reddit post

jukutt · 2020-11-02T08:05:44+00:00

Holy moly, this sounds fucking awful. I have no experience with anything belonging to the field of marriage, however from a pure psychological standpoint it should be clear that given the chance she will try to destroy your life, and you should act under that assumption.

I would seek physical meet ups with others to share your story, these can be found over the Internet. Further, I would consider therapy or things akin to that to learn mechanism (mindfulness, meditation etc) to deal with the extreme mental attack you are receiving. I would assume that you show symptoms of depression (and suicidal ideation) at least in some way, and received some hefty mental scars from you experience. You already did the first step by finding people to talk about it!

There are other people on this subreddit and on reddit in general who are better suited to talk to you about this, since they have more experience for such cases.

jukutt · 2020-11-02T08:07:27+00:00

Here is the post from the google doc:

I apologize in advance for offering the lengthy version, but all of the details below are critical to understanding the significance of my present situation. I greatly appreciate anyone who will take the time to read this and give me their honest opinions.

My ex-wife and I have been divorced since 2015 and we have two boys, ages 9 and 6. I have worked for the U.S. Dept of State for roughly 12 years and my career has required me to work overseas for 2-3 months at a time, but rarely have I been gone longer than 5 months in a calendar year. My ex wife worked as a federal government employee.

We both had retained attorneys at the time and we had both incurred significant legal fees only 6 months into our separation, mostly due to bitterness stemming from my decision to divorce her and her refusal to grant me access to our children during the separation.

To offer a few examples of how much resentment she had in the immediate weeks after being served divorce papers, she completely emptied the funds in our joint bank account (~$18k) into her own personal account she opened and she abandoned our family residence in VA with our children, leaving me with the sole burden of paying the rent and all other associated costs with no money. I quickly learned that such things were completely legal in the absence of an agreed upon and filed separation agreement, which we had thus far failed to mediate.

Towards the end of our requisite year long separation (and before a custody order had been agreed upon), she accepted a job outside the government sector---a position with a private defense contracting company located in CO. While I was on a work trip to Africa, she moved with our children from VA to CO without my knowledge or permission. She sent me notification of this via email. I also learned that she was dating an Army soldier based out of Ft. Carson in CO and that her income had more than doubled with her new position.

I panicked and contacted my attorney, who assured me that he could file an emergency motion to enjoin to force her to return the children back to VA. He also advised me that it was highly likely that, once she returned to VA, that she could then pursue a legal avenue to move to CO by citing my career requirements to work overseas for part of the year. He advised me to offer to drop the motion to enjoin in exchange for settling on the terms I’d set forth in the custody agreement. Our legal fees at this point were roughly 50-60k each, so this seemed like the best course of action to finalize terms and begin an enforceable custody schedule. At this point, I had not been given access to our children.

The custody schedule in the final agreement gave me one weekend visit per month during the school year and 6 straight weeks of summer custody over the summer. Travel costs for my travel from VA to CO were to be split. Although the agreement was filed in VA, I learned that in order to enforce custodial terms, it needed to be filed and registered in CO. Due to Colorado’s complicated process of registering an out of state order (and the general disinterest from the attorney in CO who I hired to accomplish the task), it took roughly 6 months before custodial items were enforceable in CO.

During this time, I transitioned to a satellite location for my job in North Carolina. This was a mutual family decision as my acceptance of this position took place when we were still married and before the separation.

Once my ex wife had settled herself and the children in CO, she intentionally violated most custodial terms such as refusing Skype access on the designated days/times and routinely canceled my monthly visitation with sometimes only a week or so of notice. Again, during the 6 months it took to get the agreement registered in CO, I was powerless to take any legal action to enforce my custodial rights. At this point, she and I had both easily spent over 80k each in legal fees.

At the time, I had hoped that her new relationship and the comfort she was granted to live 2k miles away from me would have dulled her animosity and permitted us to get along better. Instead, I learned that she allowed her Army boyfriend to move in with her and that they had actually recently gotten married without mentioning so much as a word to me. She instituted bizarre demands from the boys, such as forcing them to call him “dad” while forcing them to refer to me as “father”. She would routinely tell them things like “your father chose to leave our family”.

Against the terms of our agreement, she made medical/dental decisions without me and enrolled them in sports that infringed upon my monthly custodial time with them. With their school, she listed her new husband as their dad and would force me to contact the school myself to get any information at all. She would refuse packages from me or anyone in my family addressed to the boys for birthdays or Christmas when I didn’t have scheduled custody.

In the spring of 2017, I finally received amazing news. She sent me an email advising me that her husband had received military orders to report to Ft. Bragg in NC and that they would be moving there in only a few months. I immediately worked with a local attorney to work out details for a revised custody agreement since they would be living only an hour from me.

The negotiations were again very expensive and drawn out because she preferred to nitpick and minimize my custodial access as much as possible. This went so long that they had already lived in NC for a month before she agreed to let me see the boys. The hold up was that she demanded I put in writing that I’d permit her to move the boys back to CO once her husband’s tour at Ft. Bragg was over. I obviously refused because I didn’t want them to move to CO the first time around. I knew that once she moved to NC, it was going to be left in the hands of a judge as to whether or not they’d be permitted to return to CO in 2 or 3 years once her husband’s military tour was over.

Title	reddit post
Author	deep6er
Upvotes	9
Comments	4
Date	November 1, 2020 11:02 PM UTC (5 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/jmc37j/reddit_post/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/reddit-post.841451 https://theredarchive.com/post/841451

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