My question involves a child custody case from the State of: Washington State
- child custody issues after divorce
Hopefully this is a good place for me to start. I went through a bad divorce last year here in washington state and according to the parenting plan, I am the custodial parent of our 2 sons with their father having summer visitations and alternating holidays. About 6 months after our final marriage dissolution, I made a verbal agreement with their father to let our youngest son, who is 9 years old to stay with him in California where he moved to for the school year and I will have him for the summer. The first summer vacation, he didnt send my son to me, saying that he signed our son up for taekwondo classes and football and there would be no time for him to come see me. As upset as I was, I let this slide to avoid another heated fight between us. Being that I work fulltime and having 3 other children to look after, I couldnt go to California myself to visit with him either. It has been frustrating trying to communicate with my son during the time that he has been down there as they always screen their calls and I have to leave a message and then maybe I will hear from my son after repeated calling. I have tried all that I can to be civil with my ex but being that he is such an unreasonable person, its virtually impossible and he is quite a manipulator and from the times that I do speak with my son, I can tell that his father has been speaking derogatory of me. He even once told our older son who is 12 to not bother to visit him unless he is going to live with him, which is very mean and unselfish. Now, this is the 2nd summer and only after telling him that if he doesnt send our son to visit me will I be forced to refer back to the original parenting plan and retrieve my son from him did he agree to have him sent to me but only giving me 3 weeks to do so and at the end of his visit, I am suppossed to send my 9 year old, along with our 12 year old to him so that he can visit with our 12 year old and return our 9 year old to him and at the conclusion of summer, he will return our 12 year old to me. As much as this has got me peeved, I agreed but I am afraid that once I have sent him both boys, he wont return them as he has ran off with them before and it took me a month to get the boys back after going to court here in Washington state and driving to California to retrieve our boys. I am just about leaning towards playing his games and thinking about once my 9 year old is actually here with me, to just tell him that I have decided to revert back to the original parenting plan and keep my 9 year old along with our 12 year old and go to court to ask for a modification of the parenting plan ,explaining the situation and that I had to do what I could to get my son back and possibly ask for supervised visits here in Washington state as I know how my irrational my ex husband is and acts of emotion instead of logic. I even agreed to stop child support collection when our 9 year old started staying with him since we both had 1 child each. I am at lost, I am worried about the children and how they are being affected by all this but he seems to think that he can do whatever he wants if he doesnt agree with anything that I do. He doesnt even let our 9 year old say my boyfriends name in their house even when our other sons name is the same as my boyfriends. I feel alienated against my son and that I am being replaced as his mother by his new wife of whom he got married to 5 months after our divorce. We were married for 9 years, together for a total of 13 years. I am at total lost, my children are all the family I have and I couldnt stand to ever become detached from any of them as their mother. If anyone may have any advise for me, please help. If I could only afford a lawyer, I would have been there at the very first sign of issues. Please, help.

