Originally Posted by Sasha1972

I find things to agree with and things to disagree with in Cyranoak's post, because I'm in exactly the situation s/he describes. On drunk driving - No. Never. People die that way. That's what flipped the switch for me to seek sole custody of Kid.

On seeing the alcoholic parent: that's a tough one. If I ran the world Kid would have nothing to do with her father until he can demonstrate that he's able to maintain sobriety. However, I made the decision to facilitate limited and controlled contact with her father.

I made this decision mainly because of what a very experienced social worker friend told me, when I laid out the situation to him. He said that he thought the thing that was most at risk was Kid's relationship to me. If I tell Kid "no, you can never see your father", he becomes the wedge between Kid and me. Given how good alcoholics are at triangulating, this is the perfect setup for Kid-and-Dad vs Mom. My friend said he had seen a lot of these situations in his practice, where the child aligns with the addicted or otherwise disturbed parent because the healthy parent has been made into the enemy, and when crap starts going down with the addicted parent, (as it will) the child is really hooped, because they've stopped trusting the healthy parent.

His advice was to be more lenient than I really want to be - put some safeguards in place (two-hours visits, Kid has her phone, I do all the driving, I check Dad at dropoff and pickup) but help Kid see her father.

Dad has been feeding Kid a line (for years) about how Mom is a controlling b!tch, Mom is trying to keep us apart, Mom hates me and doesn't want you to see me, etc etc etc. However, Kid has the evidence of her own eyes - Mom is taking me to and from Dad's place several times a week, Mom is arranging visits for me with Dad, Mom isn't trash-talking Dad - to counter Dad's version of reality. If I did what a large part of me really wants to do and told Dad "you can see Kid when she's eighteen. Maybe. If you're lucky", I'd be confirming the stories that he's telling Kid.

If Kid were younger, things might be different. I'm taking a gamble that Kid is astute enough to see that Dad's version is wrong and Mom is not the enemy.

I'm taking the time to write this all out because what my friend said was a real revelation to me - I had assumed that the less contact Kid has with her batsh!t crazy drunk of a father, the better. However once he laid it out to me, I understood that in my situation, I had to play the long game and think about what kind of relationship I wanted Kid to have with me next year or five years from now, rather than focusing only on the immediate future.

I am not totally comfortable with this. It's a gamble. But I decided in my situation, it was the best of a bad set of options.