homework, letters, phone transcripts, etc, everyone looks at the "cover page" which might say something like:

emails: 76 total; 71 disparaging, 3 neutral, 2 positive
phone calls: 11 hours total transcript (556 lines; 544 lines disparaging, 10 lines neutral, 2 lines positive)
homework: 83 pages completed by son; 60 signed off by Dad, 20 signed off by neither parent, 3 signed off by Mom
etc

If you already know that the documentation will back up your "cover sheet", then it's a win for you whether the other party objects to it (puts the onus on them to go through the pile) or agrees with it.

Your attorney will know best if this will work for your situation.

[ForeverDad]

I will add to @EyesUp post.

Go for emergency or temporary orders... You already filed first, before your ex did elsewhere in another county, right?  It's just service got messed up?  If you raise that issue then a smart legal perspective might - no guarantees - be to ask that the two cases be merged (or hers deferred) into the first one.  In my case I filed first for divorce and my then-stbEx days later filed for child support in juvenile court but the notice letters crossed in the mail. Her court deferred to my divorce court case.

If that fails to bring the case back to your county then be sure to submit a petition right there making similar motion for action in your behalf as parent.  What you don't want is to be unprepared to have response to your ex's claims and petitions.

Something messed up with the first hearing date you had sought.  Is there a reason why you're depending on only mail service?  Waiting to see if she shows up on the scheduled date seems weak to me.  Why not have a process server serve her in addition to the mailed service?

Tackle the jurisdiction issue...  If your ex had moved to another state, federal law would have required she establish residence for 6 months before filing on custody matters.  How your state handles county vs county jurisdiction matters is a legal question that an experienced lawyer can answer.

As EU noted, ask the court to maintain the same school, preschool, daycare, residency arrangement for your child as before the case(s) were filed... for the least impact on the child.  Courts are charged with determining the best interests of the child and part of that is the continuity.

What about the claims back and forth...  Courts commonly hear vague and unsubstantiated "he always..." and "she always..." claims.  In general, those are viewed as hearsay and largely ignored.  Claims are usually deferred to investigators and professionals surrounding the court and court schedules another hearing to hear the reports.

It's important to understand that courts are supposed to rule on evidence and documentation.  (On the other hand, they're also give wide discretion on what they decide since every case is a little different from others and they know little about a case as it begins.)  So it would be wise for you to Let Go of what you feel is logical and fair and common sense and instead focus on following the pattern of how court deals with matters... evidence and documentation.

So when you list your incidents or 'documentation' be sure to include details such as whether there are reports by professionals, date/time, location, witnesses and events/narrative of the incident.

[livednlearned]

If I'm remembering correctly, at least one member here has had success with summarizing extensive documentation on a "summary sheet" or "cover page", and then asking if the other party objected to what was summarized on the one page.

My situation was sort of like this.

I printed out texts and emails and put them in two 3-ring binders. Then I tabbed and labeled them under different categories and gave them to my attorney. It saved me thousands of dollars to do this. I also created a timeline, similar to what you've done, but I did it by entering the events into a Google calendar and then printed it out in agenda view so I could see everything in chronological order.

That part was helpful for a deposition that my ex's lawyer called for. Depositions tend to be a way for attorneys to see if you're a credible witness. Being able to recall dates in the order they happened and understand them in the context of other things going on at the time helped cement my reputation as someone who was on top of things, whether it was doctor appointments or how long the cycle of dysregulation was for a given period of time (based on emails).

I also asked up front if there were ways I could cut costs. For example, the firm I used charged in 15 minute increments. If I sent an email, even if it took them 3 minutes to read they charged me for 15 minutes. If I sent an attachment, they charged more to open it and print it out to put in my file.

I offered to pick documents up from their office instead of having them send them by mail. These cases generate a surprising amount of documentation and they send hard copies by mail, which can add up.

Over time we worked out an arrangement where I consulted with junior lawyers because they charged less. For some matters, I worked with my senior lawyer. They conferred on matters so I knew my attorney was in the know but I didn't have to pay unless we litigated something in court.

