That apart from seven, none returned from Avalon

Back in late February I found out my son, who is an honors student, a member of the school orchestra (cello ftw!) and a starter on 2 varsity sports was suspended from school for 2 weeks. Apparently last fall his mother (who he lived with at the time) bought him a used pickup truck that had a confederate flag painted on the tailgate. The entire tailgate. Seems that this past year the school district he is in added that flag to the list of inappropriate symbols on school property. I'm not going to get into the political aspect of this other than to simply say I don't agree with this, and move on.

So it seems that on a Thursday, as my son was driving off the school lot, the assistant principal was behind him and saw the tailgate. He stopped my son and informed him of the policy violation and told him that he could not bring the truck onto school property any more with the tailgate the way it was. The assistant principal then called his mother and told her the same thing. She told him she would take care of it. Pfft.

According to my son he couldn't get the tailgate off himself (acceptable) and since no one was around to help him do it, he did nothing (unacceptable). He then continued to drive the truck to school, and the following Tuesday he was caught and immediately suspended for 2 weeks. My first issue was with his actions. He should have known better and refused to drive the truck to school. My main issue is with his mother. She knew he was driving the truck and did nothing to prevent this from happening. Once I found out about it the first thing I did was to make sure that tailgate was removed. Immediately. Keep in mind my son lives 150 miles away, so this isn't something I could just run over and do for him.

So over the course of the next week I burned a couple vacation days to sort this out. I spoke with the assistant principal, the principal, and the district superintendant. Ultimately it was agreed that they would halve his suspension with the condition he met (along with his parents) with the vice principal to go over school policy before returning. Sold. I took off that Friday and drove down for the 11am meeting. I couldn't even look at his mother because I was fairly pissed off at her lack of parental supervision in this matter. We had the meeting, my son apologized (on his own) for his poor judgement and that was that. He came back up with me for the weekend.

Now normally we would meet halfway for visitation, but since I drove the entire way to get him the pickup should have been reciprocated with her driving up on Sunday. However she decided Sunday morning she wasn't going to make the trip and in fact didn't want him anymore. Through a surreal series of events she told him he was a piece of crap (just like me!) and nothing but a disrespectful punk (what???) and she wanted nothing to do with him anymore. She told him (verbally and by text) that he could stay with me and go to school up here. My son is a big kid (natch), starter on the football and wrestling teams, and generally a pretty strong individual. But she had him crying his eyes out because of this, and it was absolutely gutting. As you can imagine I had some words for her, but the issue aside from his psyche at this point was his schooling.

Him living with me would normally be a dream come true. If he were a freshman this would be a no-brainer, I'd have taken care of things on the spot and he'd be going to Downers South as I type this. But he was almost finished with his junior year and pretty well established where he lived. He has opportunities for college scholarships where he's at. If he moved up here he'd be transitioning to a new town and a new school, new friends and new teachers. Thats way too much to ask of him for one year. He'd also most likely lose any opportunites for scholarships. Its pretty tough to transfer in somewhere as a senior and find a way to get an athletic scholarship. Then there's the whole concern of how the adjustment would affect him overall, would it affect his grades and his general well-being? Probably it would have, yeah.

But fortunately (and in a way sadly) I found out that for the past several months he had been spending most of his time at his best friends house. He was eating dinner there up to 5 times a week and spending the night almost as much, including on school nights. WTF? Nice parenting, bitch. And as it turns out after speaking with the parents of his friend they were very willing to let my son stay with them for the next year and a half until he graduated. So I had to drive him down there that Monday (his last day of his suspension) to get him set up so he could return to school. In the meantime I had to drive out to the courthouse in Wheaton that morning and petition for a change in custody. I don't have the money for a lawyer so I had to do this pro se. If you've ever attempted something pro se in family court you know exactly what kind of nightmare that can be. The judge decided to not grant a change of custody without a hearing so I had to schedule a date a week from then.

I sent her notice and consulted with as many lawyers as I could. In the end I realized that if I gained custody then he probably couldn't go to school where he was anyway since it was a public school and I, who would become his custodial parent, did not live in that school district. Oops. So I had to get her to agree to some significant changes, including him living with this other family while she held the custodial title yet relinquished her custodial rights. I spent a full week writing up a motion that I hoped would not only cover everything but one that the judge wouldn't crumple up and throw in my face while yelling at me to get out of his courtroom. Yeah, I've done pro se in front of this guy before and he intimidates the crap out of me.

It also took some mad conversation skills to get her to go along with this. She's an unreasonable bitch on her best days, and going by the last half year or so it seems she may have picked up a substance abuse habit as well. Talking with her family they even acknowledged this seemed likely. I could fill a dozen blogs with the horrifying shit I've found out in the last 2 months about how she was "caring" for my son. She has been investigated by DCFS over issues concerning her daughter with her other ex-husband over this time period as well. Poor kid. But ironically the skill set I developed dealing with all the bullshit at work came in extremely handy in dealing with her and, while on the day we went to court she almost pulled some bullshit, we got this done and my son is now in a stable, peaceful family environment where he can finish his school where he is and have the best opportunity for his future.

As far as support goes, my payments now go to the family he's staying with instead of the exwife. As an added bonus she now pays an equal amount in support to that family every week as well. This other family is now listed as primary contact with his school (I'm second, the ex is third...although I almost took her off the list entirely). They would have been listed as new contacts with his doctors too, except we found out that he doesn't have a doctor. Or a dentist. When he was sick she'd take him to the clinic for meds and that was that. I need to stop typing about this because I'll have a fucking heart attack if I keep dwelling on this.

Anyway, he's all good now. He's like a different kid. When I get him on weekends he's happy, he's smiling, he's not brooding or sullen. He's back to the way he used to be and its great to see. This is him from a couple weeks ago: