My Daughter’s Mom Is Moving 4.5 Hours Away To Another State In A Month And Wants To Take Our Daughter With Her.

Location: Oregon

There’s a lot of background to this that I’m going to try to boil down as much as possible so that you can understand why we’re at where we’re at now. But I apologize if some of this info gets a little long in the tooth. I promise that it’s important context.

Our daughter is 11 years old come December and her mother and I separated when she was only a year old. It took us a couple years and a lot of bickering back and forth to get ourselves into a position to be decent co-parents because we knew that was the highest priority for our kid. Since our separation, I made it my obligation to do everything in my power to just be the best father I possibly could be while also keeping things as fair as I possibly can. We agreed to have a shared custody situation without ever going through a paperwork or court process because we were both only concerned about getting equal time with our daughter and honestly, after those first couple of years, we had a really great (one week on/off) system sorted out. Whenever mom needs help buying anything for our daughter, I’m always willing to do so and whenever either of us need the other to take over for an extra day or two, we always find a way to even that out in our schedule. We both go to all of our daughter’s events and we’re both actively involved in her education and life. Because neither of us pay child support and mom doesn’t really have any family that lives close by, I have always told mom that if she ever needed financial help, all she has to do is ask and I’d be happy to help in any way I can. We’ve built a great system that took a lot of work to establish.

The issue is that we separated because mom was making incredibly irresponsible decisions and has continued to do so up to current day. Until this past year, she’s been incapable of holding a job for longer than a few months because she’s combative towards anyone who has authority over her. Her boyfriend that she’s been with for a majority of our daughter’s life is very similar in that he’s pretty consistently in and out of jobs. Because of such, they have to live in low income housing to afford their rent (I’m not hating on this, I came from a poor immigrant family, so I get it) and are frequently struggling to pay their bills. Mom and boyfriend argue often enough that they split up a number of times and always end up back together. Mom has even been in jail twice: Once for choking boyfriend in reaction to him pushing her during an argument and again for missing a court date soon after. Mom also had a weird habit of using our daughter’s “happiness” as a way to manipulate me into giving mom what she wants, à la “Our daughter doesn’t want to spend Christmas with you, she wants to spend it with me.”Throughout all of this though, I had never pursued full custody not only because my daughter loves them both and they do treat her well, but because I never wanted our daughter or her mom to ever think I wanted to separate them.

On my side, I’ve worked really hard to establish myself in order to provide for our daughter. My partner and I have been together consistently for five years now and we have a three bedroom apartment that we can reasonably afford together with jobs we’ve each had for all of those years. All of our bills are paid, on time, every month. We take our daughter on weekend trips and spend a day or two a week with our relatively large families here in the city. Anything our daughter needs, we get. Anything our daughter wants, we find ways for her to earn via small chores and fun activities. Neither me or my partner are making six figures or anything, we’ve just been very fortunate and have worked hard to have what we have.

With all that said - Let’s talk about the current situation:

Last week, mom asked me to get together with her and our daughter to have an important discussion about something. During this conversation with our daughter present, she explains that her and boyfriend had broken up again back in February and when that happened, she fell behind on her rent by a couple months. When she finally got enough money to pay one of those two months of rent, the apartment management told her that they needed both months or she would be evicted. So she devised an “ingenious” plan to let the eviction process begin so that she could fight the eviction in court and try to convince them to set up a payment plan for the couple months of rent that are owed. However, it’s October now and the management has yet to serve the eviction notice and mom has not paid any rent at all, nor saved any of it, to prepare. She also explained that during her and boyfriend’s break up, she started seeing someone for a short time and found out shortly after they stopped seeing each other, that she’s now pregnant.

Now her and boyfriend are back together again and are deciding to keep the baby. However, they recently found out that boyfriend’s grandma that lives in northern Washington is willing to let them move in with her on November 1st at no cost if they help her with some care-giving needs in order to avoid those whole eviction debacle and because they’re in the predicament they’re in, they’re wanting to commit to this move. To add the icing onto this proverbial shit cake, mom says that she is letting our daughter choose whether she wants to go with them or stay with me and our daughter has chosen to go with mom. Mom expressed that if our daughter moves with them and decides that she doesn’t want to anymore, that she’d happily let us take her back, but otherwise, she wants to “abide by our daughter’s happiness”.

No asking me if this would be okay.
No trying to work out a different solution with me.
Already made up her mind.

I might be wrong and potentially just racked with stress over this, but I find it absolutely mind boggling that she’s giving our 11 year old the agency to make such a big decision to uproot her entire life away from all of her friends, family, school, and culture to move to this place where they only have one elderly family member to rely on. This goes without mentioning the potential legal issues that potentially exist with her wanting to move across states lines while also forcing us to have to either do the same or sacrifice our relationship with our daughter.

So my question here is… well… what is the best course of action here? I know that the beginning steps are likely speak to a family lawyer and get a parenting plan served ASAP, but is there anything I need to know about this process? I’m stressed out of my mind about this because I hate the idea of entering into a custody battle over this and tarnishing the amazing relationship I have with my daughter because of it, as well as potentially leaving mom in a position to be homeless because she likely won’t want to move if she doesn’t take our daughter with her. I never wanted to put either of them in this sort of spot. I only ever just wanted to do right by my daughter while preserving my rights as a father. Any and all advice would be appreciated.

TL;DR - My 11 year old daughter’s wildly irresponsible and manipulative mother has to move 4.5 hours away to another state in a month because she’s getting evicted and is wanting to take our daughter with her without my direct permission to do so. What do I do?