Is it time to go to court yet?
After the disagreements last week regarding D’s upcoming schedule and how X wants him during the school week and will not agree to anything less than 50% of the time with HIS son, I emailed him on Monday…
I have concerns about D spending overnights at your house during the school week. He reports that he does not have a bed, clothes, pajamas, toothbrush, etc at your house. D has a difficult enough time getting enough restful sleep during the school week without subjecting him to sleeping on a couch.
My alternative suggestion is that for this week, you can pick him up at the Y after his swim practice on Friday at 4:30pm and can keep him until Sunday at 11am. I’ll pick him up when I drop A off. This way he’ll have a proper bed to sleep in, and will give you an opportunity to purchase clothes, pajamas and toiletries for his time with you.
Concerning following weeks, we have yet to determine what D’s schedule will be. However, I will be in touch when I know more.
Please let me know if you wish to have him with you from Friday at 4:30 pm until Sunday until 11am.
He responded with his own ideas, as he usually does. He also seems to think that if he just ignores what I’ve already said, then it never happened.
D requested, after discussion with me, that he stay with me from Wednesday after school until Saturday morning prior to his diving lessons. I intend to honor that choice and will be planning on having him with me during that time period. I will contact D to see what he prefers for pick up on Wednesday – whether that be me picking him up personally or if he feels comfortable enough to take the bus. I will drop him off at the Irving station on Saturday morning at 8.
I look forward to spending time with my son as already planned.
Really? This is your approach to compromise? I want to see him on THIS day at THIS time. This is what D wants. Trust me.
In your email to me last week, you said that if I did not agree to the plan that you had laid out to respond before the end of the week. I did that via my lawyer. I do not agree to D spending consecutive school nights with you. I believe that it will be too disruptive to the schedule we’re working to put into place for him now that school has started.
The timing of visits, as in what days it happens on, matters very little to D. What matters is that he’d like to come and visit you. You can see him from Friday after swim at 4:30 until Sunday at 11am. Eventually a judge will need to decide what will work best for D, and until then we’re trying to facilitate these visits to best meet D’s schedule and needs.
Please let me know if you’ll be able to pick him up from the Y at 4:30 on Friday or not.
And here comes the crazy!
I sent you the email and asked if you had concerns so that we might discuss them. There has been no discussion on your part about a set schedule beyond offering to allow D to visit with me every other week on the weekend. Your proposal is not even close to 50/50. What you offered is not a discussion that is meaningful nor does it take into account what D and I want. I offered to continue to discuss options with you at which point Armanda replied that we would need to go before a judge – that is not a discussion. That is you making a demand.
I am sorry if you feel that the schedule I proposed is going to be too disruptive to him now that school has started. I waited all summer long, trying to establish a schedule of visitation with you to no avail. Your only stated concern all along, that I can recall, has been that you didn’t want to allow him to visit because he didn’t want to and that it would be damaging if he was forced to do so. Visits that only occured when I was able to make direct contact with him or him with me because for some reason going through you first seemed to result in you not allowing it to happen. There has been no damage done with his visits with me and in fact they have led him to wanting more.
D wants to visit with me, he has said this to me. He has verbalized this fact and is ok with overnights as am I. We had an open and frank discussion about it. He gave me his concerns and I made sure they were addressed in the proposal I sent to you. I see no valid reason why he should not be allowed to visit overnight and you have not presented me with any reason that it should not happen. I can understand your concerns with him not being with you all the time, but I am his father and I have a right to see him too. You even stated in your email that the timing of his visits matters little to him, so the only one that seems to have an issue with when he visits me now is you. I would like to point out that although I can appreciate you “trying to put into place” a schedule for him, doing so with little regard to me and my time with him is not ok. Your actions lead me to ponder whether all the talking and patient attempts to work together on visitation with you have been done so with “bad faith” on your part.
Again, you have not given me any other proposal that resembles a fair compromise of time with my son, you have refused to continue to discuss the matter and offer compromise, and you have offered no legitimate reason that visitation should not occur as I proposed. For now, I will look forward to having D with me starting on Wednesday after school so that he may begin to adjust to the new school year and the new schedule that includes time spent with his father.
I hesitate to go into the following with you but in the best interests of both A and D I would ask that you reconsider your position and work towards reaching a fair and adequate compromise on visitation so that they will not have to go into court with us. These boys have been through enough already. A has expressed in the past a desire to be with me full time but I have made sure that the current schedule includes time with you on a fairly equal basis as we originally agreed to. D has expressed a desire to be with me for part of the week yet it feels as if you continue to make efforts to block this from happening. Regardless of my silence on the issue of motivation on your part, they both are seeing this happen and it is not a good thing. Although they may not understand everything right now and they may not appreciate all that is happening – one day they will. I am not asking for full custody of either of my boys. I am looking to share based on what is best for them regardless of our personal differences. There is still time and my offer to work on a reasonable compromise for visitation still stands.
Ok this is exhausting. Can you please stop being an asshole? Just for a second?
Unfortunately, it appears that a compromised isn’t going to be reached. A judge will have to make a final decision regarding these issues. In the meantime, if you would like to see D from Friday until Sunday this week, he is available.
So what does he do? Well he didn’t stop being an asshole, that’s for sure.
He called D at home last night. “Hey buddy! I’m going to pick you up at school tomorrow (Wednesday) and you can come to my house until Saturday. How does that sound?!” I hear D ask “Do I have a bed to sleep in?” Dad replies, “We’ll work it out, you can sleep in my bed or in A’s bed. And if you don’t bring clothes with you, we can pick some up. Sound good?!” D said, “Yeah ok.”
I explained to D that dad and I had already discussed this and the answer was already “No, not during the week. Friday, Saturday and Sunday was totally ok…but not during the school week.” D apologized for agreeing with his dad, I told him he didn’t need to apologize. It was ok, and not his fault. This is a grown up thing and its not ok for dad to try to use D to work around the rules I’ve already made. “So dad is using me?” D asked. I said, “Yes. He is.” D tried to rationalize, “maybe I should just go with dad. I don’t know what to do.” I asked him if he really wanted to go, or if he was just trying to keep things….” He interrupted me with an arm sweep in a slow and even line through the air in front of him and said “Caaaaaaaalm” Yeah, I get it. No one likes it when dad gets mad. D agreed. “Yeah, I’ve seen it. It’s not good.”
I went to the school this morning to drop off the current order that says contact is from Sun – Wed and is to happen at a specific location, which is NOT the school. Who knows how the school will handle it. If he can’t get D there, he’ll likely just go wait for him at home and take him from there.
I told D that no matter what happens today, he just needs to do the thing that makes him the most comfortable. No matter what he chooses to do, he won’t be in trouble. I packed his cell phone in his back pack. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t holding my breath.
Is it time to go to court yet? Seriously, this shit is out of hand.
Looking Forward 