Almost immediately after this, Tonia filed a motion to reconsider that dragged us all back to court. The new information she had was that I had submitted a request to modify child support which Rita got two days after the second hearing.
In April of that year, I spoke with associate dean Anthony Atchley, who suggested I apply for a Family Medical Leave for the fall semester to take time to try to get things back in order. In the application, I had stated that the modification was because Penn State had put me on unpaid leave, which was technically accurate. I didn’t mention the FMLA in the petition because I didn’t know how much income it would provide.
The state approved the application on May 20, 2013, but I, of course, never mentioned it to Rita because that would have put me back into jail. I’m sure Rose was aware, but I guess she thought it wasn’t any of Rita or Tonia’s business. The tax-exempt disability checks would net me slightly less monthly income, so I filed for a child support modification. I didn’t think “going on disability” was necessary or even moral, but it seemed like Penn State wasn’t giving me an option.
Tonia’s position in the motion to reconsider was that Judge Ruest’s primary reason for denying relocation was that I was a tenured professor at Penn State and could support the kids by staying in Pennsylvania. She argued that my job was in jeopardy, which at the time, it was not. She also said that Dr. DeCarle had essentially lied during his testimony. There were some inconsistencies between what he said on the FMLA application and what he told the court. However, it was an inconsistency of omission on the FMLA application.
Tonia kept trying to make Dr. DeCarle predict future anxiety attacks because he stated that one might expect anxiety attacks to occur every three to six months on the FMLA application. He kept saying that there was no good way to predict it, and the best way was to assume they were cyclic, and since I’d had two in six months, you might expect them to recur every three months. Dr. DeCarle then said he didn’t think this applied to me because specific things caused the attacks, and if you went back further into history, you could make a different prediction.
What infuriated me about this entire thing was that Tonia somehow obtained the letter from dean Atchley about me being “reinstated” and the FMLA application. I had submitted these documents to domestic relations, so they understood what my income would be. I had no idea that domestic relations would/could then provide them to the opposing party.
In the end, it didn’t matter much as Judge Ruest denied Rita’s motion to reconsider. However, that was just the beginning of an exhausting custody battle in which it seemed like every time I would request more time and freedom with the kids, Tonia would file an “emergency” petition trying to prevent me from seeing them. Each time Tonia submitted one of these, she would make some wild claims about my mental health “spiraling” out of control, and each time I would have to defend myself by trying to establish that there was no evidence for her to make that conclusion.
Not long after Judge Ruest denied the reconsideration, on November 6, 2013, Rita filed another petition/notice to relocate, starting the entire process over again. It appears this didn’t go anywhere because there was no hearing, and I suspect she only did this because if I didn’t respond within 30 days, it would mean that I did not object to the relocation. Maybe Tonia thought Rose and I weren’t paying attention, but we did object.