There's another important way to save money but you're a ways off from that and hopefully won't get to that point. Essentially, it's making sure that your lawyer includes consequences for non-compliance. Courts give parents many, many bites of the apple. You pay for each bite. To avoid that, you include language that spells out reasonable consequences for non-compliance. Say your ex is supposed to give you the title to your vehicle. A consequence for non-compliance is that she has xx days to sign over the title and give it to you. Failure to do so means she pays for any legal fees incurred if the matter must be heard by the judge.

[ForeverDad]

I recall at least one parent here mentioned placing a stack of paperwork on the table at a hearing worked wonders.  The other attorney would ask the ex, "Can they have that much on you?" and the ex, knowing reality but never willing to admit it, caved and they reached a settlement.

Whatever works...

[GaGrl]

My husband's divorce from his uBPD,/NPD took nine months, even though she had been living with her partner for 7-8 years at the time he filed. They had been officially married for 31 years at that time. Too much weirdness to describe, but it was a combination of entitlement and cultural history (she is SE Asian and married him during a military assignment during the Vietnam War). They divorced in 2005.

My DH found that he had to put leverage on what mattered most to her. In his case, it was her business, which was semi-legit (an Asian massage parlor, which brought in about $1million a year, but certainly didn't present that $$$ for U.S. internal revenue filings. Seriously...it took him threatening to bring her business into the judicial financial filings for her to cave -- she wanted no "sunshine" on her business.

They had not for habit ed for 14 years at this point. He was willing for her to go her own way, til we reconected, and we wanted to marry. She could not believe that he would actually ask for a divorce -- her culture pretty much allowed women in their 40s to do whatever they pleased (post child bearing, and assuming arranged marriages). Except her marriage was not arranged, and she married him to "get to the U.S. as she confessed in front of H's sister).

The thinking is twisted.

[EyesUp]

@demosthenes2010,

How are you doing?

[demosthenes2010]

Hey all, thank you for your replies.  I will definitely be responding soon with the state of things and the next steps I'm taking.  Work has been a bear lately and I am honestly kind of depressed with how this is all going to have to play out.  Just causing me a lot of anxiety and dread.  As soon as I feel caught up on everything I need to do, I'll definitely provide a more comprehensive update with questions, etc...  Thank you all for offering your advice and feedback!

[Jw2111]

So sorry you’re going through this. I’m in a very similar situation with my ex with BPD; however, I have two young children with her. Now that we are nearing the end of our custody battle and she’s not getting everything she wants like she thought she would, she’s not resorted to trying to get me into trouble at work and calling DCF. It’s seems like it’s never going to end.

[ForeverDad]

Hi Jw2111, welcome to our site, though I'm guessing that though this is a first post, this probably isn't your first visit.  Why not start a new "topic" so you can get responses matching your own needs and situation?

As for your work, has your lawyer written a letter to her lawyer that work should not get involved with a marital dispute?  Of course, she may not even listen to her own lawyer.

[demosthenes2010]

Alright, I'm going to take some time to respond to the comments and to provide an update, if for no other reason than I need to get my head straight and my priorities in order and form a game plan and if I do it for you guys, I'll feel more motivated to complete it than if I am trying to address it alone in my room.

So, the responses first -
@foreverdad
I'm learning very quickly that the only way to approach this is with an absolutist mindset.  I wanted to be balanced and compassionate as I heard that judges like parents who can show that they are willing to foster a good relationship between the child and the other parent and because I honestly thought it would be best for my son, but a few things have happened that I'll outline later that have shown me (as if all of the previous incidents weren't enough) that my ex is never going to be honest or play fair or acknowledge anything that she has done, so you are correct that the threat of her behavior and the fact that she lives in a make-believe world is always going to be a threat and I actually should always be worried about what awful thing she is going to do next that is going to impact his life.
I am going to keep the "hovering anvil" in mind permanently and approach everything through that lense.  (Also, I got the "Danger, Will Robinson!" reference.  My son's name is actually a Star Trek reference, if that tells you anything about what kind of Sci-Fi fan I am).

