Q. Can you tell me what Mr. Mockensturm’s involvement with her care has been like?
A. He pretty much has never done her ACE. I’ve showed him a couple of times how to do it just in case something would happen to me or I couldn’t have done it for some reason. I don’t know if he ever did her bladder catheter, maybe once in the hospital when the doctors were showing us how to do it. He would change her pull-up when needed if I wasn’t there. She didn’t prefer him to do it, but he would do it, and she would let him only if I wasn’t there.
I don’t think I ever did ACE on my own because Rita was always there to do it. If Rita were gone, she would make sure to do it before she left. Plus, it was required and simply prevented Amanda from having “accidents.” The procedure consisted of putting a catheter in a port on Amanda’s abdomen that went into her large intestine. We would then gravity feed soapy water into the port to flush out her bowels. I did often help get things ready, but it wasn’t that much effort to put soapy water into a bag. After getting the processes going, Rita would usually leave to do other things, usually with Amanda wearing an oversized diaper and laying in bed with the bag of soapy water suspended above her. It would take between 30 and 45 minutes usually to flush everything out. Rita would then come to remove the diaper and clean Amanda up. Amanda did not want anyone else doing this, and I wasn’t eager to intervene forcefully.
As she got older, I kept telling Rita that we needed her to sit on the toilet for this as she was certainly old enough and capable of taking care of it. Amanda refused to do it, and I honestly don’t know why. The last I knew, when Amanda was 13, Rita was still doing the ACE with Amanda laying in bed with an adult diaper. In early 2021, Amanda told me that she hadn’t had to do an ACE in quite a few years. I’m not sure what changed, but I suspect it partially was because she was motivated not to do it.
Q. Does she wear a pull-up now?
A. Every day. Even though she doesn’t have an accident every day, it’s just her comfort of she doesn’t want to be at school and have that kind of accident.
Because the ACE wasn’t always 100% effective, Amanda wore a pull-up until she moved to Michigan. I assume that since she isn’t doing an ACE now, she is no longer wearing one.
Q. Now, has Mr. Mockensturm not participated because you’re a momma bear and said, hands off, I can do it, and you just refused to allow him to do it?
MS. KAUFFMAN: Objection, Your Honor. She’s leading the witness.
THE COURT: Sustained.
There was a terrible co-dependency issue between Rita and Amanda. Rita was a “momma bear” and had Amanda believing that she was the only person that could adequately care for her. I think caring for Amanda made Rita feel needed and essential, and over time Amanda came to depend on Rita for her care. However, there were times when Amanda was very young when Rita just was not comfortable doing things the doctors had told us to do. One thing, in particular, was after she had the Hirschsprung’s pull-through surgery, we had to dilate her anus with this metal probe-like thing, so the scar tissue remained compliant. Rita could not bring herself to do it because it was clearly painful.
BY MS. TORQUATO:
Q. Have you encouraged Mr. Mockensturm to participate?
A. I have, and I have asked him to help me because of the lack of sleep, and especially in the beginning it was very, very difficult to have a newborn and have a kid that had to be taken care of frequently throughout the day and throughout the night. I asked him could you just get up with her one time at night or maybe one or two nights a week, and a lot of times he would be up anyway. He would be up until 3:00 in the morning on the computer. I am like, well, can you get up with her at midnight and 3:00 a.m. and then I can sleep until 6:00. And he just wouldn’t do it.
I spoke about this before. We had agreed to alternate nights, but on my nights, Rita would get up anyway because she didn’t trust that I would ensure Amanda’s bladder was empty. She had no reason to distrust me, but it was her nature to oversee everything with Amanda. After a couple of weeks of this, I told her if she was getting up anyway, it was ridiculous for me to get up too. We tried a couple of times subsequently, and the same thing happened.
I was constantly advocating that Amanda simply leave the catheter in at night so she, and everyone else, could sleep. Rita refused because the doctor had told us it would be better not to leave the catheter. After all, it might cause the flap of tissue that acted as a valve not to seal shut as well, and urine might leak out of the port when a catheter was not in place. I thought this trade-off was well worth it. If a bit of urine occasionally leaked out, it would have been no big deal. Amanda would simply wind up with a small wet spot on her shirt if it happened at school, which no one would assume was urine. Plus, she could always have extra shirts at school with the nurse so she could change. Additionally, we could have simply taped or strapped something absorbent over the port. I could never understand this masochistic behavior on Rita’s part.
Q. Now, you also heard Ms. Westerhaus testify on Cross-Examination that Mr. Mockensturm had been to two out of the three IEP meetings. Is that because you weren’t — why is that?
A. Basically we split the duties. I was the one taking care of the physical health of Amanda and doing her care, and because her care is around the clock, it was just easier for him to go and deal with Caleb’s educational needs because I was dealing with Amanda’s other needs.
Q. What was that — what did that responsibility consist of; what did that commitment consist of?
A. Of taking care of Amanda?
Q. No, Caleb.
A. Oh, basically there would be a meeting once or twice a year that he would attend, and that was it.
Q. When he would come home from those IEP meetings, was there any kind of discussion?
A. Very little. I would just ask, how was his IEP; did they change anything. He says, oh, he’s doing okay. Nothing really changed. Never really discussed much of it. I would read the report when it came in the mail, talked with his teachers, if need be. I’d e-mail them back and forth. Like I said, working in the school, I talked with his aides that were working with him. They would bring me his homework if he had something that needed to be done that he wasn’t going to get done in Homework Club, but for the most part, there really wasn’t much discussed about it.
