Sticks and Stars

I met with a parenting plan evaluator the other day and paid $240 for the privilege of clenching my jaw for two hours while I tried not to let her irritate me to death. The idea was that I wanted to have someone help me come up with a parenting plan that would address the complexities of our situation while keeping in mind what was developmentally and emotionally best for my boys. I know what I’d like but I can’t even remotely pretend that I am unbiased in this situation, not to mention the fact that I am hardly an expert in child psychology, so I really wanted an outsider’s more knowledgeable perspective.

Unfortunately this woman pretty much brushed away the boys’ emotional health with a casual, “Eh, they’ll recover” and proceeded to focus our two hour session on how I could offer my boys’ dad the most visitation possible. Every time she’d suggest something that I’d counter with, “Do you think that’s going to cause problems for [my two year old]?” she’d pause, think for a minute, and then respond with a wave of her hand, “Eh, he’ll recover,” and, “Do you want their dad to visit or not?”

I would, of course, respond that yes, I absolutely do want their dad to visit, that I want him to visit them as much as he is able, but there are other issues that need to be addressed too, to which she’d respond with a sigh, “this is so complicated!” And then she’d offer some bizarre custody arrangement that would be entirely useless to their dad, living across the country as he does (no, he’s probably not going to visit them every other weekend) and when I’d point that out she’d tell me that at least this would show the court that I was trying to offer him lots of access.

She seemed to vacillate between writing up a parenting plan that would please the court (even if it would make it entirely impossible for their dad to have any real contact with them — this seemed to be the plan she thought I’d prefer) and writing a parenting plan that would give him everything he wants with no regard to my concerns. When we were going down that route she kept telling me that I “have to have trust,” that I have to give him a chance to be a good parent, that I have to show that I support him in that. I felt completely invalidated. I feel like I’m the only one who gives a shit about my two year old, I’m the only one who’s looking out for him and making sure he doesn’t get hurt and she’s telling me that I have to just give that up, that I have to just “trust” that his dad, who offered me reassurance about his intention to be a presence in my two year old’s life “because he has no choice,” is suddenly going to step up and be SuperDad? My two year old is so quiet and shy and reserved, especially in comparison to his bubbly, gregarious brother. Considering that they clearly don’t want him around in the first place, how are his dad and his dad’s stupid girlfriend going to treat him? It makes me sick to think of them fawning over my five year old while my two year old stands awkwardly in the background, no one paying attention to him at all. I just want to know that he’ll be safe and I have absolutely no reassurance of that and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect some. When I’d say as much, she’d agree but would then shrug her shoulders and remind me that if I put up barriers to him visiting, then he wouldn’t. I certainly appreciate that and I am trying to be reasonable about the barriers, I am trying to scrape down to the bare minimum of reassurance I need with regard to my two year old’s safety and security, but there still is a minimum.

I didn’t exactly feel like she was siding against me (in fact, I definitely felt like she was trying to be supportive) but she just seemed so stupid, like she couldn’t fully wrap her mind around our situation. She had this idea of how Moms are and how Dads are and she couldn’t fit out situation into that. Over and over she sighed and remarked on how complicated it was.

I did leave the consultation with a parenting plan (despite her frequent urgings, when we came to various impasses, that I go home and think about things for a while — what the fuck does she think I’ve been doing for the past two years? It’s not like I just woke up last week and said, “Hmm, a parenting plan! Now there’s an idea!”). I can’t say that I’m thrilled with it because it deals too lightly with the important issues (namely how we are going to transition both boys to an equitable visitation arrangement with their dad) and too heavily with things that are stupid (who cares who gets them for Spring Break, it’s just a random week as far as I’m concerned) but it’s a reasonable starting place and one that I hope we can discuss further in mediation. I’ve been trying to get him to meet with me and a neutral third party for months and months and months and while he doesn’t necessarily seem any more willing than he ever has been, he also seems less vehemently opposed to it than usual. Or at least in the last email he sent me he was no longer blaming me for the inevitable failure of the mediation process we hadn’t even started. Really, it’s this or court, and while he’s certainly happy to threaten me with all the ways he’s going to prove I’m an unfit mother, I keep hoping that if I just repeat myself enough he’ll eventually see reason, because if nothing else, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to spend $1,500 on mediation than $15,000 to go to court.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 11:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.