@eyesup
I am actually in Ohio and the jurisdictional issues are around which county in Ohio to try the case in.  This is relevant because she filed for child support in the county she recently moved to so she can live in her boyfriend's house.  I do not want the child support issue decided there as I've heard it can be very difficult to reverse once in place and I don't want to be fighting for custody while also essentially paying for her lawyer via the child support.  

Regarding the validation process, I have several methods I intend to use to prove the validity of the records -
1.) I will align the text messages with records provided directly from Verizon to show that the messages were coming in and out at the exact time I claimed they were.
2.) I have sent requests to Meta and Snap Inc requesting my entire chat history and they sent it to me via email, from a company email address, pointing to a link with a password protected archive.  I can therefore prove chain of custody for these messages and show that these were absolutely sent between my ex and I on the dates I specified.
3.) I have metadata on the videos and photographs supplied showing that they were taken on certain dates, in certain places, from very specific devices (her phone or mine) to show that these were not doctored and did not originate at some other place or time.

I'm hoping that these methods will prove that all of the documents and evidence are original and should be allowed.

Regarding the billable hours, I intend to compile as much of it on my own as is possible to reduce the total amount of hours she needs to spend reviewing it, but you are right that it will take some time.

The main reason I am being so thorough is I don't want the case to rush.  I feel like my ex is absolutely going to use her typical tactic of obfuscating the truth, trying to make it appear like a two sided problem, trying to confuse the situation with irrelevant or out of context information, etc... If I am slow and methodical, even if it takes many hearing dates, I do believe I can show the extreme pattern of behavior detailing many instances of neglect, abuse, manipulation, theft, felony behavior, etc... that makes my ex unfit to have custody.  If it goes quickly, I worry the judge will rubber stamp it.

My ex does have an attorney and our attorneys spoke many months ago but nothing fruitful came of it.
I think my attorney tries to do these things in batches and is too busy to typically pay much attention to any one case.  As such, I am going to try and incentivize her by booking at least three hour long sessions to go through everything after I have it perfectly organized so I can show her how I'd like it to be litigated, where my ex will absolutely lie, how to catch her in those lies, and where I think my ex will attack my case and how I'd like to defend it and then ask for her feedback on where this plan might not work in court so we can make adjustments.
I have documents that I drafted from last March that were emailed and which she agreed to but you are correct that they were never signed.  My intention in providing them, even if they will not hold water on their own, is to highlight the pattern of behavior that makes her incapable of coparenting.  A single document that does not hold legal water still (I hope) will still matter in the larger context of my ex asking me to agree to many things and agreeing to many things herself, none of which she can stick to and all of which result in a degraded coparenting ability between us.
The insurance issue, as you noted, is just another example of the hundreds of instances where my ex puts herself and my son in situations that could be legally and financially troubling.  I am worried about a judge rubber stamping a joint custody agreement that puts my son and I in a terrible position and so I am trying to detail as many things as possible with evidence that show it is not one thing that makes her dangerous to him but rather that it is an ongoing pattern of behavior highlighted by hundreds of terrible decisions that will not only endanger her ability to provide a stable environment but will also set a bad example for him.
I like your idea around identifying the ideas in order and I have done that. Now, I am breaking them out into categories so I can list them chronologically but by category.  When presenting our case, I am going to go through each section and highlight how she has neglected/endangered him and his best interests section by section and showing that it is not a one off thing but a long standing pattern of behavior that overall shows years of bad parenting in every single one of those categories.

I do very much appreciate your suggestions and those from others regarding the emergency custody order.  We are going to request a temporary custody order during the first hearing that gives me legal and physical custody if for no other reason than the fact that I recently finished submitting all of his paperwork and the school wrote back saying that I needed a custody order from the court in order to enroll him (because it is public school, they have more strict requirements than they did for private pre-k where I signed him up on my own without issue).  I believe they may have reached out to her for confirmation because she immediately started looking into pre-k herself in her jurisdiction after I got the email from the school district.  That is very concerning to me and so I want to get it addressed ASAP.  I'm hoping that by showing how I have handled ALL of his educational needs so far, the courts will be inclined to let me continue doing so instead of letting her suddenly take the reigns for the purposes of her case so she can get him placed in her school district. I worry that if she gets that done, I am going to have a very hard time getting him back into my school district in the future and it will feed her case for being the residential parent for the purposes of education.  

