This turned into a damn novel. I'm sorry. It's cathartic to write about, apparently.Exposition: My daughter will be five in March. I'm so excited! She's growing up into such a wonderful little human, and every day I'm proud to be her mother.I co-parent with my fiance, who I've been with for a few years now. He is the only male figure in her life other than our extended family, and he treats her like his own - he's currently in the bathroom getting her ready for school, just like he does every morning. His family treats her as if he's her father, his biological daughter calls my daughter her sister, his mother doesn't treat one child differently from the other. If you didn't know prior to meeting us, you'd assume that my partner and I procreated and produced my daughter. She even has blue eyes and freckles just like my partner - recessive genes like woah, I'm Mexican-American - so strangers just assume that they're blood. She calls him Daddy and the adoption paperwork is filled and can be filed once we have a marriage certificate.Obviously, I *did not" procreate with my current partner. My daughter was conceived with an ex-boyfriend of mine that I was with for several years between the ages of 18 to 22. He was much older. There was a history of domestic violence before we conceived (unplanned). I would try to leave, he would threaten to kill himself. He'd hit me and my friends would give me ultimatums to leave him. He'd cheat on me with impunity. When I got pregnant it just got worse.He graduated to actually beating me. He tried to date rape a mutual friend who was on pain meds but was stopped by her roommate. I visited my mom overnight for Christmas and I came home to my dresser thrown across the room. It was bad.I managed to leave him before the birth, but we got back together right before labor, then I left him again after I have birth because he tried to change my natural birth to a C-section then called me a c*nt for wanting his help two days after I pushed out a baby. This went on for about seven months. I'd try to break away but would end up trapped back in his grip.One night, coincidentally the night before we moved into a different house, he got arrested for indecent exposure. He had been going to one of those closed gas stations where they lock it up at night and you go to a window to do your transaction and masturbating while those poor girls were basically stuck in a glass box. It wasn't the first time because the police were actually looking for him. I woke up in the middle of the night to his mom sobbing. I asked her what happened. She told me what he got arrested for. I felt nothing. I rolled my eyes and went back to bed.The next day I was so sick. Those stomach bugs that make you feel like you're dying. He gets out of jail, helps us move. I'm still sick. We're in the new house, I ask him to watch my baby for a few moments so I could run down to the basement to get my purse so he could get me medication. He agreed.My daughter fell down the stairs right behind me. She wasn't even a year old yet. Thankfully she was okay but that was the straw. I dealt with the abuse. The cheating. The arrests. No help with the baby. Judgement for my parenting. Disrespect. I did not deal with his neglect of my child.I told him I was done, I was leaving. He had JUST been arrested the night prior for indecent exposure and couldn't handle not fucking up for five minutes with a child that he helped bring into this world! He started screaming about how he didn't want to live, and went into the back part of the basement to hang himself, locking the door behind him. I kicked the door down and jumped up on a workout bench to cut him down. When he was down, he slammed his face against the concrete and then ran off, screaming.I took my daughter and fell asleep. The fallout was extreme. He didn't kill himself, as he never planned on it. I had four years experience with his craziness, it was probably the fifteenth time something like that had happened. I start looking for a place, find one a few days after he gets out of the psych ward, and plan on leaving when him and his mom were out of town. They found out and sent family members to keep me there against my will even though they gave me two weeks to find a place and the clock wasn't on my side.Thankfully, I had three large male friends come help me escape. I escaped! I did it!Then a few days later my Ex started to demand over night visits with my less than year old breastfeeding child who he had never dealt with at night, just a few weeks after getting arrested for indecent exposure.Note: over the months that I lived with these two people, my ex and his mother, I managed to leave the house twice, once because I begged and pleaded to leave my sleeping child for a few hours and the next because I hired a babysitter. My ex had his excuses, and his mom would tell me that her vertigo and other health issues were too extreme for her to care for a child. Then suddenly, they find the capacity to do so as soon as I leave?When I expressed my discomfort, his mother loudly announced that they had more legal right to my child than I did. I then decided that I wasn't comfortable without a custody agreement in place and asked them to contact me via their attorney. I had already gotten threatening letters from their attorneys before, so I knew they had one in the wings. I contacted my local police department and DCYF office who assigned me a social worker and had my back against my ex and his mother. DCYF would have helped me in court and everything due to my ex's recent criminal history.They never contacted me like they were supposed to. I found out that he had started to expose himself on our SEVERAL college campuses long before he was arrested, having been arrested for it two or three times by campus police before I found out. Found out that he had been dating a seventeen year old kid for two years during our relationship. Got caught again for exposure. Went to court against him for child support, he tried to follow me into the courthouse bathroom, yelled at me across the courthouse, and tried to follow me out to my car (all of this was witnessed and documented by the sheriff at the court) Demanded the judge go after me for visitation. Showed up dressed like the joker. I didn't want child support, I just wanted to be safe. He was unhinged and jumped at the chance to be free of child support. The judge saw this.There hasn't been much in the years since. His mom sent me threatening messages about grandparents rights, then sent me much nicer messages about please letting her visit my daughter when she figured out that she didn't have a leg to stand on to sue me for grandparents rights. I blocked her. She had her other son's new girlfriend message me a few years ago to ask to see my daughter. I said no and blocked her, too.Recently, though. My ex. Ho boy. He got arrested to soliciting a minor child for sex and sending her explicit photos of himself. Felonies. In my state, a minor is between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. A minor child is under the age of fourteen. I'm not certain how old she was, but it was either twelve or thirteen. She was also a group of police officers from what I hear. Talk about glo up, amirite?So, TL;DR: My ex is an abusive, predacious pedophile who has not interacted with my daughter since she was less than a year old, does not pay child support, and is maybe currently in jail?End of expositionNow, as my daughter grows older, the fact that I will have to sit her down someday to explain at least some of this to her is weighing heavily on my mind. I don't need any advice that says, "Your daughter deserves to know her dad!"1) No child deserves that and 2) she has a wonderful dad that she has a wonderful relationship with.I don't think that she'll feel like there's something "missing" in her life, or anything like that. I respect my daughter immensely and don't lie to her. I don't want her finding out via high school blood typing or a DNA test or if she ends up with gout when neither of her parent's family's have a history of it. I want her to be aware.I also want her to be aware of the fact that these were not normal circumstances. I would never keep a person's child from them unless absolutely necessary for the child's welfare. DCYF told me that if I had released my daughter into his care and anything happened, I too would be legally culpable because he was a known predator. Even before he was arrested, even before I left him for good, I had the terrible thought that he might try to hurt my daughter when she was her most vulnerable. I'm terrified that someday, she'll ask me who this man is on FaceBook messaging her.When do I even start bringing this up? How do I? Do I just let sleeping dogs lie until she's old enough for a sit down conversation about sexual predators?Do I use, "hey, don't get into any white vans" as a segue into, "by the by, your biological father might be the one driving that van"? /sHow do I minimize her potential emotional turmoil associated with the fact that the man who has been Daddy for as long as she can remember isn't her biological father?Thanks in advance and sorry about the length! via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2Enay6g
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