According to the court transcript, it took a family court judge in Colorado less than eight minutes to change Joanne's life.
She and "Keith" were divorced five years ago in Colorado. Shortly after that, they both moved away. Keith went to Alaska, choosing to forgo his court-ordered visitation. He didn't write to or call their two little girls. But he did pay his child support on time.When he was told that new child-support guidelines would increase what he was required to pay, he apparently decided he'd had enough. He petitioned the Colorado court that originally decided custody to reverse its decision.
The year before, Joanne had moved to Utah to live with her sister. She found a job and they formed a tight family unit, their children playing together and the mothers helping each other out.
Joanne never heard about the court hearing. Her husband sent the "notice" to an address where she hadn't lived for two years. Keith knew that; they'd talked to each other since and she always kept him informed of the girls' address.
The court hearing was a short, disturbing one. Keith's attorney said that apparently she didn't care enough about the girls to attend. The judge agreed and gave Keith custody. If you read the transcript aloud slowly, it would take you just minutes.
If there was any doubt that Keith knew where Joanne was living, it was dispelled when he showed up at her house in Utah with an order changing custody. He brought along a deputy to enforce it.
The judge apparently didn't notice that the papers were served to a state back East, while he was told the woman and the children were in Utah. It was right in front of him, as the transcript shows.
Sloppy and illogical or not doesn't change the fact that her daughters are gone or that she never had an opportunity to attend the hearing. She didn't get to tell the judge that Keith never called the girls. That she was the one who cared for them when they were sick or well, who scraped to provide for them.
Maybe he would have gotten them anyway. There's no way of guessing what the judge would have decided had he looked at and listened to both parents or had he talked to the girls about what they wanted.
And maybe he should have gotten them. But not that way.
There's no way of telling where the little girls, now in grade school, would have been happiest.
It's a moot point. Because like so many decisions made in family courts around the country, the decision was made fast. The judge asked a couple of questions, listened to Keith (who clearly had a goal or he wouldn't have been there in the first place), ruled and moved on to the next family.
It's hard to understand a system that changes lives so quickly, so easily, with so little information and so little thought.
It happens all the time.
The problem here isn't that the father got custody; the bias that says a mother is automatically the better parent is asinine and is, thankfully, fading. More and more courts are recognizing that children need heart connections to both parents.
The story was appalling, not because of who "won" but because it hinged on dirty tricks and half truths.
She cried when she told the story. He hung up when asked about it.
I don't blame him. It was a shabby thing to do. And both men and women have been using such tricks to get their way since divorce and custody first became issues.
Perhaps society shouldn't be surprised by such maneuvering in a war as passionate and sometimes mean-spirited as a divorce. But we should be surprised that a judge could make such a decision so quickly that he didn't even notice the obvious discrepancy in addresses. The transcript shows he asked for no documentation on anything the husband said.
It takes more work to transfer the title on a car.