Well, as a few of you know, we had our first appt with a lawyer yesterday to discuss bringing suit against Bm for custody of SD. Despite all the research and work I had done, my F decided he didn't want me there. That kind of bothered me, but he explained it as he was afraid if all this went badly, emotionally in the end he might end up blaming me for pushing him, and, he felt like he needed to do this first step on his own. i got him the names of several lawyers, and he made an appt to meet with one for a consult yesterday, and it would cost $75.00. I tried over the weekend to see if there was any way I could convince him, as DesguizedAngel suggested, to see it as two heads are better than one, not put him down but just say we're stronger together, to no avail, he really wanted to do this on his own, so I didn't have much recourse.

well, F's 75 dollars bought him exactly 15 minutes of lawyer time with the woman nicknamed "the shark". In a nutshell, b/c he was not properly prepared, he came home completely morose, b/c the woman told him his best bet was to pony up the 3500 retaining fee for her, and hope BM couldn't afford/desire to the same. He's also have to pay half of SD's lawyer, so the idea is that he could hope to BUY his daughter for 5k.

All this completely flew in the face of the material I had both printed for him, and discussed with him. He said he didn't realize how short the time he had with the lawyer was, and before he knew it, he was being ushered to the door. I asked if he even had a chance to go over the papers I gave him with her, and he said no, it was the lousiest 75 bucks he ever spent. He was SO upset.

The big issue is that he didn't know the difference between probate court, and superior court. Most of the documentation I put together was for probate court. The process I outlined to him was for probate court. the lawyer didn't even DISCUSS probate court with him.

Now, I understand a lot of people probably go in there with no idea how much it's going to cost, and, like the dr's office, the money is the first thing that's covered so you don't waste their time. This woman has a reputation for being legally VISCIOUS, and quite frankly, for 300 an hour, I'd rather NOT beat around the bush. My feeling is I'm not hiring a therapist, I'm not hiring a best friend, she's not coming over for dinner, I need her to go up against the biological mother, who has the legal precedent on her side, and win, so while I might LIKE the fluffy bunny better, I'd rather have a shark for this purpose. Still, I think she could have used a BIT more patience with him, and given him more than 15 minutes, but hey, you don't get to be a lawyer by being nice.

Thankfully I had come home from work early to hear all of this, so I was able to drag him off the couch and down to probate court while they were still open, where we had the exact opposite experience, and I'm sure you can GUESS who did all the talking.

The woman at the outset wasn't that friendly, but I suspect she was the same woman I spoke with the last time I called, so I hit some of the points that illicited a more personal response from her in the conversation I had on the phone, and tried my best to appeal to her wisdom from working at her job for a while (I think she was an admin of some sort). we were there for about a half an hour, and ended up with 3 people in the office talking through the situation with us, helping us with the forms, answering our (read my) questions, and in general, offering both support and advice, for free.

In the end, it appears that we can only go the probate court route if he does not have a pending case in superior court. He has to call this morning to see if that's the case. If he has a case pending in superior, their jurisdiction overrides probate court, and probate court cannot modify a dictate set at Superior. The only way to do that, is to cough up the 5k and go through Superior.

So we're waiting now to see what shakes down from the person he had to call this morning. If we can file in probate, we'll do it this Friday. If not we wait and see what happens when sara gets her reduced check. THEN if it comes to it, we try to find 5K to pay the lawyer, and hope for the best. The woman at Probate court had another suggestion for a different lawyer, so we may follow up with that lawyer, to see if the cost and or the method of payment might be different (i.e. not 5k upfront, maybe she'd let us pay less to have her do the filing work, then pay as you go for the court time, or something).

I'd like to think he realized after the trip to probate court that he was better served having me there. He made it a point to thank me, and tell me how wonderful I am. I hope he'll remember this in the future though, and not be such a MAN about wanting to do things for himself when we together can accomplish more....

Thank you guys for the support and advice through this, and for listening. It's far from over yet, but like some of you, I have NO ONE in my life who can relate to any of this, they're all unmarried, or happily married, or have no children. No one can even emotionally relate to this, so I'm grateful to have found a resource of people who I can relate to on these extremely emotionally charged issues. I was up for almost 3 hours last night, trying to view our home from a CPA's perspective, like how would they feel about what they saw? I'm sure I have a lot more of this to go too....anyway, thanks for being there...