Not Without My Children

Securing Court Reporters For Accountability

I have decided I am hiring a stenographer for family court. I don't have family here, and I don't have someone sitting in that courtroom who knows the history, who has watched all of this happen, or who understands what came before whatever isolated incident is being discussed that day. I have now gone pro se before this judge and this attorney multiple times, and the same problems keep coming back before the court while the boxes get checked and the actual problems remain. This time, I want a record of what is said.

Requesting a GAL for Independent Investigation

Court reporters aren't provided in family court, but you can hire one yourself. I didn't know that before. I am also requesting a Guardian ad Litem, a neutral third party whose job is to investigate what is happening and advocate for the best interests of the children—not mine, their father's, or his attorney's. I need someone outside of this conflict looking at what is actually happening with my children because I have brought serious concerns before the court twice now and they have simply not been addressed.

Establishing Legal Boundaries Regarding Stepparent Involvement

Their stepmother has increasingly assumed parental authority in their lives. She controls their phones and Screen Time—what they do, when they do it, and how they do it. She took my daughter to her first gynecologist appointment. I brought these issues before the judge twice. Nothing was done. I don't understand how that is normal, and I don't understand how a mother can raise concerns about being pushed out of decisions involving her own children and have the concerns themselves simply go unanswered.

Family Court Ignores Evidence of a Pattern of Abuse

Years ago, when I sought a domestic violence injunction, I brought Ring videos into court. The videos were four months old at the time of the hearing, HD had removed the cameras after the incidents happening, and the judge did not approve the injunction because she considered the videos too old, despite all the additional supporting evidence of a consistent pattern of behavior. I explained why I didn't have newer ones: he had taken the cameras down. When his behavior would become unhinged, he would take the cameras down and hide them so I couldn’t document the abuse. At one point he said the cameras were the problem. So the evidence I had was too old, while the reason I couldn't produce newer evidence was that the means of recording it had been removed. What exactly are you supposed to do with that?

Ex Withholds Children and Claims They Don't Want to Go

Now, years later, I have found myself in another version of the same impossible cycle. I have shown up for my children week after week and been told they don't want to live with me. Only my youngest has come out. I kept responding to the claim itself: Why don't they want to come? What is happening in that house? What is influencing them, and how am I ever supposed to prove it? Then I finally had the lightbulb moment I wish I had had months ago. It does not matter what he claims.

Children Caught in the Middle

These are his words. I am not going to put them in my children's mouths. I know what it is like to live under his roof and inside the warped reality created by coercive control. I know what it is like when standing up to the person controlling that environment does not feel like a real choice. My children should not have to stand up to their father in order to see their mother. They should never have been put in a position where that could even become necessary. They are children. Protecting them is my job, and I am trying. But there are parts of protecting them that I cannot do without the court doing its job too.

Enforcing Parenting Time When the Other Parent Refuses

It is not up to him, and he cannot make it the children's responsibility either. He does not get to withhold them and then tell me that they have made the decision. I do not have to debate his explanation before my parenting rights count. It is not up to you, and it is not up to them. You are required to produce the children for my parenting time. I have always respected yours, and it is your responsibility to make sure mine is respected too. You are required to support a loving relationship between these children and their mother, just as I have always supported their relationship with you.

I do not want them fighting their father for me. It is my responsibility to stand up for my relationship with them so they don't have to, and it is the court's responsibility to enforce the protections and parenting rights that I cannot enforce on my own.

When the children are with me, their father calls and messages them incessantly. This June, we had company in town and my oldest was crying while talking to him on the phone. This isn't new. Throughout our divorce, once the children had phones, this was a constant battle, and I still have phone records from when their lines were under my plan. The problem is there is no record for iMessages. only calls. I’m not sure how I can overcome that one. I cannot produce screenshots because that is here say. It needs to be that actual phone log.

I pray he is not nearly the way with them that he was with me. I genuinely pray that. But I also lived under his roof. I know how coercive control works from the inside, and how difficult it can become to recognize that you are even allowed to resist it.

Seeing the Pattern Instead of Isolated Custody Incidents

That is why I need to find a way of widening the perspective from individual incidents and see what is happening as a whole. The calls. The withholding. His claim that the children don't want to live with me. A stepmother increasingly exercising parental authority while I am being excluded from my children's lives. Their phones. Their Screen Time. My daughter's first gynecological appointment. Concerns repeatedly brought before the court and left unresolved. These things cannot continue to be separated from one another until each becomes small enough to ignore.

When “Document Everything” Isn't Enough in Family Court

If you have lived some version of this and have useful guidance, please reach out to me. Did a Guardian ad Litem help you? Did you hire a private court reporter? What finally made the court address the withholding? What has helped?

There has to be more we can tell one another than "document everything," because some of us already do.

I am done asking him to agree that my parenting time should be respected. I am done treating his refusal as though it creates a question I have to answer. They are my children too. I love them, I raised them, God and I made them from scratch.