NO, THE CHILDREN ARE NOT ALL RIGHT!

My daughter, Marianne, is wonderful, lovely, funny girl and she also has a learning disability known as ADHD for which she takes medication. I don't feel comfortable with this medication and so I try to reduce the use of this medication by combining it with a special diet. This requires a certain amount of effort to make sure that her meals are planned and that she avoids certain kinds of foods. We have a psychiatrist who is very supportive of what I am doing and has done additional research in the area of nutrition to be sure we are doing the right things.

At the beginning of the divorce, I explained the nature of Marianne's disability to the GAL and I referred her to our psychiatrist for additional information. However, the GAL couldn't be bothered with attending to this information and didn't bother investigating the condition or talking to the psychiatrist.

During the divorce, my ex husband was aware how much I love my daughter and used his understanding of her disability to wreak havoc not only in my daughter's life but in my own. He refused to follow the special diet when she was in his care and frequently just refused to provide her with her medication. After a while, he declared that he didn't approve of handling Marianne's disability with nutritional adjustments and he said he wouldn't follow the special diet at all. Then he called into question the efficacy of the medication.

I documented everything that my ex husband said and did during that time and kept my own lawyer informed as well as the GAL. Both of them treated me as if I were an overanxious neurotic and refused to do anything about what my ex husband was doing. In fact, the GAL implied that I was just using the issue as a weapon to prevent him from getting custody and as a means to alienate him from the children.

Once the divorce was over and he had worn me out with worry and grief over the issue and, as a result, received a division of the assets which gave him pretty much all of the assets we had, then he returned to following the medical guidelines for our daughter. But not before he had caused her a lot of difficulty in terms of the disruption of her studies and social life.

Since that I time, I have heard that this is the standard in Connecticut. Since the courts recognize that the issue of how you treat children can become an open and shut reason to give sole custody to responsible mothers, a level of power that the legal system refuses to give to women, the Courts, GALs, and attorneys have gone along in a silent agreement to do nothing to protect children who have disabilities from abusive fathers.

The end result is substantial damage to the health and well being of children. What's the bottom line here? It is exactly what it says in the title of this blog. The children are not all right, especially not in the state of Connecticut with the judicial system we have that allows them to remain at risk.