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Strollerderby
Monster mother loses custody of her kids
Jennifer Petkov, the 33-year-old woman who admitted to taunting and bullying 7-year-old Kathleen Edward ,is learning that life holds consequences for monsters like her. After the news broke last week about Petkov’s merciless harassment of a dying little girl, the Internet responded with fury. While her victim has been showered with love and treated to a fantasy day at a toy store, Jennifer and her family have been on the receiving end of a lot of anger and hatred.
Jennifer Petkov has received death threats, her husband is in danger of losing his job and their son has been fighting at school over his messed up mother. And earlier this week, Petkov was arrested and charged with assault with a dangerous weapon and reckless driving after allegedly trying to run down a neighbor.
But while neighbors and strangers alike have been appalled by this woman and what she’s done, there’s at least one person with a personal interest in what kind of craziness is going on in the Petkov home: Jennifer Petkov’s ex and the father of two of her children. Continue reading »
It seems less and less likely that Gibson will get even shared custody of his infant daughter, Lucia, as her mother and Gibson’s former mistress, Oksana Grigorieva, provides more damning audio to Radar online. In a sixth tape, released yesterday, Grigorieva says, “You hit me, and you hit her (Lucia) while she was in my hands! Mel, you’re losing your mind. You need medication.”
Gibson’s response? A string of expletives, followed by screaming, ”I want my child, and no one will believe you!”
Despite Gibson’s lunatic, tormenting (and tormented) rants, he still appears to think he’s a fit parent. He can be heard in the most recent recording threatening, “I will have that child, easily,” telling his former mistress, “They won’t let you keep her because they’ll know what you are!”
The world certainly knows what you are now, Mel Gibson. (As if we didn’t already, sugar t*ts.) But will any of this evidence hold up in court? Continue reading »
Motherlode featured a heartbreaking essay yesterday by Liane Kupferberg Carter, the mother of an 18-year-old autistic child named Michael. She recently had to petition the court to remain her son’s guardian, and writes of her family’s visit from Aretha Franklin – not the soul singer, but a representative of Mental Hygiene Legal Services, who was there to determine if her guardianship was a “safe and appropriate one” for her son.
“Appropriate? We are his parents,” Carter writes.
In the end, Carter and her husband were awarded guardianship, though having to prove she was a good parent inspired Carter to reflect on whether or not she’d done enough for her son, and indeed whether or not she’d caused his autism. She asks herself a litany of questions: “What did I do wrong during my pregnancy? Was it that Advil I took the week before I realized I was pregnant? Did I not play with him enough as an infant? Not go to enough conferences, seminars and workshops? Or go to too many that took me away from him? Should we have taken him to see other experts?”
Like many mothers would, she concludes, ”I should have done more.”
I don’t know what it’s like to parent an autistic child, but I can relate to Carter’s fear of losing her son. Almost immediately after I told my ex-husband I’d contacted a lawyer about a divorce, he sent an email to a lawyer himself, indicating that he would fight for physical custody of our daughter. The idea of losing my child to a man who not only had been caught engaging in criminal activity, but didn’t have a problem leaving the country for a week-and-a-half without calling to see how things were with our infant was unbelievable to me. But worse than his arrogance, sense of entitlement and audacity was the sick feeling that suddenly rushed over me when I thought, “Could he possibly win?” Continue reading »
I’ve written before about a father’s rights surrounding reproduction, questioning whether or not a woman should be forced to terminate or carry-out a pregnancy based on the correlating wishes of the father. But what about a father’s rights to a child that already exists? A bill is currently pending in the Massachusetts House “that would begin each custody case with a presumption that fathers and mothers are entitled to equal amounts of time with their children.”
That may initially seem like a simple and agreeable premise. Most married mothers (or mothers who have an ongoing romantic relationship with the father of their child) probably feel like parenting is a responsibility that should be shared equally. But giving a child completely equal time with both of their parents is not necessarily realistic – or good for the child – when it comes to parenting after a split. Continue reading »
The next time you are tempted to badmouth your ex in front of your children, here’s a helpful word of advice: don’t. You could end up in prison.
A Long Island, New York woman is facing jail time for deliberately turning her two teenage daughters against their dad over a period of several years, telling them that their father was a “deadbeat,” “loser,” and “scumbag,” as well as a rude but common phrase Babble doesn’t allow its bloggers to use.
But what seemed to set the judge presiding over the multi-year case through the roof was the the false allegations of sexual misconduct mom Lauren Lippe lodged against ex-spouse Ted Rubin. Continue reading »
Sandra Bullock’s estranged husband Jesse James has been in the news for months, ever since his cheating scandal broke. In an exclusive interview with ABC’s Nightline this week, he blamed his infidelity on the abuse he received as a child. After a stint in rehab, he came out saying, “I grew up with a huge amount of shame and fear and abandonment on my shoulders from a very young age and I think, you know, the way my mind rationalized [cheating], ‘Well, you know, I might as well do whatever I can to like run her off cause she is going to find out what I am anyway and leave me anyway.’”
Vicki Mabrey countered that many people who were abused as children go on to be faithful adults. So is it that there are real excuses for cheating, or do men who cheat need an excuse? British psychiatrist Dennis Friedman, in his book The Unsolicited Gift: Why We Do The Things We Do, thinks that men who were raised by nannies have a natural instinct to cheat. He believes that being cared for by more than one woman as a child introduces men “to the concept of the other woman.” Continue reading »
Share and share alike. Fifty-fifty. Half-and-half. Seems like a good idea, whether you’re a couple of kids at recess with a single playground ball or divorced parents figuring out custody of your kids. That’s what lawmakers in Tennessee think, anyway. House bill 2916 would require children’s time to be evenly divided between couples who cannot agree on a custody agreement.
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