Thanks for your diatribe, svelte. I can’t believe I’m saying this (to you!) but I concur with all of it. I also believe everyone goes through life changes and it is all part of our personal journey.
I believe in personal and financial responsibility for all adults. And I do agree that every parent (unless severely disabled) has a fundamental duty to financially support their children. If they are not, then they are in a “tacit arrangement” (no matter what their marital status) and that is okay, too. I have met people (all females) “after the fact” who admit they married for money. Since I didn’t meet them until after their relationships were over, I can attest in all cases that it didn’t end well for any of them. I’m not saying I think anyone on this forum is, but I’ve met several women who I thought were completely delusional about what they thought they were “entitled to” both monetarily and percent of child custody timeshare in their family law case and in all cases they were way off base. You can only split a 50/50 community so many ways before there is nothing left. That includes the community debt. The vast majority of (former) FT or nearly FT caregivers of their children believed that they were the only ones who could deliver the kind of care to them to keep them happy, healthy and well-adjusted. But they figured wrong. They figured the other parent wouldn’t fight the fact that they petitioned for 85-100% custody timeshare of the child(ren) and figured they could just remain in the family home with their children (which they couldn’t afford) and somehow a little elf was going to pay all their bills.
As I posted before, the way the child support formulas are written in CA provokes and invites the family’s primary breadwinner in nearly all cases to petition for their 50%, as it their right. It doesn’t matter if they have NEVER taken care of their own children. It is much cheaper for them to have a garnishment for CS that is 100% less than they would have had if they had just settled for every other weekend and one weeknight per week with their child(ren), as was once the norm. The child support burden on these payor-parents is so heavy (esp if there are 3+ children) that there is no way most of them can even live themselves unless they can find a way to take their children 50% of the time. And they do. And the payee’s CS is never enough to live on (in any case it is intended for the child[rens] support). If the CS payee isn’t making enough to live on and is not severely disabled, it is purely a function of the choices they made while living in the “tacit arrangement.”
This reality was a very difficult concept for some of these women to accept.
