Amazing Mothers Without Custody

You have to understand one thing about your mother-in-law. She will always, ALWAYS, choose her son's side over yours. It's nothing personal. Even if he hurt you. Even if she disagrees with him. He's her baby. Her allegiance is to him.  My ex-MIL is a fantastic woman. My daughter was named after her. She's an accomplished artist and has many talents. We got very close during my marriage. However, the relationship abruptly ended when I filed for divorce. I saw her in court once and she couldn't look me in the eye.  She's let me into her house once in the last 5 years under the guise of secrecy, and gave me a container of food for dinner. I started to send her pictures of the kids and even called her on video chat when the kids were with me to say hello. I thought the relationship was improving, but once my ex and I started arguing again, my contact with her ceased. This past Purim (a Jewish holiday) I had the kids and was tempted to visit her house and...

  It is extremely important to mitigate your expectations while dealing with a contentious custody battle. Just as you cannot get to the top of Mount Everest with one step, you cannot undue years of legal issues in a day. It takes time and baby steps to change your legal status. I learned this early on in my custody battle. In the early stages of my custody battle, my ex and I unsuccessfully tried establishing a visitation schedule. He wanted the children every other night but I refused to allow our children to commute every other night. After much back and forth, we finally settled on him getting every weekend. I was assured by my lawyer that this would be easily reversible and temporary. When I realized it wasn't working, I asked my lawyer to change the schedule. He told me we would need to file a motion to do this. I had to pay my lawyer an additional $2500 to file this motion, only to be told in court that there is no reason to change it. I ended up having to give up 4 Wednesd...

10 things I learned from being an advocate, that I wanted to share with people who are interested in advocacy: 1) You have to focus on a specific niche. You can't spread yourself too thin by getting involved with every cause, because you'll burn out. The more specific you are, the more effective you can be in enacting change. 2) Decide if you want to concentrate on legal reform, social change, education, awareness, etc. You can't do it all. Everybody is good at something. Some people are better at social media, some people are better writers, and some have a talent with the spoken word. You need to figure out what you are good at and concentrate on that. 3) You need to be assertive, yet polite and professional. If you are too aggressive, or you curse, or dress like a bum, no one is going to take you seriously. People get turned off when someone is in their face. You need to find a good balance between passive and aggressive and constantly re-evaluate your approa...