The day Rita filed the PFA petition, she filed a petition to relocate the kids to Michigan. This initial battle would drag out for quite some time as Rita switched attorneys and the courts seemed in no rush to get anything scheduled.
The filing, contained in the image gallery, includes some information worth discussing. Rita proposes that she and the kids move to her sister Debbie’s house, near her parent’s house and in the Dundee school district. She notes that there will be three adults and three children living in the house but does not mention that it’s a double-wide modular home that certainly does not have space for everyone. I will discuss the ridiculous idea that three adults and three children could live in this house later.
The proposed moving date is March 4, 2013, and I have no idea of the significance of this date. We didn’t even have a hearing concerning this proposal until June.
Rita provides three reasons for proposing to relocate. The first is that nearly all our extended family lives within a 50-mile radius of Debbie’s house. The second reason Rita provides is that without me being there to help with Amanda’s medical care, she wants to be closer to her family for support. Finally, Rita mentions that she will not be paying Debbie any rent and cannot afford to live separate from me. Her explanation for this is that instead of pursuing “lucrative employment” during our marriage, she focused on raising the
This last reason annoys me since she acts like she could obtain lucrative employment without the kids. Rita had been out of high school for eight years, and we’d been married for six before Caleb was born. During this time, Rita did nothing to try to improve her career opportunities. She worked at McDonald’s, Kmart, a children’s shoe store, and university family housing. She had plenty of opportunities to take classes and at least try to get an associate’s degree, and she didn’t take them. Rita was not working long hours or to support my graduate education as I had financial support through scholarships, fellowships, and assistantships throughout my studies. These all came with stipends that financed all of my living expenses. Combined with some great returns on investments I made while I had time to study the market, she didn’t have to work at all.
Saying she could not afford to live on her own was one of Rita’s many attempts to predict a horrible future unless the court allowed her to move. I was paying her over $2,600 per month in spousal and child support, and she was able to find good places to live when the judge eventually denied this petition and moved out of the McBath Street house. I believe she was paying roughly $1500 in rent for a townhouse about a mile from McBath Street.
Regarding custody, she writes the following.
I propose the custody schedule be the following if I am permitted to relocate:
- Mother and father have shared legal custody of the minor children.
- Mother is granting primary physical custody of the minor child, subject to father’s partial custody rights, as follows:
- Father shall be granted Thanksgiving Break with the minor child, from the Wednesday before Thanksgiving until the Monday following Thanksgiving.
- Father shall be granted Christmas Break with the minor children, from noon the day after the children are dismissed from school for Christmas Break, until the day prior to their resumption of school after Christmas Break.
- Father shall be entitled to have custody of the children during their spring break from school, if any, with specific dates and times to be agreed upon by the parties.
- Father shall be entitled to time with the minor children if father chooses to travel to Michigan for the purpose of visiting the minor children, with specific dates and times to be agreed upon by the parties.
- Father and Mother shall share physical custody of the children during their summer break from school on a two weeks on, two weeks off schedule.
- Father shall permit mother access to the minor child Amanda Mockensturm during father’s extended visits with the children, for purposes of Amanda’s medical care.
The custody time she offered is unusual, but I genuinely wonder if she had any plans to abide by this if she was allowed to move. When she finally moved, the first thing she did was file a petition to cancel all of my visitations. There are many details left out, such as where was my visitation supposed to occur? The petition suggests but does not explicitly state that I would have them in Pennsylvania during these periods, but where would Rita stay? She’d have to be nearby to take care of Amanda. Was Rita going to give up all Thanksgivings and Christmases with her family to be in Pennsylvania? If she was planning to be in Pennsylvania, again, where was she planning to stay? Rita obviously could not stay with me as the PFA order made that impossible. I can’t imagine she was planning to stay in a hotel for all this time. If so, who was going to pay for it?
Likewise, what was the plan going to be for the summer? I would have assumed my two-week stretches of custodial time would be in Pennsylvania. If so, again, I just can’t see how this would possibly work. Did Rita have a plan for where she was going to stay? Or was she betting on the vagueness of the order to turn around then and say it meant all my custodial time was to be in Michigan? I quickly learned that the courts would interpret anything imprecise in the order in Rita’s favor.
Laura, representing Rita at the time, surely knew and would have told her that we’d likely renegotiate this entire arrangement after she moved. Thus, I don’t think Rita ever planned on following this proposal. I’m sure she planned to move to Michigan and then claim it was too burdensome/expensive to bring the kids back to Pennsylvania. Rita would then petition–as she later did–to have the custody case moved to Michigan. Once there, Rita could start over with her offer since she now had what she wanted and did not have to pretend to be courteous. What was the court going to do if she didn’t follow the order? Make her move back to Pennsylvania? Would the Pennsylvania courts even have jurisdiction to enforce the order?
It is also fascinating to note how much time she was proposing to give me when she and her family later claimed I couldn’t take care of them at the hearing. Fortunately, my attorney pointed out this ridiculous inconsistency, and it caught Rita off guard. I don’t think Rita had even considered that what she was telling the judge was that I couldn’t be trusted with her children when she was indirectly claiming I could.
On February 5, 2013, after a custody conference–an off-the-record meeting between the attorneys and judge in the judge’s chambers–four days prior, Judge Ruest scheduled a pre-hearing conference for April 25, 2013, and a day-long hearing for May 14, 2013. I’m unclear why, but this schedule was adjusted on April 8, 2013, pushing the conference back to May 28, 2013, and the hearing to June 11, 2013.
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