Imagine if you can going to pick your child up from school only to find when you arrive, he’s gone. When you ask the teacher and administrators where he went and who picked him up they don’t know. You call everyone you know to ask if they may have picked your child up & nobody knows what you’re even talking about. As a parent it is the worst feeling in the world, there I am I’m freakin out and a hysterical mess in the school office when the attendance lady comes to me and says, “Well his mom signed him out early today.” I’m standing there in shock. All of a sudden it hits me, his dad took him and I’m never getting him back. You see we’d been in the middle of a long, nasty, custody and divorce battle.
So, I call the police to make a report that my son had been parentally kidnapped by my ex. Much to my surprise in the state of Texas in an ongoing custody battle neither parent has custody of that child until it is written in ink on the final divorce papers. It becomes a civil matter for the courts to decide. The officer informs me that there isn’t anything he can do for me; he kindly excuses himself and walks away.
That would be my fate for the next year. It was as though they had fallen off the map. Court dates stopped coming, and I had no idea where or how to locate my child or my ex for that matter. I felt hopeless, until I did some research and found that there was something that I could do. It takes some persistence and fight but hang in there, because it does get better. Here’s how. If you think you can’t afford help guess again there are many agencies out there to help single or low income parents.
· In Texas Lone Star Legal Aid (services are free or reduced depending on your situation if they can’t help you they will provide outside referrals).
· Look online there are limitless possibilities
· Fathers for Equal Rights (they helped file my divorce response and petition for full custody, which I now have).
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