Buckle up. It's a long ride. Advice is at the bottom.

Outcome: 50/50 custody, ex pays me modest child support.

Her requested relief: "90/10," I would get one night every two weeks, supervised visits two to three days a week. Some $700/month support, over $1,000 in child care costs.

My requested relief: 50/50 custody, $100 support (paid to me)

Background: My ex is controlling. This is part of what led to our divorce, but there are many reasons, some my fault, some hers. I just wanted to be done with our marriage, but I also wasn't willing to give up being with our kids. I'm still not sure what she wanted-- was it for me to not have any money? Or to not have a relationship with our kids? Frankly, I don't give a shit about the why. I just wanted to be done with her after I tried so hard to save the marriage and was met with stonewalling. If I never see her again I won't shed a tear.

We have two kids, one is a toddler and the other is a young child. Boy and girl.

Another important piece of info is that I work nights, twelve hours a night, seven days in a two week period, assuming I don't take overtime.

Story: She serves me with papers at the marriage therapist's office. She asks that she can buy my equity of the home. Fine. She asks that we both keep our own major personal property, e.g. retirement accounts, vehicles, etc. Fine. She then informs me that she will be willing to let me see our kids every day... what? She wants me to have supervised visitation any day I want it, but will not "allow" me to have overnights. Actually, her words were that I "would be allowed to visit the kids every day and can come over once a week for dinner as a family."

Fuck no.

I wasn't going to let that happen. I immediately started looking at lawyers in our area. I set up a matrix for consultations, I even went three towns over to get consults with lawyers. Now, if you're at all familiar with shopping for lawyers you know consults don't offer a whole lot of insight, but they're more of a sales pitch: the lawyer is selling himself as your best option, you are selling yourself as a respectable client. Well, that's fine. I wasn't looking for free advice. I was looking to limit her options. I made sure to the best lawyers in town, as well as some of the worst.

For those of you that don't know this yet, getting a consult with a lawyer creates a loose lawyer-client agreement, meaning those lawyers wouldn't talk to her at all, unless they wanted to risk being reported to our state bar. Now, this relationship is really loose. In fact, so much so that if they did take her as a client then reporting this to the state bar would likely do nothing. Most consults where I am are either free or the fee is often waived, making it so that person isn't exactly a client. But very few lawyers would risk the conflict of interest.

Back to the story. I started documenting. This is important because I knew I would need to know when each conflict happened, what the outcome was, what my actions were, what hers were, how it could have been better or worse, and who said what. I shorthanded most of it, but I kept pictures and massive amounts of text messages. We're both pretty smart. Neither one of was going to say anything that would singularly win it for the other. But she fucked up.

She started doing things that no parent should do, regardless of the situation. On at least one occasion she told our daughter that I wasn't doing my job around the house (untrue, but I guess this can be a matter of opinion). Then she told our daughter that I didn't care about her or our son, that I just wanted to be with mommy. I mean, what the actual fuck? Who tells their kids that? The funny thing was I couldn't have given a fuck less about her at this point. I had already been dating since a couple weeks after I was served and I had even started seeing someone exclusively by the time I moved out. It wasn't exactly serious at that point, but I'm old enough that I'm not into playing games and I just wanted a relative amount of companionship that I had been missing for nearly five years.

Remember when I said my ex was controlling? It was to a fault.

We were still living under the same roof, but she was making it unbearable. There were a million little things that she was doing to be as hostile as possible without making it clear to outside observers that she was being hostile. It got to the point where I felt I had to move out for my own safety. Honestly though, this was my second mistake.

At the time our mortgage payment was ~$800. I moved out and started paying ~$800 in rent. So I went from dual income to single income, paying the same monthly. She did, too, but between the fact that she makes a little more than I do, I've been paying support for the interim, and that her family has been helping her financially since the filing, she has felt no comparative pressure.

(As a side note, I found her notes on what was going on while we were still living together and, just out of curiosity, I compared them with mine. The sheer amount of lies and fudged numbers were overwhelming. For example, one day I had spent seven hours straight with our kids, taking them to the park, playing, making dinner, bathing them, reading stories, and doing their bedtime routine. She wrote that I spent three hours with them and that I put them in bed without food.)

DO NOT MOVE OUT.

Just don't do it. I didn't listen to my lawyer and advice from others, I paid the price. I could have saved up money for when I was finally forced to move out by the court.

At this point she was denying me overnights with our son, but not with our daughter. Her reasoning was that he needed specialized care and she was the only person qualified to give him that care; that to let him be in my care was dangerous and could possibly kill him. I fought it, but I didn't keep him in the overnights when she would pick him up I acquiesced. The one and only reason I didn't just lock her out of my apartment when she came to pick him up was that I knew it would have made her go berserk and create more issues than it fixed.

