Michigan Court Orders - Online Access!

It's about time! I've been wondering when the county where my husband has his court order for his kids would get with current technology and make information available online! Finally!

If you have a case with a Michigan Friend of Court, you can access online information now at MiCASE. Register, wait ten days to receive your registration information through the mail, and then you have access! Easy!

Instead of calling every week to make sure they applied the child support correctly, now I can log-on. Perfect!

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Stepparents are Legal Strangers

I'll bet that is one title you never thought of for yourself, huh?

According to Wikipedia, we, the step-parents, are legal strangers because we have no legal right to the minor child even if we are the step-child's "parent" in terms of love and responsibility.

This is taken from Wikipedia:

"The stepparent is a "legal stranger" in most of the US and has no legal right to the minor child no matter how involved in the child's life they are. The biological parents (and, where applicable, adoptive parents) hold that privilege and responsibility. So if the biological parent doesn't give up his or her parental rights and custodial to the child, a parent's subsequent marriage cannot create a stepparent relationship without the parent written consent before a "child" reaches adulthood. In most cases, the stepparent can not be ordered to pay child support."

I get that we have no legal rights. You can love that child like your own and take care of that child like your own, but you can lose that child without any legal recourse if you and their biological parent were to divorce. What a risk step-parents take with their hearts. A risk that many step-parents have taken and had their hearts broken either through divorce or by loss of the relationship due to other factors (ex: the ex's emotional manipulations). Besides, the family court will beat "no legal rights" over any step-parent's head repeatedly so I think we all know we have no legal rights.

I don't understand what they mean by "...marriage cannot create a stepparent relationship without the parent written consent..." Written consent by who? The biological parent you married or the same sex biological parent, AKA the ex?

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Can't Stand Child Support Enforcement Agency

For over 12 years, the Michigan Friend of Court county office that we have had to deal with for my stepchildren's child support has been nothing but difficult. My husband has always paid his child support on time, along with all their stupid fees they charge to handle the child support (because the kickbacks they get from the Federal government for every dollar they collect isn't enough). We had a few problems:

1. If you are a dad, you are automatically assumed to be a deadbeat before they even look at your record showing otherwise. You could hear the sneer in their voices when they spoke to you. The only time we didn't was when one of our caseworkers was a man. That was the only time my husband was shown a little respect for being a loving, responsible father.
2. Another problem we had every year was with their record keeping on the child support they received and their false accusations of support arrearages. It was so atrocious for years that we would spend months (every.single.year) trying to prove to them where they made a mistake in record keeping and were accusing my husband of being in arrears falsely. At one point, it took me over a year to prove to them that their accountant screwed up, not us. Eventually, dh's ex would agree that he wasn't behind but only after months (or a year) of tying ourselves into pretzels with all the canceled checks, employer garnishment records, and their own accounting records (yes, we had to point out to them where in their own records THEY screwed up and it would take months for them to finally fix the records).

Since the state took it over from the county, we have only had one problem like that happen so it is better. Instead of every year of being falsely accused of arrearages and threatened with income tax garnishment, it's only happened once in the last few years. The ex would get her money faster if we paid her direct but that would mean trusting my husband to pay her directly instead of the Friend of Court but she won't do that. He was trustworthy enough to be primary caregiver for the kids while he was with her but after he left her, he's not trustworthy enough since HE dumped HER I guess. Who dumps who makes the difference in how you can parent I guess. Not. She'd rather he pay weekly fees for the county to process her child support and also lose a part of her child support on the additional fees they just tacked on this year (at least she has to pay some of them now!).

So now what is my problem? My problem is the Friend of Court county office can't just mess up the support records of my husband for his two children but now they are affecting my own child's entrance to get into a preschool program so she can get her speech needs met there. A week ago, our county agency faxed them a request to verify the child support my husband pays for my stepkids. All they have to do is fax them back a sheet of paper that verifies that he pays x amount of dollars weekly/monthly. Did they do it? Of course not! This information is holding up my three-year-old's application. If the class fills up, which is likely since it is highly sought after in our community, she won't be able to get in.

It's not enough that they made our lives hell for years. Now their incompetence has to affect my child's speech intervention needs as well.

I sent the Friend of Court an email today requesting they submit this information ASAP. Hopefully they do it soon.

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Men & Divorce

A lot of men and their second wives will tell you that men tend to get the unfair end of the stick in family court. Heck, even a lot of the wives who they divorced will say the same thing (which is why some divorcing parents are smartly choosing not to allow the courts to dictate their custody, visitation, and support orders into any cookie cutter standard order but are co-parenting instead). Then you have the others who will use this messed up system to get what they want and stick it to their ex.

I found this article on AskMen.com about it. As the wife of a father who has two kids in the family court system via his ex-girlfriend, I have to agree. He is hostage to the family court system for another four years and 11 months. If his ex had been more receptive from the beginning to dad's relationship with the kids, everybody, but the kids mostly, would've been better off. Kids and their relationship with their parents don't fit into any "standard" some strangers create.

*not a sponsored post.

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Rights in Court According to NOW

For those of you who don't know, NOW is the National Organization for Women. They may have done good things years ago but I think their time has come and usefulness has passed where it concerns family law because they have no clue! They have their own agenda and equality is NOT IT.

This is from their website:

Recognizing that mothers' rights in family law courts are regularly violated, and that stopping that must be a priority of the feminist movement, we must have strategies for effecting change in this area. By organizing ourselves into groups we can have a greater impact on the problem. We can bring attention to the details of the problem, call for change through legislation, demand that our elected officials and politicians recognize this problem and step up to do something about it, and organize with other mothers and concerned citizens to protest the treatment of women in the courts.

Somebody come pick me up off the floor now! OMG! It is a well-known fact that there are more courts that are mom-biased than equal or father-biased. I know if I were to divorce my husband (which I have no plans of btw, 'cause we love each other immensely and he's sexy and sweet and he loves me and...getting off the point here, lol), I would have the advantage over him in court. Sad, but true.

Why don't they get a clue and start speaking up about EQUALITY period. I've been a part of a womens movement for family law change and it didn't coincide with NOW's ideas to trample men's rights so women could one up them in court! What about fighting for equality for the children's sake? What about equality so BOTH parents constitutional rights are upheld? NOW makes it a gender issue. It is time to put "gender issues" aside and be HUMAN. It is a human issue. It is a parental issue. It is not just a woman's issue for them to use as they please.

I can understand standing up for battered women so they and the children are protected (as should the men and children who are battered by women which nobody wants to talk about because it is better for NOW to portray women as helpless and men as the big, bad wolf all the time) but they go beyond that so that ALL men's rights in family court are in jeopardy every time they step foot in it. Men know that in all likelihood they aren't going to get a fair deal in court without a whole lot of time and expense to fight what should naturally be a constitutional right to parent your children equally with mom...and even after expending all that money, a majority still lose out!

If the courts would give BOTH parents equality where you have two loving parents involved, this wouldn't be an issue. I don't mean joint "legal" custody because that is a load of you know what. All that means is that both parents agree unless mom doesn't and she gets her way (that is what the court told us personally and I will forever remember the name of that government official!). I mean a TRUE sharing of parental responsibility - physically, legally, and monetarily.

I think NOW needs to just be quiet now. I am sick of them. They turned feminist into a dirty word. I'd never use it to describe myself again.

I am a mother.

I am a wife.

I am a woman.

I believe in equality.

That means I don't believe in NOW.

This is not a sponsored post.

This is not a political blog. This is just my rant for the day (actually more like the past 13 years but who is counting), lol.

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