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Hi all,
I'm just about to submit an application to Family Court to try and establish some sensible contact with my 2 year old daughter.
To sumarise things so far, my wife moved back in with her parents just before Christmas after 6 months where my wife became increasingly unstable and made some pretty wild allegations.
I've never faught with my wife or her family over our breakdown and accepted that our daughter will spend the majority of her time with my wife. My wife and her family have faught a one-sided battle to stop me having reasonable contact with our daughter.
Initially they offered supervised access for an hour or so when it suited my wife's family. After 3 months of being made to feel like I had no right to be be in our daughter's life I went to see a solicitor and immediately after his first letter I was offered 3 hours contact every fortnight. I accepted this contact and have since made every effort to progress things through independent Mediation. My wife has flatly refused to consider Mediation and has continued to make contact very difficult.
After six months out of our daughter's life it's obvious that we're not going to be able to make any progress ourselves and I've very reluctantly decided to apply to Family Court in order to start some more sensible contact.
I'm not interesting in "punishing" my wife or using our daughter as part of our breakdown. I'm using a solicitor initially as my wife has a history of being irrational and impossible to deal with. Could you fill in some of the blanks around the initial hearing, engaging with Cafcas and handling a possibly long-running legal dispute?
Cheers,
Nigel
Hi Nigel
Have a read of yoji's guide to representing yourself at the top of the legal section as this gives a good idea to the processes involved, even if you are using a solicitor. It may be worth considering doing some of the work yourself with your solicitor assisting where necessary to keep costs down - you could have a word with your solicitor about this.
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