Your husband is a liar. He lied to counselors; he lied to attorneys; he lied to the judge, he lied to pastors; he continues to his divorce support group. He claims to have found Jesus, making him the worst kind of narcissist. You are in a spot where you cannot even go to the church where your children attend.
As a result of all of your husband’s lies, your son has now opted to live with his father. Your son appears to be vulnerable to all of the lies that his father is telling. He some how now beliefs that the best place for him is not with you, but his father.
You would like to be surprised that your husband could stoop so low as to turn your children agains you, but now when you look at the situation objectively, you realize that he has only had one goal all along. Money.
He does not want to pay child support. He does not want to pay alimony.
He has forced you to take a vocational assessment so that he can prove that you are able to work. That you should, in fact, be back at work already. He seems to totally discount the fact that the reason that you have been home the last seven years is to care for your daughter. Your daughter who was so severely affected by Autism that you and your husband agreed that she should be at home most of the time. You daughter who died suddenly in her sleep a little more than two years ago.
Finding a Divorce Attorney Who Focuses on Family Law May be Important
For whatever reason, the lies your husband has told seem more appealing than the truth you have lived.
You wonder, as you look back over the last six months, if you should have taken the advice of your friends when they told you that you needed to find a more experienced family law attorney. You friends gave you examples. Would you, they asked, settle for a public defender when who you really needed was a criminal defense attorney? Would you work with a criminal defense attorney when you had been the victim of a personal injury accident?
In hindsight, you should have listened closer to the public defender, criminal defense attorney comparisons. You should have done more interviewing. You should have found a legal team that had both family law attorneys and custody attorneys. You should have found a legal representative who would have been more familiar with the battle that you are now facing.
Not all law firms are the same and you should have realized that. Not all lawyers have experience in the kind of struggle that you are going through. A grieving mother who is now dealing with the loss of a son as he decides to go live with his father. You feel as if you might just die of a broken heart. You have promised yourself that you will no longer allow yourself to put up with the verbal and emotional abuse that you dealt with in your marriage to your husband. You never promised yourself, though, that you would assemble a legal team that would help you fight for the things you love most in your life.
The national statistics may tell you that there are as many as 876,000 divorces each year in the U.S., but that is no consolation right now. These numbers might mean that there is a new divorce happening every 36 seconds, and that 41% of first marriages end in divorce, but the only number that matters to you at this point is one. That one son you have. That one son who is now going to live with his father instead of you, probably because your husband was savvy enough to know that the attorney he found may just be one of the biggest deciding factors in how your divorce, and the custody of your son, might turn out.
Not all attorneys are alike. A criminal defense attorney, for instance, may not be of help in a personal injury case. It might be in your best interest to make sure that you seek the legal advice of someone who is knowledgeable in the help that you need.