Hi,
I am a 35 year old dad currently going through a divorce. Unfortunately my wife is not able/willing to look after my children properly and for that reason I think that the best interests of the children is to live with me the majority of the time. I would like to know if anybody has had a similar situation and if they were able to obtain majority residency? What was the process like?
My solicitor has told me that anything other than 50-50 is rarely granted unless physical or sexual violence can be proven. However in practice I would like to obtain a situation where my children are with me 80-90% of the time and would like to hear other people's experiences and whether you think this is achievable in practice.
My children are 6 year old twin girls.
Since they were born, my wife has been very unengaged with them. When she was a SAHM, she dumped them in front of the TV most of the time, and does not talk to them. Whenever I finished work, I would normally have to take the children to the park, or do activities with them, since they had had a day without stimulation.
Once they started primary school at age 4, the school called us in for a number of meetings about their delayed speech development. Now they are 6, but talking to them you would think they are 4. I believe that this is due to my wife's neglect.
Around 2 years ago, my wife became even more disengaged from the children. She met a 17- or 18-year-old boy and began a relationship with him. This involved a lot of overnight stays, including during the pandemic, and my wife began to disappear for up to 3 or 4 days at a time.
My wife has a hot temper and when I confronted her about the affair that she was having, she began to throw all the items in the kitchen at me (bowls, cups). This incident happened in front of my children, and the shards of the glass cut my daughter's foot.
Once I began the divorce proceedings, a mediator told me that my case would not be suitable for mediation because I am alleging neglect, and I would need to inform social services. I made a call to social services and reported the neglect and the violence, and I arranged with my parents to enrol the children in a school local to them, just over an hour from the family home. I stupidly didn't make a police report as I didn't want to escalate into all-out conflict, however the violence was reported at the time to social services.
As a retaliation to my call to social services, my wife called the police and accused me of domestic violence and coercive and controlling behaviour. It was a terrifying experience and I was held in police custody for 8 hours or so waiting to be interviewed, although once the police spoke to me it only took about 15 minutes and they released me immediately, since it was clear that my wife had no credibility. My wife then withheld all access to the children from me for about 3 weeks. In this time my solicitor wrote a number of letters to her and she eventually relented and gave me back the children.
Since then, with the help of my solicitor, I have taken my children to my parents' house and now they live 5 days a week with me and my parents and attend school here. They have Friday afternoons until Saturday evenings with my wife. We don't have any court order in place and it's a volatile agreement. My wife feels that she has lost out with the current arrangement and she frequently tries to frustrate the process.
What I would like to aim for is to have the children with me during the week plus half of the weekends, perhaps with a court order if this is necessary. The problem is that so far, a lot of what has happened is my word against hers. So how can I prove that she is an inadequate parent?
So far proof of her chaotic lifestyle and mental instability:
- she is a woman in her 30s in a relationship with a teenager
- the overnight stays away from the children
- the outlandish accusations of things like coercive and controlling behaviour (if I was coercive and controlling, how could she have an affair?)
- when we are due a pickup or collection, she often writes long ranting messages to my solicitor trying to change or disrupt everything at the last minute.
- before she married me, she was in a relationship with somebody else and had a daughter (my stepdaughter, now 16). After they split up, my wife sent her daughter back to her home country (a third world country) when she was 6 years old, and she was looked after by family members for 2 years. My wife didn't work in this time and just seems to have partied. The reason for sending my stepdaughter away was that she didn't want to look after the girl and didn't want her to fall into her father's hands. Overall my stepdaughter has been moved around from school to school her entire childhood to follow her mother's chaotic lifestyle. My stepdaughter's unfortunate experiences are something that I don't want to happen to my own children.
- I believe both schools that the children have attended have flagged their delayed development and concerns that the children are/were not being looked after at home. I don't know exactly what they have documented but they did call us in for meetings a few times about it. My challenge is to prove that it is her that is being neglectful and not me.
The problem that I'm facing is that she has shown no interest in looking after the children until now, and I do not believe she is capable of looking after them long term, however she may feel now that she is 'losing' and so is willing to try anything to stop me 'winning'. My solicitor has told me that it is likely she will accuse me of assault again if we go to court. I hope that over time her crazy behaviour will be noticed by more and more people in authority and I will have a stronger case. But what I am worried about is us ending up somehow on the default 50-50 split.
My impression from reading forums like this is that a feckless father normally fades out of the picture, but a feckless mum is more dangerous because she insists on holding onto the children even though she is unable/unprepared to look after them.
Furthermore, the delayed speech and delayed education is a major problem. They are in Year 1 but are currently where a child would be on starting Reception. My parents and I are doing lots of reading and activities with them, but when they are with their mother, they are still dumped in front of the TV. This makes it very hard to undo the damage.