From there we had a temporary matters hearing. It was interesting, but it went far better than I could have expected. The interesting part is that she got two different people to lie for her. HARD. One said I was a suicidal alcoholic and the other painted me as being a horrible, dis-attached father. Neither had more than a dying spark of truth. I did struggle with suicidal ideations at one point, but I was in therapy and had been taking medication. I was actually off of the meds by the time the temporary matters hearing rolled around (at the supervision of my therapist and PCP) and my therapist said I had made a remarkable recovery. Would you be surprised if I told you the recovery only started making headway when the paperwork was filed? The other spark of truth was that I was not as present as I wanted to be. This had been due to my previous depression and my work schedule. That said, I was quite present and I spent all of my spare time with our kids as all long as our kids were awake and I was awake. I had actually completely changed my sleep schedule, too, so that I could maximize my time with our kids. It's taken a toll on my health, but it's honestly worth it.

But there was one caveat: she got primary care, two more days every two weeks. In hind sight, this was a test designed for her. I'll get into it, but (spoiler) she failed it.

I was going to be tight, though. I was ordered to pay $700/month in support and half the daycare costs, coming to roughly $1800 a month. In other words, 3/4 of my month's pay if I didn't get overtime. So actually, tight was an understatement. I was fucked. Throw in the fact that my ex was not (and still hasn't) started the paperwork for the refinance, I have been broker than broke.

And here was my last fuck up. I knew I could ask the court to reconsider an amount for temporary support, but I didn't know you could ask them to reconsider their finding for custody. I asked for the former, but not latter and I got neither (the court was following the state guidelines, we were just paying an ungodly amount for childcare, which was necessary before she filed for reasons that I can't get into on reddit, but by the time of the temp matters hearing was not necessary).

So I continued what I was doing. I stayed the course, kept my nose clean, documented everything.

I was letting my ex come over in the mornings and evenings, on her way to and from work, whenever our kids were in my care. It wasn't a problem at first, but then she started overstaying her welcome, which would get the kids into a frenzy and make our bedtime routine go for about an hour longer than it should have. This was taxing on our kids, emotionally and physically. So I told her she was no longer welcome past a certain time at night.

Oh boy.

She came over anyway. I think one time was enough for her to realize that she made a huge mistake. She was literally trespassing. I won't get into what she did, but it was fucked up and made our kids hysterical that night. Nobody was physically hurt, but it was the wrong thing for a caring mother to do in that situation.

I said she was only allowed over in the mornings. Then suddenly morning routine started taking twice as long. I told her she was no long welcome over and that if she wanted to see our kids on my days it was going to have to be at their respective day cares. It was that, and the fact that she was using this time to take pictures of my apartment while she was supposed to be breast feeding our son. Do I even need to mention the fact that letting her over was above and beyond on my part in the first place? It's not a common practice among divorce couples.

So our final court date was looming. Again, I don't have a lot of money. My family isn't as well off as hers. I wanted to close this deal without heading to a costly trial. I told her I wanted to sit down and see one last time if we could come to an agreement. We carved out some time and got into the same room, no kids. I sat down and said "I think if this time has proven anything it's that I'm not a danger to [our son]."

She replied, "No, he's not safe in your care."

I just got up and left. It was clearly a waste of time.

Court: Her narrative was that I was an unfit parent. Mine was that she was controlling and will keep our kids away from me absent a court order.

She called in herself, me, our nanny, and our pediatrician as witnesses. I called in her dad, my aunt, and a previous child care provider as my witnesses.

Her evidence was largely just tens of pages of our text messages and a bunch of graphs and charts based on "data" that she and several others "tracked." The graphs and charts were more than a bit much and only worked to make her look more controlling.

My evidence was five different text exchanges between us and the temporary matters order.

Her charts and graphs were thrown out, mostly because they couldn't be authenticated, and thus were hearsay. We didn't object to the text messages and none of our evidence was removed, despite numerous objections.

I'll just talk about the testimony that I think made a difference in the case.

The pediatrician: she was called to talk about our son's growth, how it had been off track since he was under our joint care, and how I didn't come to the majority of our kids' appointments. The caveat here is that I work nights so I could only make it to appointments at certain times, times that my ex would never schedule appointments for because she would miss work. Whenever I tried to schedule an appoint for a time I could make it, ex would reschedule to a time I either could not make it or a time that would make me miss several hours of sleep. And when it got to the growth issue, our pediatrician testified that there is no way to isolate why our son was having issues, but in her opinion it was likely because that he was recently sick. Her second strongest witnessed helped me more than her.

The nanny: I knew the nanny, my ex's strongest witness, would lie. She already lied in the affidavit. When she started testifying my lawyer got a quizzical look on her face, scribbled something down, and slid it over to me.

"Is she smart?"

I wag my head.

