No, I'm not telling you that at all. I'm telling you that the courts are going to see it as you wanting to rip your son away from the happy school/home/family that he is settled in. I don't know how it was for you growing up, but these days the courts are reluctant to agree to changing anything for a child. You'd have been better off fleeing the state with the kid & settling him into a new school back when the violence took place.

Do you have an order of protection?

OK... that said, if you do not feel the child needs to be protected from his father and should see his father, then the judges were not going to allow sole custody. This is what my friends' ex was looking for. She was looking for sole custody so she could move the kids across TOWN to be with her boyfriend. She wanted to be able to make the decision without any oversight from anyone.

Frankly, that wouldn't work anyways becaus elike I've said, sole custody does not give you the right to pick up & move without permission eithe rfrom your ex or the judge.

What I'm saying is not that you don't have a right to want this, but rather, "welcome to divorce jail, where you have the right to move anywhere in the country that you want, so long as your child can still go to his old schools". I'm in the middle of this right now. We are stuck. There would be wonderful opportunities for my husband to work other places. HE's gotten job offers with amazing money attached, but we're stuck here because this is where his kids are. His ex has the kids convinced that if they leave here they'll just DIE... so we're stuck.

Now, that said, it doesn't sound lik eyour lawyer gave you bad advice on that issue. Once you were IN YOUR STATE, you are STUCK.

I know someone whose wife took the kid to her hometown on a claim they were going on vacation. THe kid is in school there. This guy is here on this board but i've not seen him post recently. They're in the middle of a divorce and he's not been able to get her back, so the kids' school year started and is nearly over. THe judge kept ordering her to come back, come back, bring the kid, and she kept defying th eorders. At some point, it's going to be impossible to bring the kid back without more trauma. This is what I'm saying... that WHEREVER that child is on the day the divorce is filed, kidnapped on vacation and enrolled in schools a thousand miles from home... if the kid ends up staying there for a year, THAT is going to be wehre the judge is inclined to leav ethe kid unless it becomes clear that the situation is bad for the kid... generally, the kid will have to fail in school, get sick, etc... before the judge will allow one parent to move that child if the other parent disagrees.

I know how hard it is, after you've come to an agreement on things and when the other party is bein ga real jerk about the agreement, to think the agreement was in your best interests, but I've not heard anything you say other than one domestic violence incident that he pled to and went to counseling for, that would suggest anything otehr than that you made a good deal... and if you went to trial, the judge would probably say, "he pled and went to ocunseling, so great" and you'd have 10s of thousands more in attorney's fees just to get the same 60-40 setup, but maybe worse... maybe if you had refused to agree to the 60-40 unreasonably, the judge would order you to pay the extra legal fees that your ex incurred by going to trial after you rejected that settlement offer.

And your personal opinion that the counseling didn't work... well, that's everyone's personal opinion about their ex so the judge would just shrug & say, "let's give him a chance" and do what he wanted. Your best chance is to get an order of protection for the violence he committed and the ongoing harassment since then. And tehn if he harasses you, call police and prosecute it so that over time you can build up a record that it's not just a one time thing that happened on the day you split up (I can't tell you how common it is to have a single incident of violence like that)... and over time you might get to get out of this little "divorce jail" we all find ourselves in, befor eyour child is graduated!

I'm not kidding, you could have done a whole lot worse than you did.

But it's hard not to feel buyer's remorse in a divorce case. No one is ever happy at the end. No one "wins" in a divorce!