robby -- any chance of fighting for custody? i don't know your story, and it might not be an option for you for a variety of reasons. if you do want to, though, there is help out there for FATHERS particularly.
in the past year or so i've been reading a lot of stuff (on a bbs i've been on for years) about the men's rights movement. at first i just laughed. whatever. like OUR rights are ever infringed upon.
and then i started paying attention -- and i realized just how suckered in and brainwashed i really had become.
men, too, are domestic violence victims. men routinely get denied custody. men routinely end up paying out child support for many years.
when it comes to marriage, men truly have a hell of a lot to LOSE. pick the wrong woman, and your life is screwed royally. hers? sure, there are crappy situations where women end up losing out, but by and large MEN LOSE. they go from being Dad to being The Wallet.
anyway, there are divorce lawyers now who have been tapping into this market -- yes, it's a business. but a lot of those lawyers are PASSIONATE about this because they, too, lost homes, families, HUGE chunks of income -- and most of all, they lost the ability to PARENT their kids in all but the most remote sense.
there is no reason whatsoever that men should NOT have a 50/50 chance of winning custody when they go into the courtroom. not one. i know i defend the "minority" end of things a lot (women, homosexuals, etc.), and all too often "straight white men" are viewed as this big oppressive class who get all they want in life while non-straight, non-white, non-male people are second-class citizens.
well, i got my education about how "good" the straight white men of the world have it when i listened to a buddy's horror stories about his divorce.
he was treated like the scum of the earth in every respect. in the courtroom, out of the courtroom. he was no long a husband, a father, a man who cared about his family enough to work hard to provide for them and be there for them in every way -- suddenly, he's this cold, distant ogre who probably beat his wife and god only knows what he did to his daughters in private and so on.
of course, none of this was true at all. but it played like a sunday night movie of the week in court. the poor, weak, defenseless wife and mom who sacrificed her own dreams to stay at home and iron his shirts ended up getting the kids, because, hey -- children belong to the MOTHER, right?
well, the sad fact of the matter is that after going through all this, he ended up eating a bullet. he couldn't stand to face a life of seeing his kids for a few hours -- supervised, mind you, because the ex-wife insinuated that he had molested the kids) -- every other weekend, have NO say about what schools they went to, which doctors they saw (but he had to foot the bills while wifey dragged those girls from one shrink to another to find some evidence that dad had harmed them), etc.
it's pathetic. divorce is one playing field that is absolutely NOT equal. and guys have a snowball's chance in hell of getting out of it with their kids in their custody. there are lawyer groups, though, springing up all over the place who really will fight like hell for fathers' rights to be JUST as important as hers. if you're interested -- either in getting such a lawyer or even just in joining a fathers' rights men's group online, robby, just holler. no two ways about it, man, that SUCKS.
