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Hi, I have an issue with the mother of my daughter who is 2. I have just had her for 2 weeks while she went to Spain with her boyfriend. I would like to swap the weekends, it will be 3 weeks in a row which is great but it would be better for me to swap as some single dad friends have their kids the opposite to me and we had such fun doing things with all the kids this weekend. I asked a year ago and she refused. But now I'd really like to swap. Do I have any legal right to do this? It doesnt affect her what so ever but out of spite she doesnt want me to.
They live 150 miles away and I have always done everything possible as soon as I found out the child was mine through DNA. I was never with the mother but a one night stand that I am trying my best to be responsible for. She has 5 children and is expecting another with a 4th dad, not that this matters. One of the fathers has been looking after my daughter more recently with his two and she has now started calling him daddy too which Im not happy about but understand I have no power to change this. The mother just laughed when it was brought up. I pay always from the beginning with the CSA.
Any help for this seemingly trivial problem would be great.
Hi There,
do you have a formal order in place (one put in place through court) or is it just a personal agreement when you see her?
If it's through court then you would need an official change to that order if your ex didn't agree I would say you had good reasons to do this.
However if it's a personal agreement it would need to be agreed through the 2 of you, that may be difficult so you may want to consider mediation in order to help gain some sort of agreement that works better rather than the one you have now.
With either option you wouldn't be 100% certain of being able to swap the weekends it would just be down to her agreement or that of the judge on the day.
You may want to continue conversations with her first to explore all avenues, ask her what you can do to enable the change to weekends or ask her what her objections are, do it politely and ask so that you can understand, it could be that she has time on her weekends with people that she would then miss if she were to swap.
Good luck.
GTTS
Hi got-the-tshirt.
Luckily we have got this far without the courts being involved. My parent want me to try and get custody as we don't think she's a great mother or role model but we cant prove anything its more that she's a lazy rude slob! So I don't want to go there but maybe when she's old enough to make her own judgments she would like to come and stay with me more. Anyway I digress!
Baring in mind she knows she has all the power I have been treading very lightly from the beginning, learnt quickly that she loses her temper very easily. There is always a drama, no matter how nicely I ask her a favour she would never agree - where as on the other hand I have been taking lots of time off work to have my daughter as a favour for her. Which obviously Im over the moon to do but when the shoe is on the other foot.
I dont really know anything about mediation but I imagine if its anything that might help me out she will not be happy about it. Its very difficult as you can understand as you have the tshirt!! Don't really want to have to go to court and create a massive or even more massive rift but was hoping there would be some way to solve. Not sure that telling her I'd like to swap purely for the benefit of shareing time with my friends and their kids will go down to well either.
Thanks for listening, really appreciate your help.
Hi,
sometimes you have to play the game a little to enable what you want or need, try and make something that would suit her better, free up her time, maybe start with one weekend swap then work from there.
As you say you have t tread carefully as unfortunately she holds all the cards (which isn't fair)
I know playing games isn't the right way to do it, but maybe a suggestion would be to say your boss needs you to work due to the time off you've had so you will need to swap weekends, put it that if you were to ask in the future for time off to look after your daughter chances are you wouldn't get it if you didn't meet the request to work additional time.
GTTS
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