I took this as a cue. I stared at the nanny the whole time. I could see she was on fire in the hot seat. She was uncomfortable and felt the pressure. She said her part for my ex then there was a brief pause while the parties transitioned for cross examination. I turned to my lawyer and said "remember the knife story?" She nodded. "When you're done, ask her about that." I went back to staring while my lawyer shredded the nanny to pieces.

Then we got to the "knife story."

"Was there ever an incident where [NoName's son] was under your care and he was holding a steak knife?"

"Yeah."

"Tell us about that."

Insert a story about how I came upstairs after waking up to find my son sitting on the ground next to the dishwasher, holding a steak knife and the nanny in the same room, doing nothing about it. Yes, I'm serious. This happened.

"Did you tell [NoName's ex] about this?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I felt like NoName dealt with it and that was that."

So yeah, she's a fucking liar and the court saw that.

My testimony and my aunt's: This was basic testimony about how my ex was controlling and how she tried to create distance between me and our kids. Neither one of us even embellished and it was actually embarrassing to tell and hear all this because it means I was the dumbass that fell for my ex's shit.

Former daycare provider: This was the pinnacle of a perfect witness. I needed this witness because she could, and would say ever every single thing I wanted to say but couldn't. The benefit here is that I wouldn't be the one saying it. I didn't coach her. My lawyer didn't coach her. In fact, when my lawyer contacted her she flat out said she wouldn't testify without a subpoena. She was terrified of backlash from my ex.

She told story after story about how my ex harassed her, her staff, and even bothered other parents. She said my ex had been asked to leave multiple times due to snooping when our daughter wasn't even present. She talked about how my ex was spreading rumors among my witness's staff, of trying to poach my witness's staff, how my ex accused my witness of starting a cult, etc. She said it got so bad that she was even considering a restraining order against my ex. There's a shitload more, but this story is already long enough. I was even surprised by some of this testimony because I simply didn't know the true extent.

The turnaround for the permanent order was quick.

Again, the result is more than I even wanted. I just wanted to be with our kids for a reasonable amount of time. I wasn't even going to ask for support, my lawyer was just so disgusted with my ex that she threw that in there and told me I deserve it for putting up with my ex's shit for long.

Takeaway: If you're going through a divorce or about to go through one, here is the takeaway you need.

  1. Document it. Send yourself text messages, take pictures, record a video, whatever. Just document it. Very little of it can be used in court directly (they aren't going to accept your diary as evidence), but this helps you track things, lets you bring up what's going on, and can refresh your memory for testimony or witnesses.
  2. Keep your nose clean. Maybe you're depressed or you just like weed/drink. Don't do that shit. You're kids are worth living a straight edge life. But you don't even need to go that far. Just be a responsible adult and the only thing people can bring against you are lies. Example: the affidavit that said I was a suicidal alcoholic said they witnessed me stumble home drunk. I knew this person's schedule and I knew that they were at their house when I came home. I got my uber receipt from that night which showed I got home after they were usually already asleep. (no, I wasn't caring for my kids that night. Yes, I was drinking. I had a friend in town that I deployed to Afghanistan with. Yes, I drank responsibly).
  3. Don't say "my kids" in court. Yes, they are your kids, but they aren't your kids alone. My ex kept saying "my kids," and when my lawyer pointed that out my ex was incredulous. This looked awful for her, especially given that our narrative was that she was controlling.
  4. Have a plan and stick with it. Being sporadic helps nobody, especially not you. This is even more true for your parenting style.
  5. Don't try to screw your ex over. This does nothing to help your kids.
  6. If you were a good parent before the divorce it will show throughout the divorce process.
  7. Remember that you are not god's gift to parenting. A little humility goes a long way, especially in court and twice as much with your kids. Respect your ex when you're with your kids. I don't even tolerate my daughter saying anything disparaging about my ex to any degree, even if nobody else is in the room.
  8. Get consults with the best three lawyer and the worst three lawyers in your area. Going against bad lawyers is as bad as going against the best lawyers. I actually learned this one from a coworker going through a divorce right now.
  9. Don't move out until you absolutely have to.
  10. Do your research. I am a child of divorce. Two, actually. I knew what it was like going in. My ex had no clue. She thought everything would be handed to her. She might have even had primary care (BIG maybe), but she had no clue about anything throughout the process. She even urged me to agree with her original proposal, saying we could change it later. Yeah, for $2,000, and that's if we agreed to change it and what to change it to.
  11. Be the best parent you can be. You're kids are the important part. Never forget that.
  12. Ride it out. If you are a dad the cards are stacked against you a bit. If you fight and keep fighting, and you were a good, involved parent before the divorce and continue to be one throughout, you'll make it through.

If I remember anything else or if anyone adds something below I think is helpful I will tack it on in an edit.