I’m trying to decided whether or not to proceed with court and possibly redo my entire marriage settlement and parenting plan that would make me feel more confident that I can coparent my children.

I’m active military and live in Washington state. In 2019, while I was TDY in Germany, my ex took our two boys (8 and 11) to live in Florida without my knowledge nor consent. After immediately conferring with a lawyer, I decided it was best for them to stay because, at the time I had orders to move here to Washington. If I would have filed the temporary motion, my boys would have had to stay in Oklahoma where I was currently stationed, until some sort of agreement was in place. I could not have stayed there because I didn’t have enough time left to defer my orders to a later date. After marriage counseling, I decided that the marriage wasn't worth rectifying and filed for divorce in May of 2020.

Through out these past three years, the relationship between me and her has been contentious to say the least. We’ve been cordial enough to schedule exchanging the boys with our current arrangement, which is she has them in the school year and I have them in the summer, we’ll send a few pictures highlighting what they’re doing, but she has been reluctant to actually allow me to coparent and share important information about the boys. Fast forward through three years of mediation and negotiations, we finally arrived at a point where we had a signed marriage settlement and parenting agreement. I was done and tired with the process. The day that I was sending her the notarized paperwork for her to sign, I was on the phone with her letting her know that I was sending the paperwork over and that I was expecting that the general guidelines drawn out in the parenting plan, would open a dialogue to allow me to coparent my boys. She echoed a lot of what she had been saying in that the boys, [paraphrasing], “had everything they needed there in Florida and that I wasn’t necessarily needed for the raising them.

I decided not to send the parenting agreement because of what she said and I drew up on that’s more specific. One that specifically states the implied agreements that the court would consider reasonable. Things such as requiring the exchanging of information 3 times per week, noting who can and can’t discipline the children, the expectations of communication and a few others. I presented this to my lawyer and she says that although everything I put in there is reasonable, the court that would determine the outcome of a court case wouldn’t likely allow specifics to be dictated in order to keep the parenting plan as fluid as possible in order to account for unexpected circumstances when it comes to raising the children. She instead advised me to proceed with the original parenting plan because the court could consider anything that inhibits the reasonable expectation of parenting, to be in contempt of court.

I’m not satisfied with this, as 1. My children now live on the opposite side of the country than me and it’s out of my control and 2. She has shown no real interest in wanting to coparent and has shown that she will simply play the system in order to barely keep the agreement viable. I’m strongly considering getting another lawyer and just starting from scratch. I’d love to know what your thoughts and advice on this F’d up situation. Thanks for reading all of this.