Trial & legal costs for my daughter

My daughter has been safe for almost one year now.

We are picking up the pieces after a $250K legal battle and after the 6-year fight and loosing everything we had, we have a 2-year restraining order and she has supervised visits with her father.

I've had my daughter fulltime since 10/2024 and was issued a temporary restraining order 11/2024. We went to court for that 12/5/2024 & 12/24/24 & 3/10/24 costing around $8,000.

Her dad stopped paying child support consistently when we got the TRO. Our next TRO/custody hearing is scheduled for 5/13/25.

On 11/17/23, my daughter reported abuse to her attorney.

WE ARE STILL WAITING FOR HELP!!

Our 11/30/23 court date was postponed to a date I am unaware of, in order to complete the 2nd psych evaluation.

THANK YOU SO MUCH for your love, support, donations and most importantly, your prayers. WE LOVE YOU :) GOD IS GOOD

July of 2022, the court removed my daughter from me for 39-days of supervised visitation; costing $8,000. During that time with the court-appointed supervisor, it was proven my daughter's injuries were taking place while she was with her father.

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We almost didn’t make it.

I left my daughter’s father when I was 7 months pregnant, after being with him for a year and a half and discovering there was something that was just not right with him.

I didn’t know what was wrong. He looked great on the surface. I’d never dealt with narcissistic abuse before. I trusted in the good in people then.

I’ve now gone through 10 CPS cases, 2 psych evaluations, 3 attorneys, $150,000+ in legal costs and 3 years in Family Court. I will elaborate on this some time, but mind you, this is 9 more reported cases that the system knows of that my daughter should not have gone through. That is almost 2 hands full of known abuse + over a year of non-reported abuse. The effects of this abuse of her, and the post-separation abuse of me living through it, will be something carried by us for a very long time, effecting different parts of our lives. The family law system needs to be educated on post-separation abuse and on the long-term effects of abuse and neglect on child development.

When my daughter was born with her intestines in her lungs, my full-time job became her medical care. Ten months after that, my full-time job became fighting to keep her in my custody.

I am not a victim. I am a warrior and my daughter’s father learned again and again, I would not bow down to his bullying and master manipulation at her expense.

I have spent every extra penny I have on filling the stressful days with providing a happy childhood for my daughter; trying to balance out the negative with positive while masking the urge to have a mental breakdown over the thoughts of what I was up against.

Life as I knew it of health, freedom, travel, and love turned into

• broken faith & loss of self

• Gaslighting

• Smear campaigns

• Child endangerment, abuse in all forms and neglect

• The relationship with my mom, one of the closest women to me, suffered, when my case hit too close to her own unhealed traumas.

My well-lived life became an arena for professionals to misinterpret and judges to delegate per their own agendas. I trusted these professionals (police officers, counselors, doctors, child protection servants, judges & lawyers) to do their jobs of investigating and protecting. My faith in humanity, justice and in Spirit even, was lost to the sad reality that the system is in much, much need of healing. Why a child’s safety is second to an abuser’s parental rights, is a question that demands answering.

I am not a victim. I am a warrior.

While I don’t claim to fully understand the different aspects of the court system, and I don’t ever want to know more about it, over the years I did learn how to better present myself, to stand up for what I really needed and to be more strategic. I learned how to grey / yellow rock a narcissist and how to reach out for help from people who have been in these situations, instead of cowering to the massive amounts of shame and fear I was feeling. I learned that people who have not been in a custody battle with a narcissist or have not had to hand their child back to their abuser again and again, while getting no help for continuous and ongoing abuse, could never understand how every time that happened pieces of my soul died over and over again.

I didn’t sleep. Self-care was few and far between. But I did get up each day and have learned to accept what I am able to do even when that means bills are not getting paid.

Because of protecting my daughter, I lost and regained my rights as her mother. I lost final medical say, which to my daughter’s father meant I should not be involved in her many medical needs at all, and I was prevented from reporting abuse with the threat of losing custody by the system that is obligated to put children’s safety first, even when many forms of abuse by her father were evident. I attribute this being due to the great financial disadvantage I was in compared to my daughter’s father. He chose and paid for the psych evaluator, he had the money to frivolously take me to court over and over in attempts to gain full custody. He had the costliest attorney in our city, who was in the same affiliations as our judge, which is not uncommon but certainly didn’t help me any.

I have been broken down and rebuilt.

I was punished for doing what any good parent would do, at my daughter’s demise.

I wish I knew why all this happened to me and my daughter, and to think it was so I could help others that go through this hell just doesn’t seem fair. I BARELY survived. My daughter has seen sides of me I wish she didn’t have to see, and I am grateful she still thinks the world of me and loves me unconditionally.

As time passed and my daughter began to grow, I realized my plans to keep her in my custody had to change. With much resistance, instead of reading books on child development, growing my business or learning how to be a better parent, I studied how to thrive in “high-conflict” situations and consistently proved I could adjust, jump through his hoops of where to park my car and what specific words to say to our daughter to make her go to him; all deflections of the real issues we were having.

His complaints of me were so petty. One of them being that I hugged our daughter too much, which caused him to feel I was making it seem like I was “rescuing” our daughter from him. (That is a mouthful. Only mothers dealing with situations like this would understand how much energy it takes to explain such craziness.) My hugs that lasted ‘too long’ in his opinion was his guilty conscious/gas lightening that was actually entertained by our co-parenting counselor.

Experts like Dr. Ramini, Grace Wroldson and Judge Anthony became constant YouTube studies and One Mom’s Battle a triggering, but relatable place for me.

With each little win and the more he exposed himself, the road winded but the goal remained the same, to keep my daughter safe.

But our story does get better…

I knew it was ending when I started to have gratitude for the system that at least kept him from having full access to me. It’s taken time. But at least the time I did have with my daughter was being watched by the courts.

After so many issues, finally, our 3rd judge said he would not prevent me from reporting abuse ‘if abuse was really happening’ when his attorney asked the judge to lecture me on reporting. For the record, I reported ONE TIME ONLY, after my daughter’s pediatrician told me to. All other reports were made by her doctors, nurses, babysitters and counselors. But rather than looking at what was being reported, I took the blame for causing the report to be made at each court appearance and all attention was put on me instead of on him. Beating down women and victim shaming is sadly a common practice of attorneys who want to win at any cost.

It was hard to get help because I was so broken down. I could not talk to a therapist because they are mandatory reporters. I was only hoping that it would end, and we could all move on and have our lives back. No mother should ever have to feel she is losing her child. I felt this with her birth and then for a second time after our first court appearance and then over and over again for years after.

Eventually I recognized my dharma is to be with my daughter forever. That the time lost would be nothing in comparison to the time we would have.

I started to know it was the end when I felt grace. I mourned what I had been thru. I went through weeks of sadness, not that we were in this situation, but that we had to go through it. That this happened to us. This grief was a death of the bad parts of our story. As it was ending, I began to feel a relief and peace I hadn’t felt in years. We were really going to be to be safe. I was finally able to write about what happened, and what I wanted.

This is the beginning of a blog for a Coalition I will make to help moms/children.

Thank you for your support with these upcoming legal costs!