My Daughter's Welfare: Much Needed Advice?

[standing on the sidelines]

but what happens if he pushes her too hard. With the mother being ustable would she harm the child because she feels that is best for the child. To murder her child and kill herself because she feels that is the only way to protect her child. Remember she is not stable so things that we think are not necessarily what she thinks. It happened to a woman and her two year old in the town I live in. She was depressed and killed her child so she would not have to live without her mother and then killed herself.

I have seen the videos and they are a call for help. She is depressed and shows all the classic symptoms. To push her too hard and too fast would end badly. If he pushes too hard and she does do something to the child because she slips off the deep end becasue of the pressure then how would he feel? She needs to be handled with kid gloves as long as the child is there. She needs therapy in order to deal with her issues of abandonment etc.

[dadtotheend]

Yeah, and what happens if the woman in the other post pushes the guy too hard? Oh wait, the advice there was to get an emergency protection order so she woudn't have to worry about the guy going over the edge.

Why is that kind of intervention not warranted here? Because of a concern that Mom will harm the child? Hello?

[pemachine]

All the pieces of advice i've received on this post have merit. It's not an easy situation, and not easy to fix.

To KLD i say this. While I understand where you are coming from with regard to 'trying a little tenderness' this has been done in the past many times by me. She simply doesn't respond in the way that normal people do to things like this. She has what's called Borderline Personality Disorder which basically means she has the mind of a child; this is how it manifests in her.

Even so, when her hubby left her, I tried to be sympathetic, counselling her over the phone, IMs and so forth. I resisted the urge to use any of this to my advantage for the good of all parties involved. This is how I chose to deal with it.

But it was simply not enough for her. It never was. She will take whatever empathy is given her and give nothing back. Indeed, during the week I was out there, she flip-flopped her moods several time, even her outlook on ex-hubby: One minute he was a deadbeat loser, then next she was pining for him and insisting he would eventually come back..

The incident that caused her to cut me off from my kid during that visit, as I mentioned in my original post, was spurred by several aspects. While I was in town, I made the mistake of staying at the home with both of them. This is what I usually did before, in order to be with my daughter the maximum amount of time, and also to save money on hotels and commuting. However, it was very uncomfortable physically. It was July, and the apartment was sweltering hot. I was sleeping on an air mattress and sweating all night long, and I also have minor back problems that began to bother me greatly. I was not getting any sleep and felt physically drained.

So I decided that on my last two nights of visiting that I would sleep at a friend's place who lived in town, in a real bed. When I told her this, an argument ensued. Her points of contention, I'm sad to say, were all about her; her needs, how she would be affected by my going, and not one thing about my daughter's needs or wants. She stormed around the house calling me names, crying, and all with my child in the room, watching.

But don't take my word for it. Here is the email I received from her that very day, once I had left the apartment.

All of your belongings are outside my front door in the hallway. I advise you to come pick it up before someone else does, my neighbours are not very trust worthy.

You are less of a father than {name removed}, and considering he just abandoned us, that doesnt say much about you. The fact is he could come back in 8 months from now and still have a better raport with {daughter's name}, still be able to claim thousands of hours more QUALITY time with her than you.

twice a year you have her, and you cannot even handle the responsibility of that. Do you have any f*cking idea the stress of havign 24/7 responsibility of that child? year after year, ONE GOD DAMN WEEK BREAK is all i asked, and you bail out.

you truly are pathetic..

you will not be seeing {her} again for the rest of this trip, except maybe on her birthday for an hour or two.. and only because {she} would miss you otherwise it certainly has f*ck all to do with what you want.

She also related the same to me on the phone while I was travelling to my friend's place. I had to turn around and collect my belongings before I left again.

She has consistently shown the ability to be selfish, self-absorbed and has no concern for how what she does and says affects others. As you can see from her email above, she thinks I am a deadbeat father because I only see my kid twice a year, and considers full time parenting a burden that *I* imposed on her -- forgetting the fact that it was her who wanted to move out of province in the first place.

