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Mom recently got arrested for possession of meth, heroin, and MDMA. Her family that bonded her out of jail lives out of state, so she was forced to go live with them 7 hours away.


Most likely, she will just get probation since this is her first offense (according to her lawyer). Not sure which state she will have to serve her probation since she has nowhere to live here since her husband is divorcing her.


Her family is working with us on getting her to sign a temporary order so my husband doesn't have to take her to court. Even though she will probably be stuck out of state for awhile, the current order is 50/50 and my husband isn't comfortable just jumping right back into that once she is able to move back (which could be years down the road).


What should my husband ask for?


Obviously, supervised visitation at my husband's discretion. He may need to be more specific than that to get her to agree to it. What is reasonable? 9-4 on weekends and 3-6 on weekdays when she is in town? Is that too much? He is okay with one specific family member supervising the visitation.


Phone / facetime contact daily


Should he ask for drug testing or just leave that up to her probation officer?


Can he ask for her to attend a drug treatment program? She has said her lawyer said she probably won't have to go to rehab since she only had a small amount of drugs on her. But we know for a fact that her drug problem has gone on for years, and she also has a pill problem, which she didn't get in trouble for (and we have no proof). She needs rehab. And we want her to get better and we don't see that happening without extensive behavioral therapy. Living with her enabling family is not going to help her much.


Anything missing?

Ex has 50/50 custody, neither parent designated as primary but Dad has final say in education so DSD goes to school in our district. Ex got married and moved an hour away. 50/50 had continued because the move is supposed to be temporary, but it's been months and there's been no move. Dad does not feel the distance is good for dsd. If we go to court, do you think the judge will agree that is too far for dsd to travel on schooldays?

Some of you know our history, some of you don't. In short, my husband does not have a good coparenting relationship with his ex. He has 50/50 custody, week on/week off visitation, neither is primary but he has final say over eduation, health, and extracurriculars.

Every year we have issues around Easter. The past two Easters, his ex has filed abuse allegations against my husband and DSD's first Easter was during the four months that his ex had taken off with DSD and refused contact (before they went to court). Oh, and one Easter DSD was 'too sick' to travel. So, we've already been anticipating there may be problems with this Easter even though we just recently had a CO modification.

DH's ex picked DSD up on Friday per the CO. She then took her to her hometown in TN without telling us (which is fine; she doesn't have to tell us but usually we do inform each other of out-of-town plans). DSD is in preK and we got a call from them this morning that DSD had not shown up for class. DH called his ex, and that's when she informed them they had went to TN. She is saying that the reason they have not come back is because while they were visiting, DSD's great-grandfather was admitted into the hospital for emergency surgery. He has had quite a few health problems over the past couple of years, but this all seems pretty coincidental. At the same time, however, we do not want to be unsympathetic if he really is in the hospital.

As some additional background, DH has already had issues with his ex not taking DSD's schooling seriously. We understand it is 'just' preK, but we feel this year is setting the precedent for DSD as far as how school will go. On the days that his ex has taken DSD to school, she has been tardy or absent 33% of the time. So needless to say, DH is NOT happy about DSD missing more school.

My question is, what are your thoughts on this? Is it necessary for a 4 yo to miss a week of school because of a great-grandparent being in the hospital (they are 5 1/2 hours away)? Is it unreasonable for us to ask DH's ex for the hospital information or some kind of proof that he really is in the hospital? If he really is as bad as she is trying to say and he does pass away, is it appropriate for a 4 yo to attend his funeral? I personally would never bring my 4 yo to a funeral but I'm not sure what other people think about that.

DH & his ex just mediated an agreement on Monday regarding the modification he filed. DSD gets to stay here in GA (mother has a temporary residence  here and has agreed to stay permanently) and they will keep the week on/week off schedule. DH now has final say over medical, education, and extracurricular decisions and no longer has to pay child support after June (in order to give her time to find a job). Parents are also now required to return phone calls by the end of the day since my husband has had issues with being able to talk to DSD while at her mother's.

As I've mentioned before, when my DSD was 3 she alleged that her maternal great-grandfather abused her.  All of the professionals agree that they do believe she was abused, but only one (her original therapist) believes 100% that it was the great-grandfather (after DSD was 4, she had a forensic evaluator she did say it, but that she was lying when she said it - we believe she was coached but of course can't prove it). Our lawyer felt like DH didn't have enough legal proof to get the judge to order any stipulations regarding the great-grandfather since he had also passed a polygraph. So, in order to get stipulations against the great-grandfather in the CO, my DH agreed to keep 50/50 instead of fighting for primary custody in front of the judge (which we probably could have gotten since his ex has multiple CO violations and the GAL agrees DH is the better parent and that his ex is unwilling to coparent). So now the CO says DSD cannot spend the night anywhere the great-grandfather is at or have any unsupervised contact with him.

