My ex will not return my son

[Sunrisesmile]

My ex and I have a son, we both have parental responsibility and my ex has him every weekend, a couple of weeks ago I dropped my son off at his dad's on Friday evening as usual and went away on holiday without him agreeing to have our son for me to go away, I texted him the following day to let him know I was on holiday and would not be returning to the following week now he will not return my son, where do I stand

I can’t believe some of the snipey, bitter comments on this thread.
This woman sounds like a nightmare and OP’s son will have routine and stability with him.
Oh, and to the posters slagging him for saying that family will help with childcare, how many women do this too? Loads.
I was left by my ex just before giving birth. I’ve got no support, but I work full time and have made it work. Why can’t the OP do the same?

OP, best of luck to you. You sound like a great dad.

So yeah, since you lied about the circumstances and actually point blank refuse to do the right thing by your child unless forced, you will definitely have your arse handed to you in court and your ex will get nearly all custody as she is the main caregiver who has been looking after him for years with very little respite.

It's a shame for your son that you don't want to parent him and are trying to use him against your ex, but not much anyone can do about that.

In the thread that people here linked to your child was 2 and now they are at school?

What is there to stop her from picking the child up from school and doing exactly the same as you are?

Your child needs his mum, yes she has been irresponsible but she was still the parent he spent most time with. He will be devastated to be separated from his mum and main caregiver. He also deserves a relationship with his older sibling.

It looks like you need to go to court/ mediation to get a proper legal agreement drawn up which is fair to your son and lets him spend reasonable amounts of time with both of his parents.

She wasn't being irresponsible if he point blank refuses to allow her any respite, she was just making him do his fair share of the parenting.

I mean, I wouldn't leave my child with any man who doesn't care about their kid to the point they refuse to do school drop offs, alter any part of their life to work around their child and refuses to have them for any holiday periods, but it's not irresponsible to leave a child safely with their father who she knows will then be forced to have his family care for her child, even if he refuses to.

Sounds like she asks him to do the right thing and he refuses to do so, so she has few choices beyond just burning herself out and having no breaks at all, or simply making the father do a small amount of his fair share.

The amount of detail in this thread that's just being invented and then stated so confidently as fact in order to attack OP is fairly impressive, even for MN

I am afraid that you do not qualify to receive the collective wisdom of MN. In fact your post made me so angry. There aren’t many mothers who would do what you did. It is appalling.

And....the deadbeat Mom has joined the thread? Or, the poster has not read, nor understood, the thread as written.

It’s because he’s a man.

MNers hate reverses or when posters don’t put who’s who, because they base their replies purely on the sexes.

Quite often, like in this case, when the woman is in the wrong posters will try and derail or invalidate the OP by focusing on other things like it being a reverse, rather than the actual facts.

Its not devious or disingenuous to do a reverse on here, it’s pretty common.
OP wanted unbiased replies to know what was best for his son and could only do this by doing a reverse.

I think all threads should have the sexes anonymous, as that’s the only way you’ll get unbiased replies.

Rubbish. People hate reverses because they're dishonest ("I'm Emma and this is my version of events but really I'm Paula, the person who hates Emma right now"), insulting ("you're too stupid and prejudiced to give a valuable response to the truth") and inconsistent ("but you'll give valuable responses to a lie!"). Most reverses on here are about women only. I remember a particularly egregious one where OP pretended to be her mother. They'd had a row about something and in her OP, she used phrases her mother had used in the argument, in anger, completely out of context, as if this was comparable to using them when calmly explaining the situation to a bunch of outsiders. As usual, it was very obviously a reverse because there were no obviously angry, out of context phrases given from the daughter...

Yes, MN skews towards female perspectives. It's comprised mostly of women so that shouldn't surprise any intelligent person. If you think that makes its responses worthless, or you can't trust yourself to think critically about them, then don't bloody ask for them. Find a perfectly just and unbiased internet community with a perfectly equal demographic on everything.

When sexes aren't given, people will just guess in line with their perspectives anyway. Like I said several times, if you think we are too easy on women then you'll only be getting another unjust response when you pretend to be one. It's clear from the thread that most people don't have any problem bashing the mother, but lying about the situation has ruined OP's credibility.

I know it's a waste of time and energy but yet it's not uncommon for people to do that.
If he is withholding key snippets then maybe he will take some advice on board from people who are picking up on things he may be leaving out.

And as I said my friend did the same and the judge told him she was entitled to go on holiday. The judge also did not appreciate the mans efforts to make out that he did most of the parenting and that the mother was a deadbeat when she was still the one who had them the majority of the time.

Why would you do that? You dumped your son and now your moaning!

I can understand why it was a reverse.

