When Duane had been out of the house a little more than a year, he stopped by to make an announcement. Well, actually he had a couple things to say. The announcement was he was going to be moving in with his girlfriend of several months.
We were still married at the time, but whatever. The problem I had with this plan was I didn’t think he should be moving so fast on this new relationship when Laurel was struggling just to process the whole situation. Our daughter’s therapist asked Duane please to limit his time with the girlfriend and her son during Laurel’s visitation periods. Duane understood. He is a sensitive and caring man. But he kept right on doing as he pleased.
Listening to him at my kitchen table that day, I knew that any objections I made would look like irrational attacks and be discounted. In fact, telling Duane my fears was the best way to make something risky or misguided happen.
Instead, I heard him out as he described his plan to move into the girlfriend’s dilapidated rental house and rent out the perfectly good three bedroom house he’s just bought six months ago. This was pitched to me as a clever way to save money.
All I could think, listening to him, was there Duane sat, almost fifty years old, and here was I, the woman who had woven a cloak of reliability and maturity for him out of figments of my imagination. Now he wanted to play grownup with someone younger and economically unsettled. She would never know the difference, and that was the reason he’d chosen her.
Meanwhile, Duane had something else to tell me.
I got a job offer in back East, and they are going to pay me $250,000 a year. Would you consider moving back East if I took the job? I would support you financially.
Five months after this conversation, Duane’s attorney would slap a geographical restriction on the divorce decree ordering that I stay in Travis County. This represented a significant loss in the unofficial negotiation between our attorneys, but I had to accept it. I wanted to stay out of court because I had seen what high-conflict divorce does to people, and I knew what it would do to me. Duane was highly competitive and important in the community, while I had nothing going for me but a lot of fear and reactivity. I didn’t stand a chance.
A Judgment of Solomon
Geographical restrictions are rules that limit where the custodial parent is allowed to live so that the child, as the Texas statute states, “will have frequent and continuing contact with parents who have shown the ability to act in [her] best interest.” A typical restriction is to the county where the non-custodial parent lives, or that county and the contiguous ones.
Geographical restrictions are admirable in theory. When the divorced parents live within a short drive of each other, it facilitates visitation and allows both parents to attend school and extracurricular events.
But like many rules that look good on paper, the reality is that geographical restrictions are only equitable when the divorced parents enjoy economic parity. Where do divorced moms stand? Here are some interesting statistics:
- The majority of custodial parents in the United States are women; they outnumber men six to one, according to the 2010 Census.
- Child support constitutes 45 percent of these women’s income.
- In Texas, nearly one half of the men ordered to pay child support are at least one month delinquent in their payments. Texans owe over 11 billion dollars in child support payments.
- 20 percent of Texan men make no support payments at all.
- 61 percent of women-led households in Texas are low income in 2014, up from 59 percent in 2007. (For comparison, the total number of low-income families in Texas in 2011 was 38 percent.)
These figures paint a picture of staggering economic inequality. Divorce is a big part of the equation.
In order for geographical restrictions not to be punitive, there would have to be language in the restriction ordering the non-custodial parent to pay extra support so that staying in the restricted zone would not create an undue economic hardship on the custodial parent. To my knowledge, there is none.
Instead, women are asked to make a sacrifice for their children that may lead to their long-term impoverishment. There is a lot of scorn heaped on women who protest this reality. They are accused of wanting to punish the father by moving away or of being selfish. The economic facts do not seem to resonate. The fact that non-custodial fathers have the option themselves to move or to pay more seems to occur to no one.
The Economic Facts in My Case
I have been pleasantly surprised by my ability to earn money following the divorce. Nevertheless, I am in the middle of the statistical bell curve — Duane’s support constitutes about half of the money I use to live on. I would probably earn more at one full-time job instead of the part-time jobs I’ve cobbled together, but I want to be there for Laurel while she is still young. That is ultimately what matters.
I live in a city where the price of real estate has gone through the roof, and though I dream and scheme about moving to a better neighborhood once Laurel goes to middle school, it seems unlikely that will happen. I cannot stay in Travis County and live in neighborhood with good public schools. It is up to her to qualify for one of the city’s magnate programs.
If she doesn’t, I may have to go to court to modify the restriction so that we can move to a contiguous county. The fact that I need a judge’s permission to move one mile from the county line flies in the face of good sense. It’s not the judge I’m worried about, however. I’m worried about Duane’s reaction.
Duane never did move in with his girlfriend. And as for the job offer back East — that never materialized, either. In retrospect, neither announcement was what it seemed at face value. Instead, they conveyed a powerful symbolic message: Duane is able to move wherever he wants without restriction. Unlike me, he is free.
I agree that there are economic challenges when there there geographic restrictions, but courts don’t use who makes more when they determine custody, so I’m not sure that it is fair to use it as a factor when changing custody at a later date.
My (now)exwife had plans to move away. When I discovered them (having affair with a married guy in line for a promotion that would have required a move), I insisted that we have a no-move clause in our custody agreement. She refused. We couldn’t come to agreement on a parenting plan. I wanted 50/50 over nights (likely needed to prevent the move even with an anti-move clause) and she wanted me to visit the kids three Sunday afternoons a month (“one home” concept, but also I think to make her move away case easier later). So we fought it out in the courts. Fortunately, I won (actually, the truth is she lost), I got sole custody of our kids, and no longer have the threat of her elimiating me as a parent haning over me.
