There was a diary published a couple of days ago that provided the mother's side of the story in a custody battle that happened in North Carolina. She has Stage 4 Breast Cancer that metastasized to her bones
The title of the diary interested me when I first read it, and after reading the diary, but before commenting, I did a little research - the story sounded fishy to me.
Turns out, I was right to be suspicious. The judge's decree wasn't available, and all we were hearing was the Mom's side of the story. Well, now more info is available, and it really makes it clear how biased, partisan, and one-sided the Mom's version of the custody battle really was.
Turns out that if she moves to Chicago, they'll have 50-50 custody! Turns out that there were many strikes against the Mom, and that her cancer and her unemployed status as factors in the custody case were unfairly portrayed by the previous diarist as the sole reasons. The evidence we have shows us that it's the Mom and not the judge nor the Dad who made the whole case about her having cancer.
To read more, follow me below the fold.
Judges look at all the factors in making determinations in child custody cases. Neither parent is going to be entirely satisfied with the other gaining primary custody. This mom is not happy.
Here is some more info above and beyond what the original diarist gave us.
(A)ccording to one family attorney, who spoke to ABC11, this ruling is about much more than just cancer. Raleigh attorney Charles Ullman reviewed the 27-page order, and said the judge has many other concerns besides the health of Giordano.
"That she might expose the children to some type of risk, security risk, health risk, not provide for them," Ullman said.
If Giordano moves to Chicago, she could get joint custody.
So, she could have her kids much of the time if she were to move.
Also, there's this local story from today!
Giordano has more strikes against her.
She confesses to having an adulterous relationship, spending days out of state with a married man while her children were with their grandparents.
On another occasion, Giordano did not make suitable arrangements for her children on a day a doctor told her she was going to be admitted to the hospital.
The order shows she took her children to Duke Hospital.
To avoid calling child protective services, the doctor took the children home with her. The doctor called it a crisis and Giordano called it a great opportunity for the children to get to know the person treating their mother.
Finally, when the children were visiting their father, Giordano failed to send her son's epinephrine pen. The judge believes that shows she has difficulty separating her anger from the well-being of her children.
She could get 50 percent custody if she moves to Chicago.
Alaina Giordano and Kane Snyder were married for more than 10 years when they separated last year. They had moved to Durham, NC, for him to go to school in 2007, about 6 months after she was first diagnosed. When he did an internship at Delta Airlines in Atlanta, Georgia during the summer of 2009 while in graduate school in Duke University after getting his undergraduate degree at Villanova, he travelled home on weekends. He graduated the next year and took a job in August, 2010 in Chicago for Sears Holding.
His wife refused to move with him to Chicago, and a divorce and custody fight ensued. In this economy, he's supposed to give up a job in Chicago to satisfy her desire to stay in North Carolina? Why? Why shouldn't she, an unemployed person, have to move to Chicago so that he can keep his job?
The best thing for the children is that the parents live near one another, so that the kids can see both parents on a regular basis. Absent any evidence that either parent is toxic or dangerous to the children, the ideal (in a non-ideal situation where adults with children divorce) is for both parents to continue to be intimately involved in raising those children. Currently, a United Airline's flight attendant is offering buddy passes so Giordano can fly to see her children, and so her complaint that she can't afford to fly for visits is moot - but she shouldn't continue living in NC anyway. She should move to the community where the primary custodian lives, just as she expected him to do! In court she said that she wanted him to move back to NC and find a job there. Apparently, what's good for the gander isn't good for the goose in her way of thinking. I can't find the link right now - I've looked at more than 20 in preparation for writing this diary - but Alaina Giordano is insistent that he could find a job in Durham because other classmates of Kane Snyder from the Duke MBA program found jobs in Durham. Well, it's not that easy, actually. Jobs are still tough right now and it wouldn't look good for him to quit a job he just started in the last year.
Kane Snyder and Alaina Giordano moved to Durham, NC so that Kane could go to school at Duke, not so that would be their permanent home. There are plenty of very good cancer treatment facilities in Chicago - as I posted on the previous diary, there are quite a few very good places to get cancer treatment. As I additionally posted on that other diary, with telephones and the Internet access we now have, the oncologists she's now using at Duke could easily inform new physicians in the Chicago area. The suggestion that the only doctors who can adequately treat her terminal illness are in Durham is ridiculous. She can easily move. It would be much more problematic for the estranged husband's income right now and career in the future to leave the job he's been at for about a year and return to Durham to look for a job.
And that (her ease of moving vs the employed husband) was one of the factors that a reasonable judge would have looked at! The ideal, as I already said, given that they're divorcing, is that they both live in the same community, and that will most easily happen in Chicago. Of course, that's not the only factor, but her being unemployed, and therefore not tied to the community by a job, makes a difference.
Another factor is that she's got a terminal illness. She may be stable now, and of course no one can tell when she might die, and her husband may be struck by a car or suffer from an anuerysm tomorrow - no one has their death date tattooed on their forehead - but her health status is at more imminent risk than his is right now due to that diagnosis of Stage 4 Breast Cancer that has metastasized to her bones already. It's incurable.
And a forensic psychologist, a person hired by the court and paid for equally by both parents, a person trained in evaluating these kinds of situations, a person whose job is to look out for the best interests of the children, and not the best interests of either parent, used her expertise to evaluate the situation to help the judge determine that
"The more contact [the children] have with the non-ill parent, the better they do. They divide their world into the cancer world and a free of cancer world. Children want a normal childhood, and it is not normal with an ill parent."
All things being equal, having primary custody be in the household where one parent has terminal cancer isn't the ideal here. It can be painful for the children to see the parent so ill every day, rather than being exposed to it only occasionally. It's better for the children to have a good foundational relationship with the non-ill parent so that when that parent gets really sick or dies, they don't have to reignite that parenting bond with the Dad who wasn't sick. Having an ill parent in the primary household puts additional adult-like burdens on the children, especially the older daughter in this case. I could go on. There's good reason why her illness would be one of many factors that the judge took into consideration.
From a May 10th ABC News report
"Substantial case law and psychological research consistently indicate that the physical and mental health of the parent constitute an important factor in considering custody of children following divorce," says Dr. Gerry Koocher, professor of psychology at Simmons College in Boston.
The original diary and the diarist never gave us any reason to believe that there was any substantive reason why the ruling was flawed.
A Durham judge ordered the children should live with their father in the Chicago area. That's where he was able to land a job and find a house in a good school district, while Girodano is unemployed and facing ongoing cancer treatment.
It's a ruling at least one family law expert says the mom has already lost.
Ullman says it's not worth an appeal since custody cases are rarely overturned.
His advice to Giordano is to relocate.
"You can control [the] result by moving," he said. "Yes, I would tell her move."