:( I am a single mom who has 2 kids. I am in the United States Army. My kids have diffrent dads. I have joint custody of my daughter. Her dad is married to a great woman who treats my daughter great. The 3 have a great friendship. But on the other hand my sons dad has full legal and phisical custody of our son. We had a bad marrage. I told him as I took him to work that I wanted a divorce. When we got to his job he took our son out of the car a ran into the hospital were he worked. There was nothing I could do because in California if there is no order then the police wont do anything. We went to court and the judge gave us joint legal custody with his dad haveing sole phisical. I moved 7 hours away for a job. Because I was liveing 45 minutes outside of California he wouldn't let me see our son. So I told him that I would drive back on the weekends to see him. That was fine for a little while. I quit my job and moved back to the town we live in. He found out and had me served with a restraning order. We went to court and the judge granted it. My sons dad told the judge I was going to kidnap our son. I told the judge that is crazy I would never do anything like that. I told the judge I was liveing with a close family friend who worked for the county and would be there when my son would be there. I also said I was leaveing to the Army in a week or two. The judge didn't even care what I had to say. We went back to court a week later and I thought it would go rather well. I was wrong. I had orders in my hand from the army that said I left in 3 days. The judge said ok, I'm granting full legal and phisical custody to the father. This was the Friday before mothers day and I asked the judge if I could see my son over the weekend since I was leaveing Monday for basic training. He said no we can deal with this when I am back in town. Now my kids haven't seen each other in about 2 years. I think that is really bad for them. Right now I am on leave from basic training until the end of Aug. since I got hurt. I really need to know what I can do when I get done with my training. Does anyone have any advice for me. If so please let me know. Thank you in advance.

You wont get him back and if you do you will have to discharge due to lack of family care plan most likely. The Army doesn't look kindly on single parents with custody, they want deployable soldiers not parents with family responsibility. If the judge had given you back your son three days before training you would STILL have had to sign him over to someone else during training and the papers they put up are permenant, believe me I have a good friend who lost her daughter to her ex-con just four days out of prison when she left for training ex-boyfriend/father of daughter. She was even slated at that point to get married during training to a well-ranked recently retired Army officer so there is no saving anyone really. The military operates on deployment and they don't operate on waiting for mom to find someone to care for the kids. BTDT the only reason I didn't go back when I was eligible (injury discharge) was my dd who appeared on the scene in the interim.

This is sad but very true. In are Armed Forces they want everyone deployable. There are some exceptions to that rule but usually this is for people who have served in the War and been injured and are close to retirement and can do some sort of desk job or something 8-5, but its unlikely. With you being a soldier go talk to JAG about all this, but you will have to make your mind up, if you even were to get custody back your care plan would basically discharge you, so then you would be back to square one, no medical, no check, and so on. Think long and hard about it. JAG may be able to help out with some sort of visitation for the children to be able to see eachother. But I dunno. :/ Sorry. Try to stay focused. Things will work out.

Well you can go to the JAG office and ask them to draw up papers so you can get meaningful visitation with the child. That may be the best you can do.