My ex-wife and i have a four year old daughter together. When she left our daughter was one and a half. She took our daughter with her at first, but brought her back after two weeks because ‘she couldn’t handle it.’
Over a period of about six months I tried letting my daughter have a relationship with her mother. At first we lived six hours apart so i would drop her off with her mother and plan to pick her up again in a month. Each time she would bring her back after about a week or two because, once again ‘she couldn’t handle it.’ After a few months she moved closer, so she was only an hour and a half away. I would bring our daughter to see her about every other weekend but would later find out that the whole time my wife had her, our daughter was with a babysitter the whole time, and my wife had been out drinking.(This was the case when she lived farther away too) Whenever I would call to check on her, my wife would sound wasted. I would hear from mutual friends and see on myspace that the whole time she was supposed to be spending time with our daughter, she was out at the bars and sleeping around instead. She didn’t deny it. Sometimes she would just not show up when it was her time to come get our daughter.
Also during this time she was using my car which i gave her money to make payments and buy gas so she could come visit and drive our daughter places. But of course she used the money for something else (going out to the bars) and i had to make the payments again myself.
Finally I told her that if she wanted to see our daughter, she would have to prove to me that she could handle it and would be responsible. I told her if she called every day for one month to check on our daughter i would let her see her again. She stopped calling after a few days.
Over the past two years she has called sporadically to tell me that her dog died, or to wish my family a merry Christmas, usually not even mentioning our daughter. She did call once after about a year to ask if her father could come visit our daughter, but i said no since she didn’t even know who he was, and because he had never bothered to see her before.
Our daughter now has no idea who her mother is, because she hasn’t seen her since before her second birthday.
When we were divorced my ex-wife didn’t show up to the custody hearing, and later signed a paper saying that i would have full custody, and she would be able to visit occasionally when we both agreed on it. She was supposed to be paying child support but hasn’t paid a penny.
My ex-wife is now pregnant with another child (mutual friends have told me she didn’t want to get pregnant in the first place, and that she is working at a bar, still going out to the bars drinking non-alcoholic beer so it looks like she is still partying, and didn’t tell anyone she was pregnant until really late into her pregnancy)and is suing me for FULL custody of our daughter. She is claiming that i violated our parenting plan by never letting her see our daughter and by not telling her when we moved into a new house. The only time she asked to see her was after she found out she was pregnant and i said no because she hadn’t called to talk to our daughter or asked to see her in two years, and our daughter doesn’t even know who she is. Everything in the papers she sent is complete LIES, saying that i never let her see our daughter and that she has been trying to. I have about seven character witnesses lined up to testify against her. They are all mutual friends, or her friends who she has screwed over. My brother, who must have been a reference or something, has gotten numerous phone calls from debt collectors and even the police a couple times looking for her.
We have met with our lawyers, and our lawyers have recently met with the judge to determine if she will throw the case out, or if she wants to take it to court. I have been waiting a week and haven’t heard anything. What are her chances of her actually winning full custody, or any custody at all? Our daughter doesn’t even know who she is.