Regarding the jurisdictional issue, I have followed up with my lawyer and explained that I wanted to file for a Judicial Hearing instead of an Administrative one in the county where she filed so that we could make the case to the judge in that county that it should be combined with the custody hearing I filed for in my county.  My lawyer said that it is going to be one or the other and we need to address it now, so she called the other county's child support agency to just ask them directly if we could have them combined into the custody hearing in my county.  IF that fails, we will request a judicial hearing and we will request there (again) that it be combined with our custody hearing in my county.  Regarding whether or not the custody hearing will even occur in my county, my lawyer says that in the State of Ohio, typically you have to be in your new residence for six months before you can demand that a custody hearing be heard there instead of the one you just moved from.  She has not been at her boyfriend's place (officially anyway) for more than six months, so I'm hoping we can prevail on that front.  I know she drove into Columbus to meet with her lawyer and file paperwork.  I don't know what kind, so I'm waiting to see what I get served with (if anything).

I have not yet discussed the deposition portion of the case but you aren't the first person to mention it and I do believe it is something we should do.  If I gave my lawyer the right questions to ask and the right pieces of evidence for them to show my ex during the deposition after each lie she tells while questioning her and asking her for clarification, her lawyer is going to be shell shocked.  I know my ex has not told her lawyer everything and the sheer volume of absolutely awful behaviors documented that would impact the case would almost certainly have him questioning the viability of her position afterward.  I'll follow up on that today to see if it is something we can get scheduled within the next two weeks.

I want to make it clear that while I may have presented my life story here, it was more for context so the forum could understand my circumstances.  I am absolutely going to whittle the details down to just those things that are relevant to some very specific areas that impact my ex's fitness as a custodial parent and prove that she is not capable of making sound decisions on behalf of our child or following through on what he needs.  I'm hoping that by adding the element of "these things all apply to this factor AND it is in chronological order to show a pattern of behavior" that the individual items will be much more relevant than a laundry list of wrongs that have me upset.

I am also heavily focused on what I am doing right in my evidence.  I read somewhere that my job in court is to highlight my own actions and the things I do right as well as addressing the things I've done wrong that she might bring up and being prepared to show how I've worked on them.  I should let me lawyer be the one who uses the evidence, witnesses, and examination of my ex to show how she is unfit.  I'm hoping that by utilizing this strategy, I can do the best job possible of illustrating why my son belong with me.

As for the judge that has been assigned, one of the first things I did was look them up once our case was scheduled.  It is a new magistrate who started in February of this year.  They were previously a GAL (I was a GAL many years ago, btw) and there is no case history of them on Google Scholar yet.  I'm hoping I can find something on them before the case starts so I can understand their approach to handling these sorts of things but I will not have the benefit of understanding much about them prior to the first hearing date.

I appreciate the kind words!  I had my kid for the last 9 days and it was wonderful.  I'm going to take the time leading up to this Wednesday (when I get him back) to work hard on the case and to get caught up on work and on my house, which I'm also falling behind on.

@kells76
I really like the idea of a summary sheet.  I could also use "chain of custody" method I was talking about earlier in my response to outline exactly how I can prove the origins of the messages/images and provide examples of that data from the files themselves as well as the emails from the service providers.  I don't mind paying for the data to be reviewed so it is admitted.  Again, my ex is the master of, "well, he was emotionally abusive" if I sent her an email or message admonishing her after the last 3 dozen or 4 dozen or 5 dozen horrendous things she's done.  Another one of her recent favorites (which I've never heard until it became clear this was going to court) is, "Well, on that night I beat you up, I was defending myself because you grabbed my arms!".  Mind you, she cut my arms up, bit me, and then repeatedly smacked me in the face about a dozen times while I just stood there and took it.  What she is referring to is when she was drunk and high on acid and I tried to stop her from taking our son away in our family van while she was that messed up.  I didn't injure her or bruise her or throw her or hit her... I was just trying to protect my kid by preventing her from putting him in a van while she was drunk and high out of her mind.  Regardless, she will try to isolate things like that to create a "he said, she said" or "tit for tat" narrative, which (again) is why I need to be meticulous in providing as many examples as possible.  If I go in 1:1 with her "examples" it is going to look like "well, who knows... this might just be high conflict on both party's sides" when that is absolutely not the case.  I'd rather pay a million dollars and spend 3x the time dealing with this to make sure it is done right and my ex cannot mischaracterize the MASSIVE difference in our behaviors over time.

