My question involves a child custody case from the State of:VA/OK
My story is a long one so please forgive me while I go over some background details:
I was married in 1998 had my daughter in 1999. My husband was part of a cultish type of church and would talk about how our infant daughter should be spanked to teach her "who was boss", he gave nearly all of our money to the church as a tithe very often leaving our daughter and I without food. When my daughter was around 16months old he informed me that the head pastor of his church advised him to divorce me. We went to court and he was granted Wednesday evening visitation for three hours and every other weekend overnight visitation. He stopped exercising his right to the Wed visitation within 6 months.
When my daughter was four she started experiencing terribl e nightmares and behavioral disturbances, my daughter was normally a quiet and subdued child, so this was quite alarming to me. She was quite angry at me and she would talk about killing herself. She resisted visitation with her father very much. At this same time father was living with a woman whom he had gotten pregnant within two months of dating her and was planning on marrying her soon. None of my business, I made sure my daughter continued her visitation regardless of how much she resisted. Because of dd's behavior I took her to a child psychologist. My daughter revealed to the doc that during visitation with her father on Valentine's Day weekend, that her father and his gf put my daughter outside at night (they lived in an apartment complex but all the doors opened to the outside), we lived in VA and the temps in Feb are pretty cold. The reason for them doing this, she was crying and they told her to stop because of the neighbors upstairs and then she called the neighbors "losers", so they locked her outside in the middle of winter. She wasn't out there all night but "for a while". My daughter also revealed to the doc that father's gf would hit her and bite her when her father would leave her alone with gf. The doc said that children dd's age do not lie about these things and called CPS. She said it was a textbook case of abuse and dd's anger at me was because dd probably felt as if I were not protecting her by making her have visits with her father. Basically CPS was unhelpful, they said it was a case of "parental alienation" although my daughter relayed the same events to them. I think CPS was bias, I was a single mother who had recently lost her job, was living with my parents, and was on medicaid, my ex at this point had hurried up and married gf, they had their own place and appeared to be a stable couple. CPS dropped the case and warned me not to report anything again.
December that year my ex said my dd could come over to get her Christmas gifts but that his new wife would not allow dd in their home for longer than an hour. After that visit he packed up all the things dd had at their home into my vehicle and said goodbye essentially forever. My daughter, although she resisted visitation felt a great sense of rejection and cried all night long, she had only just turned five.
My daughter's father did not see my daughter until Dec. 2007, at this point my daughter was almost nine. I had called him about child support I had not received and we started having a friendly conversation. I said that maybe enough time had passed and he could start slowly regaining a relationship with dd by having visitation for a few hours at a public place, just him and her. Two weeks later dd had a Christmas recital at school and I invited him, he did show up, with his wife and two daughters with her. Then after that no visitation until Spring. I can't exactly remember how it went down but he wound up having my daughter overnight, I think it was for Easter. In the summer I invited him to dd's birthday party, to which he declined because his wife was pregnant again and she didn't want to meet her husband's ex in laws being swollen. Instead of her staying home and him bringing his daughters to the party he just didn't go, dd was disappointed. Visitation continued very inconsistently every other month at best up until Feb. DD said that during these times she rarely got to see her father and it was almost always wife picking up and dropping my dd off with me, not her father. There was no animosity at this point and I contributed wife's behavior towards my dd years ago to post partum depression.
continued in next post...

