North Carolina New Hanover County Child Support

Welcome to my account of the New Hanover County, North Carolina Child Support Enforcement and Court systems. In order to understand my particular account, I would like to give you a little bit of background on myself.

I am in my late twenties, this if my first child. I own a company that I have run for over eight years—successfully. Some weeks I work around ten hours, others I work as needed from home, so I have a lot of free time.  I have no criminal history.  I am a high school, and college graduate. I own my house and can afford to not have roommates; I own my car and have no debt other than a mortgage. I have a dog, which I spoil.   I go to the gym on a regular basis, and I am in perfect health. I make small donations to churches and various other organizations. I was raised going to a Baptist church and hold my moral and ethical beliefs close. If I give you my word, I hold true to it.

The mother is in her early twenties. She now has two children, fostered by separate fathers. Custody of the first child was given to her grandmother, who now refuses to return the custody to her for reasons unknown to me. She has no formal education beyond high school, works part-time at a job with no benefits, and refuses my, as well as others, help to look for better employment. She both drinks and smokes heavily. She has a felony charge for card fraud, a criminal record for possession of drug paraphernalia, as well as reckless driving with intent to harm.  She has also been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, and has remained untreated.  Since she is unable to afford to move out on her own she lives with her mother and stepfather who are both verbally and mentally abusive.

Although many of these things were unknown to me at the time that we dated, they are well-known now.

It starts out as so. I met this girl on an online dating website called Okcupid. See running a company, I hardly get a chance to meet single women, so I found this to be a nice alternative. Till I met this girl (Jane). We chatted for a few days online, maybe at most a week, then decided to meet up. We ended up hooking up. It wasn’t that great, and I later got the crazy vibe from Jane and I decided to stop talking to her.

At the time of hooking up with Jane, I 110% firmly believed I could not make a child. From my experience with past gf’s and trying to have a child, with YEARS of trying, it just wouldn’t happen. I have been ready for well over 3 years to have a child. So in this case I was very irresponsible.

A few weeks later I get a text message from Jane telling me she is pregnant. So I ask her if I’m the only one she’s had sex with and she begins to explain how there is a chance the child could be another guys. So I give her a choice. 1) Have an abortion and I’ll pay 100% for it, 2) Keep it, and if it is mine, I’ll give up my rights and she can consider it a gift and stay out of my life and I’ll stay out of hers, or 3) Give it up for adoption. Jane took choice #2 and said she would stay out of my life.

Note the only reason I agreed to choice number 2 is because of my child hood. I grew up in a divorced family since I was a toddler with one parent in another state. It was a pure living nightmare for me. I cannot stress how horrible this is to me. I can still remember being in the hall way seeing my mother and father and step mother about to go at it fist to fist screaming at each other with me as a baby screaming at the top of my lungs for them to stop. I remember countless fights they got into. I grew up having to visit that parent in another state not having any friends where I was visiting because the children in that area were there for maybe a week then off to camp or wherever. It made it extremely hard to form any real friendships. The ones I do have now are far and few and have moved away from Wilmington. The same thing happened every alternating Christmas too. What I have just described doesn’t even scratch the surface of how much of a nightmare this is to me. I figured Jane could be a decent parent, even though I hardly knew her at first, and I believe the kid would grow up in a better life with one parent rather than both. Don’t get me wrong, this whole situation bothers me to hell and back. This starts to wear on me.-

So a few months go by and no word from Jane. Then I get a text one day. She is asking me for my medical records and if I have any dna issues. I ask her, what happened to staying out of my life? She starts making excuses and I tell her nothing is wrong with me genetically and that I’m not going to give her my medical records. I start to open myself up and give her a chance and I tell her that if she is trying to change her mind, does she think it would work out best if I let her move in with me and actually give us a chance to get to know each other and raise this kid right? She says no, so we get into a conversation about how she needs to stick to her word and stop texting me and she tells me not to worry about a thing, she will stay as far away from me as she can and that when the baby is born I can sign my rights away and not worry about a thing. I tell her that my friends have told me that she has to go do the filing of the papers for me to sign my rights away and we get into an argument about that and the conversation ends.

