I have a 15.5 month old daughter with my soon to be ex husband, who is active duty in the military and stationed over 3,000 miles away. Unfortunately, my ex doesn’t have much of an established relationship with our child. Let’s keep it simple and say that our daughter has only ever been around her father about 4 months of her life. She wasn’t around him until she was 7 months old (100% his choice). Then my ex and I reconciled and she lived with him/us for 4 months. He ended up abandoning us while on vacation before reporting to his current duty station, so I filed for divorce shortly after her 1st birthday. Nearly 5 months went by before she saw him again, which brings us to present time. I’ve been a stay at home mom her entire life so she’s extremely bonded with me and I can’t say for sure if she remembers her dad.For a multitude of reasons, I felt like I had no choice but to hire a lawyer and take this to court. As much as it’s more ideal to come to an agreement on our own, this is borderline impossible because of how he is as a person and the fact that we don’t see eye to eye on anything related to our parenting plan and our child’s best interests. Throw in all of the harassment and threats and you have one giant mess. I really put my faith into the court and hoped they’d give us a good solution to our issues.Well, the judge ordered that we exchange our 15 month old child every 30 days. Every other month, our child is supposed to get on a 6 hour flight to her father’s duty station and spend an entire month there. I am honestly shocked a judge ordered a 50/50 custody plan for a young toddler with parents who live so far apart from each other, especially when one parent hasn’t been involved much at all. I guess my case is causing an uproar throughout a bunch of family law firms here and everyone is appalled by the ruling. Apparently nobody has ever seen anything like it. The order completely goes against the court’s parenting guidelines and sample parenting plans, and it’s like the extensive research that says this will be detrimental to our child’s well-being wasn’t considered whatsoever. There’s so many reasons why this parenting plan truly sucks for our child and why it isn’t reasonable or realistic for either me or my ex.My ex’s custody proposal was that he wanted to trade our daughter every six months, and it looks like the judge essentially gave him that but broke it up so she wasn’t away from either parent for too long. My ex doesn’t like the court order and wants to try hashing out our own agreement again. Except he is just so stuck on his six month idea and there’s no way to get him to consider anything else. He’s very manipulative and very much a “my way or the highway” type of person. I think he needs to exercise some parenting time in our home state, but he absolutely refuses to use his leave to spend time with his daughter. He wants to use his leave for his own personal time and he’s even already doing that next week. I mentioned to him that all of this back and forth nonsense is detrimental to our baby and there’s all sorts of research to back that up, and all he had to say was that he doesn’t agree. I feel like he’s only thinking about himself and has ulterior motives for wanting this sort of custody plan. Especially financially because he is responsible for all travel costs, including the person traveling with our child. This screws me over too because as a result, I only get enough support for a few days of daycare every month when I could easily get more and I don’t get to claim our child on taxes until several years down the line.But the sad thing is, I am having trouble thinking of what we could do that isn’t trading her every six months but not passing her back and forth every 30 days either. I feel like there’s no good solution in our situation. No matter what, our daughter is going to suffer in some way. I do want her to see her father and have a relationship, but what exactly does that look like and how much will it cost her her overall well-being? What type of custody plan will benefit her the most? Every one I can think of has a long list of cons and maybe a couple positives. It’s really hard to decide which plan is the least horrible. We’d be doing this until she’s school aged.I have to decide if I want to appeal this order or if I want to let it go and see if my ex will hang himself, so to speak, so I can get the order changed. I can see why I should and shouldn’t for both options. I firmly believe that since my ex really wants our daughter to stay with him where he’s stationed, he will take her sometimes but not every time it's ordered. He’s already said he’s not going to take her for his first ordered block of time. I’m nervous about what the consequences will be if we try to follow this order so I am leaning towards trying to appeal it.Please share with me your thoughts and opinions, especially if you have experience with long-distance parenting or know anything about child psychology. This court order has me feeling so messed up. via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2DGjwid
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