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