Surprisingly, it is bundled into my oldest son’s custody order.

The behavior that my oldest son’s father exhibited was actually bad enough to deny him access to our son — it was domestic violence — pending the completion of a court-ordered class that, to this day, he has not even tried to enroll in. When he was on probation for assaulting me, he made it a habit to go to one of the branches of the library here and send me harassing and threatening messages over MySpace. He did this every single day that the library was open until they were called and informed what he was doing, at which point the messages stopped. Approximately ninety days into his probation, he decided to stop showing up to visits with his probation officer and moved to a new residence that he did not inform his probation officer about. He was given sixty days to resume showing up for scheduled visits with his probation officer, which he did not do, and then his probation was revoked. Since he was on what was called deferred adjudication, or deferred sentencing, this meant that his guilty plea — held back until that point, because the state would have dropped the assault charge that he had pending upon successful completion of probation — was entered, and he was convicted of the original offense. The criminal justice unit here was actually surprised that he did not successfully complete probation given the circumstances. Personally, I was not surprised.

When he was originally being put on probation, I put in an application for a restraining order against him. It was denied, and the rationale for this denial was that it would be addressed in the rules of his probation and he would be prohibited from contacting me for any reason. Obviously this did not occur because of the messages that he sent me over MySpace at the library, and my custody lawyer put in an application for a restraining order herself including this as evidence. A restraining order without end date was approved by the judge that presided over our son’s custody hearing, although it would have allowed him to communicate with me about our son if he had ever regained access — the communications had to be non-harassing and non-threatening, though, and if they were harassing or threatening he could get into legal trouble due to them. For reasons that I will get into in another post, he is not going to be able to regain access to our child.

This is one of the reasons that I don’t use our real names here on this blog, though… especially the kids’.