As expected, she’s never moved away. She’s also a bit freaked out that I might. I got a job offer that would have made it worth it to move out of the country for the next couple of years. I talked to my attorney and she said that I’d be easily be able to do it over my ex’s objections. I let the opportunity go, but word got back to my ex of the possiblity and she flipped out. Despite the money and career opportunity, I couldn’t take the kids away from their mom. I’m not her biggest fan, but they need her. Now if she moves, all bets are off. The opportunity is still there.
On other thought that just surfaced from my time worrying about my exwife moving away. You said “Duane is able to move wherever he wants without restriction. Unlike me, he is free.” My ex said essentially the same thing as one of her reason’s to reject the clauses. That’s not exactly true. My exwife was free to move away without the kids, as are am I. When you have kids, you are never completely free.
I wish my county had restrictions for moving away. My exhusband just got approval to move with our kids to the other side of the country. We have joint legal custody and I have the children with me about 1/3 of the time. Now it looks like I’ll have “liberal visitation” if I visit the kids, but bringing home to me will be 1/2 Christmas break, Spring break (all of them), and 4 weeks in the summer ( or two two week trips). He’s promised some sort of video conferencing setup as well.
I know that this is a great opportunity for him, but this is so unfair to me and my relationship with my kids. Our current arrangement was very flexible and I think we coparented well. If I wanted to take the kids to a moving on their father’s night, it was no big deal. We both went together to all of the kids events, shared birthday parties, etc. How can I go from being there for every thing to almost nothing? It means that I will probably never be with two of my kids on their birthdays ever again. They fall during the school year and never overlap with my visitiation time.
The other frustrating thing is that this whole thing is so that he can make more money (almost double what he makes now) and advance his career, but it ends up costing me. He makes five times what I do now. How much more does he need? He only has to pay for two round trip tickets for the kids. All of the other travel is at my expense. He’s offered to treat it as 6 round trip tickets and let me decide if I’d rather go there than bring the kids here, but then I have to get a hotel and eat every meal out. I’ll go broke in the first year! I pay child support, and now there’s suposedly a bunch of money available that will benefit the kids, but I still pay the same child support, with no condsideration as to how my expenses have gone up.
I have a move away provision in our parenting plan. I’m free to go if I want, but it would mean only seeing the kids on holidays, school breaks, I think it’s about 60 days a year and I would have to pay 100% of the travel costs.
Not being able to move has definately has hindered my career. I make good money, more than my ex, but to continue to grow, I really need to move. The problem is that even to keep doing what I’m doing now, I’m having to travel more and more, just to stay even. That means that the kids stay with my ex more and more, making it less and less likely that I could ever win in court and be able to move with the kids. I’m afraid that at some point, I’ll end up traveling so much that I might as well move. We live in alovely place, but if I lose this job, there’s really nothing for me here, career wise. On the other hand, my ex could work from anywhere that there is power and internet. It’s been suggested that I bribe him to follow me to the next job, but there’s really little incentive for him to. He already moved twice for me, and that was when he loved me. At this point, I think he likes me and values me as a prent, but I don’t have much to offer to entice him to move. He loves it here. It’s a great place.
My exwife has a really interesting career. She’s amazing and we should all be happy that she anad other’s like her do what they do. That said, It’s really demanding on her time and as a consequence, my time has always been whatever she has left for me. Same is true now that we are no longer together. She commutes an hour each way, which means that door to door, it’s a 13 hr day, longer if something comes up (which happens frequently). We’ve worked out a plan that guarentees me time and is flexible to keep her involved as a parent. It’s basically 60/40 split where in a two week period, I get the kids 8 days and she has them 6. In actual practice, her time can dip to as low as 4 days or as high as 7.
But… she’d like to move. It would enhance the quality of her life greatly. While we were separating, she lived in an apartment with a “friend” a block from work. She could run errands on her lunch hour and gets 2 hr a day back. The problem was that her dream situation was at the expense of my relationship with our children, and really, she couldn’t pull it off on her own. She would have required max child support, and fantatasy level of alimony, a less than equitable property settlement and even then, her schedule was still an issue. Close to work is a great place for Chandler, Ross, Monica, Phoebe, and Rachel to live, but really expensive and not a great place for our kids.
So to keep the peace, we settled on a move restriction that protected my relationship with our kids. I’m sure that like you, she feels that it restricts her, but in reality it does constrain both of us. I got a job offer to move across the country. Given our situation, my lawyer thought I could win approval, even with the move restriction, but I feel like I need to hold up my end of the agreement, so I let the opportunity go.
Hopefully you can find a way to be at peace with where you live. I know that it can be difficult, but when we have kids, we have to put them first, and that almost always means making a trade.
A divorce is stressful enough without geography complicating it and make the issues worse. Often my kids fly to another state to visit their dad on summer vacations, and sometimes their grandparents in yet another state. It’s really tough to figure out all the different airline requirements for unaccompanied minors, but thank goodness I found an easy solution last summer which may be useful to readers here: a one-stop agency that specializes in booking flights for children traveling alone — weflykids.com