TW: suicide attempt
Location: NH
I am posting this for a friend who asked me to do so.
Hello, I’m looking for both legal and parental advice on next steps on this extremely difficult topic for my child. This is long so thanks in advance for reading. I have full custody of my 8 year old and have for 2 years. My co parent gets visits in the summer and every other holiday. They never take their full time and I’m normally returned our child early. I do allow visits outside of those times as my co parent lives a few towns over and I want our child to see them when they feel comfortable to do so. My co parent has always been in and out, very flakey and just not very responsible with or kind to our child. I have had majority of the custody since we split when our child was 2. Even when we shared custody, 40/60, my coparent would often not bring our child to school or flake on visits. Recently my coparent has requested a trial run of more time as they claim to be trying to be a better and more involved parent to our child. I have seen no true actions of that and my child has expressed distain towards the idea of being forced to go to my coparents house when they aren’t comfortable. Our child finds a lot of comfort in being able to choose to visit or stay home. Our child has reactive attachment disorder due to my coparents behaviors so I’m happy to allow our child the freedom to choose. My coparent was threatening court, I still owe my lawyer 4000 dollars after paying 15,000$ for our last court battle. I did not believe a judge would side with me keeping full custody as this state favors my co parents role and it took them willingly signing away their custody to get where we are now, before that, the judge always sided with my co parent. So I agreed to start a trial plan where our child spends more time there every other week as our child said they would be willing to try it. Our child started feeling cold feet and expressing they no longer wanted to spend that much time with coparent, coparent said our child shouldn’t get a choice. I want to add a trigger warning for suicide now. Well we were supposed to start this trial schedule this week but I received information that my coparent was hospitalized and almost died due to a suicide attempt. This was spoken to me over the phone, I do not have written proof yet and I haven’t spoken to my coparent as they are still unwell. I’m wondering what my next steps should be to protect our child. I do not believe our child should go to coparents home or be around them unsupervised at this time. I know I need to go to court and petition this. My coparent doesn’t have any legal visits until thanksgiving but that seems like a very short time to get well after such a huge event. I want to make sure my coparent is very mentally healthy before having any alone time with our child. Do you have any advice how I should go about this or what I should ask the court to do? Dcyf has an open case on coparent for something that happen a few months ago, do I notify them as well? I’m struggling with this myself because this is someone I once loved very deeply, I do not wish to see them hurting but I need to do what is in the best interest of our child. I have yet to even discuss what happened with our child, I don’t even know what to say. Please, any advice will be welcomed.