Apart from this, during our relationship, she showed physical abuse toward me - throwing objects, punching, kicking. One time she threw a steak knife at me, but luckily missed. Following my defeat in the Dec 2005 court case, without provocation, she harassed my family and friends with insulting and denegrating emails, calling them horrible things, and rubbing her victory in their faces.

So you can see why I stenuously resist showing outward compassion toward someone like this. She received everything I had during our relationship, when I spent three years trying to understand her condition, even starting a local support group for it. You'd have to be Mother Theresa to be able to expose yourself to something like this indefinitely.

I have just enough compassion left to resist the temptation to destroy her life with all the things i *could* use in a court case and take my kid away from her, should I ever be able to pursue it. But is that's what's best for my child? To start a tug of war and put her in the middle? I believe I could be trusted to handle myself with decorum and equity in a court case. I *sincerely* doubt that she would. She would say awful things to our child about me, and she would lose it emotionally at home. I've already seen this before.

So with all of that exhaustively said, sadly I think the best solution for my kid is what dadtotheend said: go there and try to be a buffer. And that is what it's always come down to. What am I willing to give up for my daughter? Does it make me a horrible person if I can't easily say I'm willing to spend the resr of my days tethered closely to a crazy person who feels she can do whatever she wants with impugnity?

My heart is begging me to go and be with my kid. My logical brain says it's impossible and financially unviable. My ego wants to destroy her. Someone tell me who to listen to.

[pemachine]

She needs to be handled with kid gloves as long as the child is there. She needs therapy in order to deal with her issues of abandonment etc.

Agreed, she definitely needs therapy. But how can you impose such a thing on someone? Does it take a court order? Can Child Services institute this for her? It's a great suggestion, but a) no idea how to make it happen if she doesn't want it, and b) no guarantee it will work. She's been in therapy before.

[standing on the sidelines]

Agreed, she definitely needs therapy. But how can you impose such a thing on someone? Does it take a court order? Can Child Services institute this for her? It's a great suggestion, but a) no idea how to make it happen if she doesn't want it, and b) no guarantee it will work. She's been in therapy before.

I am not sure how to go about it. The videos are a cry for help. She may have been in therapy before but maybe the person she had just wasn't a good fit for her. I had to go to three different ones until I found the one that just felt right for me.

Good Luck

[paris]

My heart is begging me to go and be with my kid. My logical brain says it's impossible and financially unviable. My ego wants to destroy her. Someone tell me who to listen to.

I think you answered your own question right there.

If it was me, I would be trying to relocate to her area to have frequent and consistent access to the child. But that's me, I can live anywhere and I thrive on change, so I've never had a problem moving.

I've watched the videos. Your daughter is very bright, and she's beautiful. Your ex is clearly destitute over her husband leaving. One thing I noticed is how the mess in the house has built up over time. She's depressed, and clearly wants attention... I also noticed her videos are an expression of her "art".

You can't fix your ex. All you can do is get as much access to your daughter as possible. The more time she is with you, the less she is exposed to her mother's instability.

[dadtotheend]

Obviously, we all have only a small window into these peoples lives, and I'm not qualified to diagnose the mental health of somebody, but...

One of the traits of borderline personality disorder is a compulsion with abandonment - see NIMH · Borderline Personality Disorder. The person with the disorder is so fearful of abandonment that it becomes self-fulfilling - they end up pushing those close to them away as a coping mechanism. There is a strong sense of that in the videos. Anti-social personality disorder (sociopath) and narcicissm are two other "labels" that professionals use to describe these disorders.

