Legal Question in Family Law in California
I petitioned for joint legal custody of my daughter when she was very young because her mother who I was never married to felt like it was ok to tell me I couldnt see my daughter when she would become angry. At the time, I asked for only one day a week of visitation because she was very attached to her mother. She is now seven and we have developed a very strong bond and her mother lets me have my daughter just about every weekend for the past five years or so..but only when it is convenient. She still has a tendency to use the fact that I only have the one sunday a week on paper against me in an effort to demonstrate power and authority over me. She is severley unreliable sometimes making me wait for hours to pick up my daughter, she fails to communicate important information about my daughters school, or sometimes out of fits of anger refuses to communicate with me at all and nominates third parties to communicate information to me. The only time I can be sure to see my daughter is once a week in which 2 hours are spent on the road because she lives in Temecula and I live in San Diego. What Can I do to ensure that if I take her to court to get the time she has voluntarily given me out of convenience put on paper through the court and ensure that she wont be able to petition that recieve I less time out of spite for taking it to court.
3 Answers from Attorneys
There is nothing you can do to ensure anything in a child custody proceeding. Courts are generally willing to order that an established routine that seems to be working for the child be maintained. The more evidence you have of the new routine and how well it is working for the child the better, but ensure an outcome? Forget it. The court can and is required to order whatever it finds is in "the best interests of the minor child" per the Family Code. So that ultimately is whatever a particular judge decides it to be on a particular day. And there is no way to ensure that your ex won't petition the court for the moon and the stars if she wants to. The right to petition government, including through the courts, is a constitutional right. Unless you have abused the right and been declared a vexatious litigant, you can ask a court for anything you want any time you want. Whether you'll get it, and whether you'll even get a hearing if you don't follow proper procedures is another story, but you can ask for anything. This is why pretty much every Family Law judge in the state opens the the court session for the custody hearing calendar by admonishing everyone that he or she can never make as good a decision about what is best for your child as the parents can if they put themselves aside and try to understand and agree on what would be best for THEIR child, and then asks everyone to meet and confer one last time rather than let the court decide.
While there is no guarantee that there will be an improvement in your child sharing order it is almost a certainty, based upon what you have said. I would suggest you have a consultation with a family law attorney who can get more details from you and give you some valuable advise. While you could do this on your own, an experienced custody attorney will probably increase your chances in court and give you insight into how to handle the mediation that must take place prior to the hearing in front of the judge.
The court can ensure a specific accountable timeshare in a parenting order that is enforceable by the court as well as the police.
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