So, DH got about 95% of what he wanted and his ex only got about 5% of what she wanted, so we feel it is a win. However, not even a day later, and other issues have already arisen. DH's ex dropped DSD off to us yesterday and she was high on pain meds (fortunately, she wasn't driving). DH knew she's had issues with pain meds in the past (nothing documented though), but thought she had gotten over it. Her mother has also had issues with pain med addictions (also undocumented). We were at our neighbor's house when she dropped DSD off. Our neighbor is a nurse who works with addicts all day long. As soon as his ex left, she pulled DH to the side and said to him, "You DO realize she was high as a kite, right?" We have NEVER said anything to her about his ex's past issues with pain meds.

Since his ex always has 'issues' (migraines, etc.), she always has a prescription for the meds, which will make it a lot harder to prove she is abusing pills again. So is there even anything we can do about this?

In June my SD disclosed some abuse allegations against a relative of her mother's, whom the mother lives with.  TN CPS would not interview the child at the time because she was not 3 yet, so it was determined to be unsubstantiated.  Mother did agree to keep the child away from this relative, claiming to move out for awhile, but we know she is back to living there again.

Mother retailiated by then filing a false abuse allegation, claiming my 2 1/2 yo dd was touching sd's privates.  Mother kept SD from us so we got an emergency hearing where the judge not only ordered her to resume back to 50/50 time share but also put it in the order that we were allowed to put SD into play therapy (CPS recommended it but Mother refused).  We live in different states, so we also got the judge to put into the co that child protective services in our state, GA, be allowed full jurisiction over the health and well-being of the child.

So in Sept, SD started going to therapy once every other week.

Last week, she disclosed the abuse to her therapist.  Part of what she disclosed was that her mother and grandmother know about the abuse but all they did was tell the relative to stop it.  This is the same thing she told us back in June.

GA CPS is taking this very seriously and has told us to not allow any contact between SD and her mother or her family.  When they called mother to inform her of this, she wouldn't listen to what they had to say and just kept trying to blame the whole thing on my DH, saying he was doing this because of an upcoming custody modification mediation.  They told her that this had nothing to do with DH, that it was from something that came up in counseling, and she just would not listen (you would think that her main concern would have been Is my child OK? but it wasn't).

The investigation starts today and I'm just confused as to what will happen now.  Has anyone been through this?  How long will it take? Do we need to hire a lawyer now or do we just trust CPS to take care of everything?

[My question is, what kind of visitation schedule should we ask for while going for full custody?]

My husband currently has a week on, week off, joint custody schedule.  The mother lives 5 1/2 hours away so they meet halfway once a week.  Neither parent is designated as primary in the CO, but my husband does pay a small amount of CS to make up for the difference in incomes.

Due to the mother repeatedly violating the CO, neglecting to include my husband in medical decisions, and filing false child abuse allegations against him on two separate occasions, my husband has filed for full custody.  Each abuse allegation was made after my husband filed for contempt against her (both contempts were resolved through mediation so she wasn't actually charged) and she is now being investigated by the state for making false allegations (both were sexual in nature and the second allegation was actually against my two year old daughter, not my husband).

The CO is through our county in GA since this is where they lived when they were together.  We were hoping that the mom would move back before sd started preschool next year so we could continue 50/50, but with everything that has happened the past 2 years, we no longer feel like that is the best option for sd.  It has been really hard making this decision but the mom sees sd as a pawn to use against my husband and only looks out for HER interests rather than my sd's interests.  We believe that the mom may have BPD and that there may be some PAS going on as well due to some of my sd's actions (she's 3).  SD is currently in play therapy because of it (which we had to get court-ordered since the mom wouldn't agree to it even though she's the one trying to say that sd is getting abused).

My question is, what kind of visitation schedule should we ask for while going for full custody?  We want sd to have as much contact with the mom as possible but we're not sure what is standard when the ncp lives 5 1/2 hours away.  Would we just offer 3 day weekends, alternate breaks, and time at Christmas and in the summer?  Or offer an EOWE availability if the mom spends it in our city (she has an uncle here she can stay with - we just don't think it's good for sd to have to be in the car for 11 hours EOWE)?  We're just torn because only seeing the mom twice a year doesn't sound like enough, but EOWE in the car seems like too much.