I posted about my DS, a teacher, whose ex wife was denying him access to their child. Courts, CAFCAS, lies, objections, no shows, illness, new allegations to the point where the judge was about to remove PR from her.
Yet, here on MN, I was made to feel that I must be covering, that my DS must be a deviant, that there must be more to the story, that I must be taking his side.

Absolutely awful bullying comments with no understandingat all.

There was very little support on here, my words twisted, the more I explained the worse it got. No acceptance that a woman could be a manipulative parent who was using their child as a pawn, who was cutting the child off from half of a family.

I'm sorry you experienced that, but it's not a reason to give a reverse, it's a reason not to ask MN at all, or just reject the answers en masse (nobody has to accept what they're told here. They ask what we think, we tell them, they then do whatever they want with that information.) If you'd lied about him being a man in the story, would that have made everyone on your thread reasonable? How would giving a false account that pretends to be a true perspective solve that problem?

Again, if you think posters will automatically give a woman a favourable response, why would you suddenly find it valid when they think your son is a woman? You might be proving they're biased in favour of women but you wouldn’t be proving that your son was in the right.

And I can understand the responses that you get because I've seen men lie about things so many times.

There is a whole culture of men lying about this stuff and their partners lapping it up, so blame the men who tell the lies.

My ex barely sees my kids anymore, one of them hates him, I guarantee that his new partner has lapped up his sob story and all of his lies (he's even tried to tell the lies to me when I obviously know the facts). I guarantee his partner doesn't know the full facts of the situation at all , including a very serious police investigation that may land at his door any day now. (Nothing to do with me but I am aware of it).

I'm just not going to support a man who has the kids on weekends (and then the monday and when his ex went on holiday) who says that he's 'not a part time dad' but then calls the mother a dead beat. He's already showing that he holds mothers to a higher standard than fathers, he's not part time (despite being part time), she's a dead beat (despite being part time, and having the child more than him).

It also becomes harder and harder to maintain when people ask questions. OP possibly doesn't know the answers to the questions, and is likely to get more and more unreliable trying to speak for the other person. If you had a dispute with someone, would you trust them to speak as you when asking for people's opinions?

That wasn't the mom. Its just a random post.

Omg that wasn’t his child

What a load of nonsense
he has the child every weekend
she doesn’t work
who would go on holiday without telling their child or checking with the caregiver

respite ffs

Hang on.
We've only got the OP's account here.

The child's mother hasn't given her side of things. I imagine it would be very different.

Oh right, I didn't realise that Mumsnet threads required multiple witness statements and started from the assumption that OP is straight up lying about all of it and it's up to posters to just make up a story about what they think might have happened and judge accordingly.

Maybe what actually happened is OP led the child into the woods on Sunday and he only found his way back by following a trail of breadcrumbs and the Mum didn't actually pick him up because he's organized for her to be held hostage in a tower by a witch.

In which case he's dreadful and I happily participate in branding him a terrible parent and ex partner.

She did ask him to have him for a week so she could go on holiday, he flat out refused stating that he 'didn't have any annual leave'.

He has a previous post from around three weeks ago, where he asks advice on it as this had already happened towards the end of July, he went to take him back and the mum wasn't there. She had asked him in advance if he could have him, and he basically said no, fuck that, I'm only a weekend dad and I'm not going to change that to facilitate you going on holiday "with your friends", so she dropped him off and went on holiday for a week anyway.

I don't think it was right, but I also don't think he is right to refuse to do any midweek childcare, ESPECIALLY during the school holidays.. then he's got the brass balls to come on here saying he is the best person to have the child during the week? He can't be arsed to spend time with him in the holidays unless it is literally forced upon him, as he uses up his entire annual leave on himself (no mention of his entitlement to unpaid parental leave) and he can't even get the kid to school in the mornings!

It is so blatently obvious that there is two very different sides to this story, but him calling her a deadbeat, and saying he is a much better parent, when she does the bulk of all the childcare is taking the piss, I don't think a court would look favourably on him at all, especially seeing as he wants to remove the boy from his mum and give him to his family to look after, as he is NOT AVAILABLE to do it himself.

Fucking joke, and I'd have said exactly the same if he was a woman.

If a mother posted here and she normally only had her child on the weekends but that sometimes the dad wouldn't take him back on a Monday and that he went on holiday and left the child with her she'd be ripped to shreds for only being a weekend parent in the first place and told that maybe he was just trying to get her to pull her weight in parenting.

If people are going to compare the responses then you need to compare like with like.

I don’t understand why people just make up things to be mad at posters for. This whole comment is a work of fiction.

I've never seen so many posters make up bullshit before, what is going on?

MN we really need the laugh reaction back for so many posts on this thread.