@foreverdad #2 it isn't that the first hearing was messed up so much as my lawyer warned me that it is common for people to just claim that they never got the notice in the mail so that you are forced to serve them via service company.  I have asked my lawyer twice now if we can just bypass the concern and serve her via both right now to make sure the first hearing date on the 22nd goes forward as planned so that it is done prior to my ex being able to force the support case through in her new county but my lawyer seems to keep ignoring that particular line item in the two emails I've sent her since first creating this thread here on bpdfamily.  I might call her this coming week and ask her directly.

I am definitely working hard to make my evidence as "validatable" as possible and I intend to request a forensic evaluator as early in the process as possible.  I want the court to have someone who can go through the entire thing, top to bottom, with both evidence and a full psych eval, to prove exactly what my position is.  One of my biggest worries (I know I've said this already) is having this thing rubber stamped based on four points from either side.  If I can get an expert witness in the form of a psychologist/psychiatrist who can be admitted as an expert witness, I'm absolutely going to do that as I believe it will provide context to all of the examples I intend to provide.

@livednlearned I like the 3-ring binder idea.  I also have some video evidence of when I had to pull her out of a running vehicle at 6am when she had apparently driven home so drunk that she couldn't walk or speak until noon that day.  It has a time stamp in the metadata showing when it was taken and on which device it was taken (mine) to back up my assertion that she regularly drives so drunk that she is a serious risk to his safety but also that it results in her being unable to wake up for him in the mornings (and again, I have numerous examples of that and intend to bring in witnesses who used to have to call me from the bar asking me to come get her while I was home alone with our kid after midnight because she was drunk and starting fights with strangers).  Again, as I've said above, she may come to the court saying, "well, he likes to drink whisky... lots of whisky..." to try and create uncertainty.  The point is, I don't drink until I'm wrecking cars, punching animals, starting fights with strangers, passing out in cars so drunk I can't speak until halfway through the next day, assault people, etc... and I can't make that distinction with one or two points that I need to worry about the evidence being admitted for.

[demosthenes2010]

As for how things are going in general, work has become absolutely insane.  I really think I need a new job that pays more in that it would greatly help with the expense of doing this and reduce the burden of child support, should it come to pass, but also in that I am working an insane number of hours trying to manage numerous very large projects while also managing multiple teams.  I'm essentially playing the role of a COO who also needs to be hands on in half of the work in the company and I'm rapidly running out of steam.

Regarding the custody case specifically, my attempt to enroll our son in school for the fall were rejected as I did not provide a custody order showing that I had custody before submitting.  So now, instead of being able to say, "I already have him enrolled in school, as I have done before, so I should be named educational primary", I must say, "I tried to enroll him in school as I have done before but without a temporary order naming me education primary, I cannot finish the process."  This gives her time to go complete the process herself (which, again, she waited until less than a month before the hearing to do and only after I'm guessing the school reached out to ask her about my submission).  In addition to that, she has called me yelling and has messaged me stating, "I can't think of a single thing that I've done wrong.  You're just mad I left you because you are abusive." which is not true at all and has just resulted in more stress during my day.  This after I told her I was not interested in discussing it and I didn't want to go through the same old pattern of her making things up and lying to me and telling her I didn't want to engage (honestly, I should have just not answered the phone).  In the meantime, she has also just signed up for therapy within the last week, (again, within a month of the trial) so she can use it as a performative exhibit of how she is "working on things" when she never actually works on anything.  Just feels like she is making every last minute/last ditch effort to make it look like she is actually an involved parent who is trying to address the issues she never wants to address for the sake of appearances and I'm worried that it will actually work on the magistrate before she goes right back to neglecting our kid and being a horrible human being...

