Dr. Phil

[tigger]

after she was born.  When I met her, the daughter was 13.  She said that she gave up custody because the father was the more stable of the two.  I said, "Let me guess, he had a house, a job he had held for a long time and a good grip on budgeting.  You, on the other hand, were still finding yourself."  She was shocked.  She said, "Most people ask what I did wrong to have her taken from me."  I said, "Nope, that's how I ended up with my dad instead of my birth mother."  (You'll notice that I don't refer to her as "mom".  This is because after my dad got remarried, the insecurities of my stepmother won out and she made life miserable for all involved until my birth mother dropped out.  Daddy made sure that my brother and I had a relationship with our grandparents and aunts, uncles and cousins from her side (made easier because they lived in the same city as his parents and his mom shared information with her mom) but no visitation or contact with her.  See, my situation wasn't perfect but not because of my dad.)  She said that her ex was getting increasingly difficult to deal with.  Interfering with visitation and phone contact and she suspected mail contact.  I told her that he was scared.  That he's had her all this time and she's probably making comments about needing her mom's advice on stuff and he's scared of losing her.  Having had her for 13 years, he can't imaging stepping back from that.  She took that into consideration when talking to him and reassured him that she had no intentions of going for custody and uprooting her and moving her to another state.  He confessed that it wasn't her intentions that he was scared of, it was his daughter deciding that she wanted to try to live with mom.  So when mom saw her next, she listed pros and cons of making that decision and guided her daughter into no longer wondering or fantasizing about living with mom but make an informed decision to stay with dad.  

A rarity?  Probably.  You had two mature adults who put the child first.  Before emotions, before social expectations, before personal wants and desires.  If parents would put more thought into with whom they bred (myself included) and then into what would this person be like were we to divorce, there might be fewer kids caught in the middle.  In my case, my ex was pretty much what I expected, what I didn't expect was an affair that broke up the marriage and the mistress turn wife being a control freak who wanted my life and everything I had, including my kids, especially after she lost hers in a custody battle.