This statement is entirely untrue. First, I would never say, “He’s doing okay,” because it was always apparent after the meeting that he was not. I constantly asked Rita to go to these meetings because, as I mentioned before, I would go in thinking things were good from what Rita would tell me when I got home from work. Then I would hear that he hadn’t turned in over 50% of his assignments. It was just never clear what was going on. There was always a discrepancy between what I would hear from Rita and what the teachers would tell me. I would then report this to Rita, and she would always say that he’d done whatever came home with him. It took a few years to figure out that he simply was “losing” the homework before getting home. We could have figured this out much sooner if Rita had gone to the meetings as I’d asked. We then started a system where Caleb’s teacher would email Rita telling her what homework he was supposed to have. This process worked for a bit, but the emails became more inconsistent, with Rita assuming that Caleb didn’t have homework if she didn’t get anything. I genuinely believe Caleb’s education was hampered by Rita not attending these meetings. She needed to be there.
A. It’s Eric’s family. He has cousins there and uncles there and aunts there.
Q. I’m showing you what’s been marked as Plaintiff’s Exhibit 10. Can you just identify this for the record?
A. This is my list of family members, and on the second page is Eric’s family members.
Q. Did you prepare this list?
A. Yes, I did.
Q. Why did you do that?
A. Just to kind of show that we are a large family. We are a very close knit family. We do a lot of things together, and my kids would have a lot of support there. They also have a lot of extended family that they would spend time with.
Q. And the second page of that document, where it says Eric’s family —
A. Right. So he’s got some aunts and uncles that live right there in town. He has a couple of cousins that don’t live that far away, and he has aunts and uncles that live in the Toledo area, which is like I said about 35 miles from where my sister lives.
I very seriously doubt that the kids have seen any of this extended family Rita mentions. I suspect they see their grandmother regularly as they often mention that they’ve been there. I’m not sure what’s happening with Rita and Debbie, but Rita said the kids barely spend time there. I’m not sure this is true, but I’m not sure why Rita would lie about it. I know Rita (and the kids, and pretty much everyone else) couldn’t take being around Debbie’s husband for long, so maybe he’s around more now. Besides Debbie and their grandmother, the kids probably see their cousins yearly, as when they lived in Pennsylvania. They have not seen my brother’s kids in Maryland since they’ve moved. And they’ve seen my father once.
A. Just a little bit north of that area, about 40 minutes away is my older brother Mark and his wife.
Q. Do they have children?
A. They do. My brother’s oldest daughter just recently moved back to the area, and she has four kids, and then Logan is about twenty minutes away, and he has a child, an infant, and then his wife has a daughter — or, has a son, Doug. He lives in Milan, which is about ten miles away. We actually see them quite a bit. Any time I come to visit, Doug and his wife and their kids come over, and my kids absolutely love it because Norma is close to Mae’s age. They love playing together, and the little baby is — he’s cute. Amanda loves little kids. So yeah, they see them every time we go there.
Mark’s kids are much older than mine, so there was never much interaction with them besides James. It is telling that Rita does not even mention James as one of Mark’s kids here while she mentions Doug, who is Mark’s stepson from his third marriage.
Q. And if the Court were to grant the relocation, how were you proposing to handle transportation?
A. I’m pretty flexible I’d be agreeable to meeting him halfway. I would even bring the kids all the way back. I don’t mind the drive. It’s a pretty easy drive. The kids travel well. They don’t mind the trip at all.
And the first time she was supposed to bring them back, she filed an emergency petition so she wouldn’t have to. It’s also not clear what she was even considering with meeting me halfway. That would only make sense if she could get herself and Amanda apart, and I just couldn’t see that happening. Her testimony shows that she had no plans on bringing the kids back to Pennsylvania much after she moved. Unfortunately, Judge Ruest, not having kids and not being familiar with the situation, could not understand the problems and inconsistencies here.
A. In the beginning, I wasn’t really sure what it was, and over the years, it’s gotten progressively worse. He spends a lot of time alone, on his computer. He said it calms him, it’s what he likes to do. He would spend days in the bedroom just crying. He wouldn’t eat. He wouldn’t shower. He would miss a lot of work. He would get jittery, is what we call it. He would start off the morning very nervous, very jittery, and that would last several hours. He would sleep a big part of the day.
Q. When did you notice this pattern? When did you begin to?
A. When I was pregnant with Amanda, so ten years ago was probably the start of the major depression. He always had issues of being down in the spring and in the fall. You know, people get that way, but I ended up taking him to the hospital because I was quite concerned that he was so depressed and just so anxious, and those episodes seemed to have gotten worse, where he was back for a few days and he’d be okay, and then they seemed to last days and days and days, and then he frequently falls back into being jittery and anxious.
This exchange especially annoyed me because I realized Rita was willing to lie under oath deliberately to get what she wanted. The anxiety and depression issues certainly did not get worse over the years; they got much better. As I described previously, the first two episodes, in 2001 and 2002, were horrible and lasted for months. I recall another minor episode in the fall of 2005 in which, under a doctor’s supervision, I had stopped taking the medication. This episode didn’t last nearly as long because I immediately started retaking Zoloft when I had issues. However, even during the worst times, most days, I could function again and get some things done by the early evening. I had graduate students to advise, and I would try during this time to stay up-to-date on what they were doing. Then until 2012, there were no significant issues and only the sporadic lousy day. The one episode in 2012 and the two in 2013 were acute but did not last for more than a few days. I have no idea how Rita could say things were getting progressively worse.
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