Please forgive the stereotype, but I'm looking for some divorced mom advice. I don't know a ton of custodial dads to discuss the situation and I'm sure that some custodial moms have faced this sort of thing before. I'm also hoping that there are some non-custodial moms out there who might be able to give me some insight on how my ex-wife might react. I generally do my best to be sensitive to her situation, but occasionally step on a surprise land mine.

My ex-wife is planning on moving. Is it a jerk move to ask to have child support recacluated? The extra money would be nice, but I really don't need it (the way I know that a lot of single parents do). What are the other impacts when you start down that road? My ex-wife and I get along well and generally work together for the kids. We do major kid events like school stuff and birthdays together. I'm a bit afraid that I'll be opening Pandora's box. I know that she is really sensitive about being seen as being a non-custodial parent. I'm always careful to say that we have joint custody when prying minds want to know. I wouldn't ask for a change in status or rights, just a financial recalculation based on reality.

We share custody, but my ex-wife has never hit the 40% overnights that she's given credit for in the child support calculation. Honestly, when I originally agreed to the plan, the 40% figure was more about getting things settled in a way that we could still work together as parents than any realistic expectations of overnights. In the end, it's all the same, but because of her starting point in the negotiations, I've always thought of our plan in terms of protections for me rather than time for her. In actual practice, she uses between 20% and 30% overnights. But now, she is planning on giving up her nearby apartment and moving in with her "friend", about 50 to 90 minutes away depending on the time of day, weather, and phase of the moon. We both agree that her friend's place is not an appropriate place for the kids to visit (the friend lives with her husband who is 20 yrs her senior and is apparently not interested in having kids in his apartment). It's complicated.

She plans on staying at a nearby extended stay suite when she has the kids overnight. It just seems to me that if she moves, we would no longer be sharing physical custody and any financial consideration she had based on that assumption should go away with the move. Her apartment aways seemed more like a crash pad than a home to me. It's really not my place to judge and at least the kids thought of it as their other home. There are familier things there like family pictures on the wall and they keep some stuff there. The people that I know who live far apart do things like have the kids spend most of school breaks with the distant parent to make up for the lack of time during the school year, but with her work schedule and planned living arrangement, summer is really no better than any other time of year. In fact, in some respects, it's harder.

She's going to do it soon. I thought she'd wait until school started, but she reasons that between summer camps, visits with grandparents, and each of our vacations, the kids would spend very little time in her apartment this summer, so why pay for a place that's not being used. If she wasn't going to see the kids, she wouldn't be in her apartment, she'd be at her friend's place.

The thoughts I have are kind of at odds with each other.
1. I have serious doubts about her plan working out at all. Why do anything when it's likely to fail sooner rather than later. Why not give it six months and see if it's really a significant change or problem. She might not be happy about being less connected to the kids. Or who knows, maybe it will all work out. She seems to think so.

2. Is it any of my business? We are divorced, it's her life, and as long as the kids are safe (so far she'd doing a good job on that front), who am I to stick my nose in? I made a custody deal with her to avoid a fight, knowing that she likely wouldn't hit the 40% overnight agreement, so is it really fair to object now?

3. Wouldn't it only be fair to warn her before she moves that I see this as a significant change to our agreement and plan to change her financial responsibilty as a result. I don't know what her financial factors are. Maybe the higher child support would be enough to make the move not as attactive. It's kind of a pisser to make a change to save money only to find out your situation is worse and you actually have less money at the end of the day.

TIA Ray

Hi Lumen,

Thanks for your note. It was a big help to me last night.

Sorry to be obtuse with my ex-wife's relationship. She's bi. It's something that she thought she could put aside when we married, but couldn't. So one kid in to our marriage, we had to find a way for her to be able to be who she is and tell the truth, so we set up some rules and protections for me. One of the most important to me is no other men. The plan had it's ups and downs (I'd never do it again), but it mostly worked for us until she met her married "friend" and her husband, and had to hide the nature of their relationship (rule #2 open and honest both ways) because it broke rule number one and two at a minimum. I was unaware and from my perspective we went from "just a friend" to planning to divorce me and move with the kids to be near them very quickly.

She stopped by last night to tell me that she's moving this week and to drop off a suitcase with kid stuff for them to bring with they stay at the hotel with her. We discussed the situation a bit. The hotel is more of a transition phase than a permanent plan. She's moving for a couple of reasons. She feels like she's caught in limbo while I'm moving on. She slogs her way back here just to sit alone in her apartment or just to have dinner with the kids. She's not much of a cook so dinner is almost always out. She plans to live with her friend, but if that doesn't work out (including the kids not adapting), she's not moving back, she'll just find a place closer to work. I explained that I saw it as a significant change to our arrangement because she won't be there for anything other than a scheduled visit. She's never going to take the day off and watch a sick kid or take them on one of my nights, forcing me to get a sitter. She seems to have thought it through and said she'd have her lawyer write up the change. I'm not real thrilled about introducing our kids to that environment, but I was told that legally I can't tell her what to do during her parenting time unless it's truly unsafe. They understand that mom likes boys and girls. I just have to trust that she'll be careful. If she's not, I'm in a much better position to do something legally than I was when we first separated.

Also, I did do the math. It's actually more money than I thought it would be. Certainly worth the cost to make the change, and it seems like she's paying for that. She grumbled a bit, but it doesn't seem like she has an issue with paying. Although during our conversation, she did zing me for not letting her move with the kids (she knows that it was not a reasonable request of me or in any way best for the kids) and not letting her come back (when I told her to spend some time apart to figure out what she really wanted, I meant a couple of weeks. after 6 months of no change, it was no longer her decision to come back, it was mine to move on).