I'm not going to let it distract me.  Just going to keep putting together my evidence in a very well-organized and concise way, use the advice I'm getting here to narrow it down to only the relevant items, keep putting together a game plan for my lawyer, and keep researching so that when the hearing comes, I can be as prepared as possible and can adapt to whatever happens.

[ForeverDad]

It's a lot all of a sudden.

Child support ... If their calcs show you make a lot of money, wouldn't it be advisable to state that this is due to overtime and that you can't continue massive overtime much longer because you have to balance work and parenting?  Just saying that if you get in front of a later filing reporting lower income then it's not like you quit work or even chose lower paying work, you just returned to something closer to a standard work week.  However, it think it goes by annual income, your past history, it that may be a prospective strategy for a future year?

Also, my ex never submitted her income,so she was imputed with basic minimum wage.  Not much but at least it took the edge off what I had to pay.

Documentation ... Your big challenge at the brief! initial hearing to set a temp order will be to get the court to ponder your claims and glance even a little bit at your documentation.  At the very least try to get the court to accept that until now and her recent actions, you have been a majority time parent or at least a majorly involved parent.  Also her poor behaviors impacting your child.  You being routinely relegated to alternate weekend parent is a major downside for your child.  (Sorry, court won't care much about you, its stated focus is on the welfare of the minor children.)

I suspect all the fine details of your extensive documentation will be left to a later in-depth Custody Evaluation.

I recall my Custody Evaluator (CE) remarked in his initial report that he felt I was too worried about the details of my ex's behaviors.  But how was I to ensure the CE was made aware of all her manipulations of the system and agencies?

It has been commented here that a CE can make - or break - a case, so it is crucial that the CE is a not just anyone picked out of a crowd of professionals.  Someone the court recognizes as experienced, reputable and has the court's trust.  (Mine was a child psychologist who ended one session early so he could give a lecture at the local university.)  Just anyone could be a newer attorney, perhaps inexperienced, gullible or biased in favor of mothers.

[demosthenes2010]

@foreverdad regarding the child support, I have several things in mind and I intend to present them in their own section -

1.) She quit her job that she had repeatedly told me was "just a job" and "sex work is work" and "you don't understand, I'm just cultivating regulars" when I'd object to her messaging customers from the strip club and hiding it, including when she was sending nudes to one of them and their significant other found out and confronted her at the club.  I'm obviously not going to lay all of that out in court, but the point is she quit that job and actually now denies ever having had it but I have numerous photos of her in her stripper clothes taken from the dressing room of the club and another photo that says "when you make your month's rent in one night" overlaid on it with her holding a pile of money.  I will make the argument that she essentially voluntarily left a job where she was making more money than me on some weeks and while I did not agree with the job, she was adamant that it was a perfectly fine job that I had no right to be upset about because it was morally sound and didn't contribute to the various problems she had/has.
2.) Further, after quitting that job, she lied about keeping it for months while leaving me to cover all of our son's bills and to pay for the $800 cell phone bill she left on my account, continued having medicine airdropped to the island that she no longer lived on while having it billed to my account, sold the family van that I have receipts for paying for and kept all of the proceeds, and missed our son's healthcare appointments so I had to pay for those before rescheduling and taking him myself.  She not only quit her job and lied about it, leaving me to figure everything out financially, but she used the illusion of her having the job to trick me out of what little free time I had (this is when I had our son for 70% of the month) so she could go out instead when she messaged me, "Hey, I have to go to work to cover my share of bills so can you cancel your plans and watch him?" before dropping him off so she could go to the bar.
3.) Since then, she has had three different jobs with months of unemployment mixed in.  She is not putting forth a real effort to support herself or my son and forcing me to pay child support when I am also the one who has done the majority of responsible parenting and the associated logistics work just encourages her to remain an irresponsible and unaccountable parent when she is able-bodied and minded and is capable of work.
3.) In the State of Ohio, the purpose of child support is to ensure that the child has a similar standard of living across both homes.  She is currently driving a new Tesla Model S that her boyfriend bought her, is living in a 400k house in the suburbs where they have a room for my son, took a vacation to Disney last year (with the money from the van instead of using it for his actual needs), took another vacation to NYC last year, and regularly go out to eat and to drinks (like multiple times per week).  If the goal of child support is to ensure an equitable standard of living across both homes, enforcing it against me will do the exact opposite and will ensure I can never afford to buy a home to raise our son in or to invest in his 529 for his future college tuition.
4.) Her father was running an unlicensed dumpster business.  In order to get the money into a bank account, he created an LLC under her name (majority) and her boyfriends (minority stake).  I know he is doing thousands of dollars per month in business and I intend to subpoena those records to prove that she has much more income through the business than she is letting on in her personal tax documents and will make the argument that she is using it to shelter those funds from view of the court.
3.) If I end up getting educational and healthcare primary, I am hoping that the judge will rule (against the generic guidance and the child support chart) that child support is unnecessary as my ex will not be the one who has the regular expenses of daily life with him.