Dad, consider reading up on these conditions. Even though they are separately labelled, symptoms of each of them can end up getting rolled into the overall behaviour of the afffected person. Richard Skerritt is someone who helped me. When I read this page http://tearsandhealing.com/sociopath...FQq3sgodw0vZCg it was like a light bulb turning on in my head. Finally someone was able to articulate for me the frustration I had when dealing with my ex. I read a couple of his ebooks. Hopefully you will find him helpful. I think I have an electronic copy of Meaning from Madness. If you PM me I'll try to get it for you.

She's not crying out for help, her behaviour in the videos is symptomatic of the disorder. These individuals often have difficulty recognizing that they have a problem. Therefore the prognosis for treatment is guarded.

Dad, your daughter's physical isolation, those videos and your statements in this thread warrant a referral to CAS. From the limited amount I saw, I also noticed that the home appeared to have been messy and neglected. In one of the videos Mom talks about her bottle a day liquor consumption, cocaine and ecstacy use, to say nothing of the extreme moods. She's off her rocker.

At this age, your daughter is very observational in her cognitive development. She is at the precipice of developing into more abstract thinking. Soon, she's going to get very conflicted about why Mom behaves the way she does. Can you imagine what it must be like for her to see her Mom walking around crying all the time, desparate because everyone has abandoned her? Or why her "routine" includes mood swings and unpredictable behaviour.

If this situation isn't addressed, you could very well have one extremely messed up little girl on your hands.

[got2bkid]

FYI - A man I know got full custody of his 7 year old daughter in approx. two weeks from the date of filing. His court case was held immediately because the mother extremely un-stable. It didn't cost him much and she even lived in another jurisdiction.

[NoahJenda]

Okay. This is a tough one. Let me provide some thoughts:

First, find a way to capture and save that video permanently. It's evidence, and you don't want your ex to wake up one day and delete it from YouTube. You're rather fortunate that your ex is spraying evidence all around the internet like that.

If anyone on this board needs professional legal advice, it's you. Find a good lawyer in the jurisdiction that your child/ex resides and cobble enough money together for a small retainer. Make sure the lawyer you retain has the capacity to advise on intra-jurisdictional issues. Then, get two hours' worth of advice. Lay out the situation with the stated intention of getting a detailed plan together by the end of the meeting. Step 1, Step 2, Step 3. It's really important that you get the jurisdictional issue sorted out first. It makes no sense to fight a battle in the wrong court. You don't have to live in the same jurisdiction to file a court application or hire a lawyer where your ex is.

Figure out with the lawyer if you moving to the region will help matters.

Once you've pinned down the right jurisdiction with the help of a lawyer, hit the books and bone up on enough information to represent yourself. Have a look at all the case law on child safety/parental capacity and custody. Find every low-cost and pro bono resource you can to help you through the rules of court, etc. You're likely to find some pretty sympathetic souls along the way, but the bottom line is you're probably going to have to do a lot of this yourself.

So what will the court action look like? In most jurisdictions, you can file urgent applications for interim custody based on the safety of the child. Then you can proceed with an application to vary the existing custody order. You'll need to show a material change in circumstance, which shouldn't be difficult, since the mother admits to struggling to order pizza to feed her child. You can pile on all the other bits of evidence, including the denial of access. Again, you're ironically lucky in that she doesn't seem very cautious about the world seeing her as an unfit parent.

There's also nothing wrong to committing yourself to helping your ex rehabilitate. Children are best raised with two healthy co-parents. I know you're frustrated and mistrustful: I'm not suggesting you take responsibility for her recovery -- you're not her mother and ultimately it's up to her to get healthy. But it's always best for your child if your ex is healthy and participating in raising the child along with you, so do what you can to help her get well.

[paris]

This is a thread that I haven't been able to get out of my mind. I hope the original poster is still lurking.

I sometimes look at the YouTube channel that his ex owns. She recently added a video. In the info section, she states that her recent ex called protective custody about her daughter, but that she handed the daughter over 3 days before he made the call.

Did she hand the daughter over to protective services or the daughter's father?

If not the father, I hope he sees this as an opportunity to step in.