Here is a story from Illinois. It is not an unfamiliar pattern. This mother’s words show us that the problem may not be found exclusively in Connecticut.
She was good enough then.
By An Illinois Mother
Hello Frank
I sincerely cannot thank you enough for writing this article. The biggest mistake I made, on the advice of an attorney, was to get a Guardian ad Litem [GAL] involved in my custody hearing.
She only spoke to two out of many character witnesses on my behalf. My witnesses would call her office and not have calls returned. They would email her and not get a response. They wrote letters that went unread.
The GAL did decide to speak to my abuser, my biological mother, and her husband – a man who abused his own daughter, myself, and my daughter. The state’s attorney would not act on what happened to my daughter because my biological mom’s husband didn’t make my daughter “act” on the penis in her face.
We were laughed at and mocked in court when I brought this up, and my estranged husband has been screaming alienation; he even tried to get an OP after he hit and drug me with his vehicle, with my daughter inside.
My daughter is on the 13 side of 12, and I’ve raised her – been a homemaker and even homeschooled her. She is very much like me in how she acts and responds, but also very much has a teenager attitude.
Alienation was used to explain away her teenage behavior and attitude, and her disliking her father.
She was good enough then.
She disliked her father because, when he left us, he moved in with my biological mom and her husband. Anyone in their right mind would understand why my daughter felt fear living in that abusive home with her dad.
I urged her to have a relationship with her father because, while he was absent most of the time while she was growing up, he wasn’t bad all the time.
When she was in about first grade, her dad choked her and turned her upside down as punishment, but I didn’t find out about that for quite some time. He threw not one, not two, but three vacuum cleaners at us out of rage. He’s not an alcoholic, but he is a binge drinker, and according to my daughter, he drinks daily.
Yes, I should have left him more times than I can count, but, as a homemaker, I didn’t have anything to fall back on. The GAL has recommended that I’m all but taken out of my daughter’s life completely – so my daughter can “move on.”
I’m not exactly sure why, other than alienation and false testimony from my biological mom – including her accusing me of being a drug addict. I’m not on drugs. I don’t drink, except on a rare occasion with my girlfriends. I don’t run around. I don’t go to bars. I don’t get into fights, and I keep to myself.
Again, I was a homemaker and volunteer!
She was good enough then.
I went through educational courses on protecting children, not harming them. PTSD from the Family Court is a real thing. Mothers losing their children is a real thing.
My story is much more extended and involved than what I have written but I wanted to take a moment to let you know that this has become the norm in our family court system. I live in Illinois, and it used to be that mothers had all the rights. Now the script has flipped, and it’s 100% for the fathers, whether alcoholics, abusers, pedophiles, drug addicts, you name it. There is no balance, and the scales of justice do not exist.
And good enough then
Since I was a homemaker and he took all of the money, I don’t have the finances for attorneys to even to fight this. I do the best I can when I show up, and I deal with the abuse over Zoom Court. This began in Aug. 2020.
Again, I sincerely thank you for writing your article from the bottom of my heart!
In Family Court, he who holds the money, holds the fate of their child.
She want to Family Court and they appointed a GAL who knew how to take a mother from a child using Parental Alienation Syndrome. Need I add that the father had the money.
Now, according to family court, she is not good enough to see her child at all.
