I don’t know if it would be right to mention by name people I know who are going through breakups and custody battles so I won’t. Some have publicly posted about their struggles on their own blogs and others, some I know about solely through email. It makes me think of my own struggles with custody issues and how I resolved them. and the pain and grief and fear surrounding such an ordeal, and the choices and sacrifices we mothers have to make.

I generally try to avoid discussing custody issues with men because they seem to feel that the courts are unfairly biased towards mothers…maybe this is true, but what I have seen is that the bias, if it exists, is there basically because most fathers don’t want sole custody or even half custody of their children. Most want the kids to live with their mother, and they (the dad) come by and pick them up ‘when they can’. It seems to me that when a father wants his kids with them, when they press the issue, they have a fairly simple time of making this happen.

When I was having a difficult time in my marriage in 2002 I was the first to mention divorce. My husband responded with Well I am taking the kids. He then went on to claim I struggled too much as a single mother (I had 2 kids when he met me, we also have a child together) and he didn’t want my older kids to go through that ever again and our younger child to ever go through it. He told me he could ‘prove’ I was unfit. and he actually had the nerve, the audacity to say he would also claim to a judge that I was a flight risk since I left the city I lived in prior because my daughter’s father stalked me and attacked me frequently, my life and hers were seriously in danger. He told me he would tell a judge he wanted full custody not only because I couldn’t parent on my own but because he was afraid I would just up and leave town with the kids and he’d never see them again. Never mind that I had no reason to do that with him, he wasn’t crazy or psycotic or abusive.

Out of everything that he did, everything that went wrong in our marriage that was the worst thing he ever did to me. Anytime I dwell on it I get all caught up in how painful this was, how trapped it made me feel. So I don’t dwell on it. It took me a long time to get over it, up until early 2005 I would still attack him for it or turn every argument into how he threatened to take the kids from me. It took him not only apologizing for it over and over again but also admitting he was wrong and admitting he only said it to try and keep me in the marriage before I could even contemplate forgiving him and moving on.

At the time I was struggling back and forth on whether to go or stay (as did he, soon it was him saying he wanted out) I was determined not to make the issue of custody a determining factor in whether or not I stayed married to Brian. In short, I wasn’t going to stay with him out of fear; the fear of losing my kids. I had already wasted years in a prior relationship out of fear, I wasn’t going to do that again. But I was still scared, and it was always in the back of my mind. and race was a factor as well that had me worried, not only did I have to worry about his social power and clout as a man, I had to worry about how racism. I am black and Brian is white. I joined a support group for divorced and seperated women of color (black, asian, latino, and one native american) who were married to white men, and 3 of them had their children taken away, their ex’s had full custody. One of them later had her kids returned after her ex got tired of having to be a full-time parent and work full-time too. The things these women told me…terrified me.

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