I'm hoping that these points, when used in conjunction, will present a solid argument against me needing to pay her out while she bounces around doing whatever she wants and neglecting the needs of our son, but we'll see...

Thank you for the advice on the CE.  I will try to keep these in mind when dealing with them and will try to focus more on the good things I've done than the negative things she has.  Maybe I'll ask them to review that evidence on their own while only talking about my experiences and time and efforts with my son.

[demosthenes2010]

My first day in court is tomorrow where the judge will likely set a temporary custody order leading into the rest of the hearing.  Any advice for the first day?  Anything specific I should focus on?  Anything I should be ready for?  I appreciate all of the support and guidance you all have provided to me so far and I'll be sure to provide an update once I get a moment to do so.

[ForeverDad]

My court resisted departing from its usual default preference for mothers.  Well, that was my perception, I had gotten a TPO from another court while she was facing a Threat of DV case yet domestic court in a half hour hearing assigned her temp custody and majority parenting time.  Me?  Nothing except alternate weekends, an evening in between and child support obligations.

So you have two hurdles, from my experience.  Do you know how much time your hearing will be allocated?

(1) You need to present enough evidence to convince the court the standard temp order (where mother gets default everything) does not apply.  Don't get lost in the details.  There won't be time for everything.  Make a list in priority order.  I made the mistake once by preparing my list (good) but grouping by topic (bad).  We only got the first items addressed and some major concerns were not touched.

(2) A half hour (like mine) is not much time to explain all your whys and wherefores.  The judge or magistrate may be thinking, who cares what the order is like, after all it's only temporary.  Ha!  The problem is this is unlikely to be a quick divorce.  In cases like ours a temp order can last the length of the divorce... one, two or even more years.  You want the "least bad" temp order from the start because (1) the court may not be inclined to modify it later and (2) a lousy temp order makes more work for you to get past it.

[ForeverDad]

No one can predict precisely how your spouse might enter the courtroom...  entitled? demanding? posing as abused victim?  Likely the judge may see through whatever persona she presents, yet courts often ignore what seems obvious to us.  To them it's another day at work, to you it's your life and your children.

Some of our members, such as LivednLearned, noted her court often seemed to side with the ex in an effort not to appear partial.  Might have even gotten yelled at for some arcane infraction... but then she walked out with what was important to her.

I didn't get that treatment.  My magistrate was like a bump on a log, nothing seemed to faze him. My lawyer said he was keeping his seat warm until retirement.

At this early step the court may claim to know nothing, who was at fault, or that both of you were at fault.  This is the time to be the parent with solutions.  Money, possessions, blaming, whatever, it will all come out, but in the final analysis you need to ensure you are the one advocating for the defenseless who may not even be in the courtroom... the little children.

[SinisterComplex]

My first day in court is tomorrow where the judge will likely set a temporary custody order leading into the rest of the hearing.  Any advice for the first day?  Anything specific I should focus on?  Anything I should be ready for?  I appreciate all of the support and guidance you all have provided to me so far and I'll be sure to provide an update once I get a moment to do so.

My response was going to be along the lines of FD so I will not regurgitate the same stuff as our friend covered things pretty well. The only tidbit I can add on is that you need to prepare yourself to not necessarily pin your hopes on one outcome or the other. The best thing to do is to focus on being level and composed.

Cheers and Best Wishes!

-SC-