Another 6+ months go by and the baby is born. I have no idea when or where. I’m not notified or told of anything. Never even given a chance to watch his birth, help choose his name, or sign the certificate. Jane has kept me on her facebook as a “friend” this whole time but never says anything about this situation on there so I have no clue whats going on and I uphold my word and stay out of her life. Five months after the child is born I get a letter in the mail from the child enforcement agency telling me I need to come get a DNA test. Immediately I text her and ask her why am I getting a letter in the mail requesting child support? She tells me the only reason I got that letter was because she requested medicaid for the child and she doesn’t want me to pay child support and doesn’t want me to be in his life. She says they made her “search for the dad” or they wouldn’t let her get medicaid. (So why couldn’t she say she was raped, or doesn’t know where or who the dad is right?) So I ask what happened to signing my rights away and not worrying about child support? She tells me she will still let me sign my rights away and won’t collect child support, then we go back into that same argument about who has to initiate the signing away of the rights because I can’t go do it myself. The conversation ends there.

I go in to meet the representative for the New Hanover County Child Enforcement agency to do a DNA test. I tell her up front the deal that was made between me and her and that I just want to sign my rights over. She says after I do the DNA test and prove I’m the father, I can push the case to court and talk to a judge about the issue. So I do the DNA test. It comes back as the child being mine. So I go to court. I’m no lawyer, so I’m about as stupid to courts and laws as a person can get. I expected to be able to sit down with a judge one on one and be able to talk about this situation. No, instead I arrive on time to a cattle farm of people and their cases, only to start court 2 hours late. To start this situation off I’m already in a bad mood from being misinformed by the child support agency and since I’m a punctual person, starting court two hours late always puts me in a bad mood. I sit through every single persons case in that room seeing just how screwed up in the head this judge is. Some of the ways she handled peoples cases made me want to throw a book at her right then and there. I truly felt bad for those fathers. They were raped. I eventually get taken to a back room with Jane and some mediator who demands my tax returns with an attitude. I try to ask her about giving up my rights and instead I’m returned with an even worse attitude. She explains to me that in order to give up my rights I have to abuse my child. So I ask her “I seriously have to physically abuse my child just to give up my rights to the parent?” and with an even worse attitude she says yes. At this point I am livid and mentally exhausted. I’m ready to just walk out of the room. To top it off she tells me I owe $1,200 a month in child support for a child I have never been able to see or have any part of. They escort us back to the court room where I wait another hour to see the judge, who eventually almost leaves the room thinking we were just spectators or only god knows what. The judge asks us to come to the stand and by this time I just want to leave the court house and go jump off a bridge. I am mentally gone at this point. I tell the judge all I want is to just give up my rights and get the hell out of here. She scoffs at me and gives me some lingo about how she cant give me advice and I should have gotten a lawyer. They bend me over backwards and force me to sign documents that I have no clue what they are for. I’m sure if I didn’t agree to sign them they would have held me in contempt of court and put me in jail.

Upon leaving that court house I immediately text Jane and tell her I’m going to hire a lawyer and get my rights signed away. I hire a lawyer who then tells me she has to initiate the signing of the rights away (Exactly what I have been telling her every time this conversation comes up). I’m also told in the same breath by my lawyer that even if I sign my rights away, I can still be required to pay child support. So Jane and I get in another argument about signing the rights away and she makes the claim that if she signs my rights away, she will not be able to claim medicaid anymore so I should just pay my child support and stay out of his life.

At this point, I have had enough. I have been mentally beaten, battered, and abused by Jane and DSS. I have slowly realized just how horrible of a person this girl is. I change my tone and tell her I want to meet him for the first time. She then instantly starts to ignore me. Will not return any of my texts. I eventually go home and start to do a background check on her. I find out she has created a case on the sheriffs website for domestic violence against me. I have no clue what this is because there are no details on the website and I haven’t threatened anyone. It just has my name and her name and says domestic violence.  So I ask her about it and she still ignores me.

-Turns out she has made up text messages convincing a judge to grant a ex parte restraining order against me. (ex parte I guess means I don’t get a chance to prove my innocence) . Apparently this judge didn’t take into account that people can edit their text messages to say whatever they want or the fact of her record versus mine, or probably simply just didn’t care that he was pushing me further out of my childs life, making it even harder for me to be a father when I finally want to be.

The next day I call up the sheriffs office to ask about it and they don’t see anything on their end, so I ask if after I get off work if they can mediate me going to her house just so I can see my child for the first time and see what kind of environment he is living in, only for a few minutes cause I believe she is crazy and I don’t want any laws to be broken and me end up in jail. They say yes they can do that.

-My car and house was not ready to transport and take care of a child at the time so I would have been very happy with just seeing him for the first time for a few minutes.-

I meet with the sheriff and he informs me that if Jane says no to me meeting my child, there is nothing he can do. (Here is another flaw in the system. I consider this extremely wrong. I’m the father of that child, and I have just as much a right to see my child as she does, especially when I am required to pay child support.) I agree to this and tell him if Jane says no, I will just go home. We go to Jane’s mothers house, and the only ones home are my son and Jane’s mom. The sheriff asks her if I can meet my son for the first time and the mother says no because Jane doesn’t want me around him. So I ask the sheriff if he can at least go inside the house to see if my child is okay, and check out the environment he is being kept in since everyone in that house is a heavy smoker. He refuses and says it looks fine from the outside. Frustrated I go home.

After the court date dealing with child support amounts, I get a letter in the mail saying I have to go to a 1 hour mediation orientation. So I show up. It ends up taking 2 and a half hours. They show this video of parenting apart which I can only describe as feeling like I was reliving my nightmare childhood, which in turn made me want to storm out of the room to never return again, but I’m sure I’d go to jail if I didn’t sit through that complete waste of time. The video shows you what can happen to your kid if you fight in front of them, or if you do action a, consequence b will happen to your kid. It was one of the worst experiences I could ever describe. Then afterwards you are supposed to schedule a mediation meeting with a mediator and Jane. Except because Jane falsely filed a domestic violence case against me, I’m exempt from this and not allowed to do mediation, yet they forced me to sit through 2 and a half hours of a living nightmare. Pissed off, I leave and go to work. That was two hours I could have spent making money to take care of the child I’m not allowed to see. Or money I’m being forced to pay to a woman who doesn’t want me in my childs’ life.

Since then over 4 months have passed by. I have been forced to pay well over $4,000 in child support, and $4,000 in lawyer fees and have still not been given a single chance to see my child. Currently Jane is dragging on the case by requesting the furthest court dates possible. She has also lead on her lawyer and mine into settling out of court, only to drag that on for several weeks, simply in the end to just say no with her reason being “Because he stole pictures of my son off my facebook and put them on his facebook.” So now we have to go the route of going to court. She is also avoiding her lawyers’ phone calls, and sets up meetings as far out in advance as she can.

Other thoughts on my experiences with this situation:

1)     Why do they need two years of tax returns if you are a self employed business owner? We don’t get a steady paycheck like your $10/hr run of the mill job. They should only ask for 1 year, and they should calculate it completely differently. They are currently milking a cow dry in a manner of speaking. My business has no extra funds to pay employees or keep a continuous stock of parts to service my customers. I don’t run a huge company by any means, so being small I am greatly affected by this manner of calculations.

2)     This state is so wrong in the sense that they “believe both parents should be in the child’s life because it is in the child’s best interest” but yet my experience in this twisted system so far has pushed me further away from that child and fueled a hate for the mother more than anyone can imagine. Plus to top it off, whoever pushed that method of thinking into society obviously didn’t grow up in a separated family like I did. I would have killed to be raised by just one parent, without all the fighting and moving. I firmly do not believe one bit in the child support system as it also has done more harm than good to my family and my life growing up. I also believe it allows one parent to slack off and be lazy when it comes to financially taking care of the child. If child support enforcement wasn’t around, I’m sure more parents would seek better jobs to take care of their kid. I see plenty of single moms where the dad has left the country and they are doing perfectly fine raising multiple kids by themselves without child support. They realized they needed to get a career and they actually achieved that goal.

3)      How is it right in any way to force a parent to pay child support before setting custody of the child? I’m forced to pay for child support, but unable to put my name on the birth certificate, or even be allowed to meet him for mere minutes simply because she says no, and there isn’t a single thing the father can do about it. Also the Sheriff in this story doesn’t care to check on the well being of my child when I believe it is seriously in question. Anyone else find this to be an issue? Instead he rather forces me to go home without knowing the well being of my child? Great way to “serve and protect” sheriff.

4)      If a person is paying child support for multiple months and the parent who has the child is preventing the other from seeing the child, their child support should be revoked and that parent should serve jail time allowing the other parent to obtain full custody.

5)      A judge that assigns restraining orders should do a background check on both parties involved and should never take texts as a form of evidence. Taking the word of a felon over someone with a clean record is completely wrong.