He says he no longer wants to be a dad

Dear Mrs Macaulay,

I was with my ex for 9 1/2 years and we have two children together. We decided to move on with our lives in April 2020; however, he was still maintaining the kids up until late May 2020, until he stopped. In January 2021, I went to the Family Court and we started to see a mediator. He told them that he would keep the kids three days for the week. When I am sending the kids to his home I have to send food, snacks, juice and clothes. If I don’t he calls to ask for things. In August 2021 we went to the court face to face and he owed $49,600 for maintenance We were to go back in September but he said he would not be attending and he no longer wanted to be their father. I have been getting telephone sessions with the mediator but it’s not working out. He keeps on saying that he’s not getting any money and work has slowed down because of COVID. He said he has loans and other expenses. He was supposed to be paying half of everything for the kids but I do everything. We work at the same company but he works more hours than I do. What steps should I take from here?

I am going to first deal with the issue of the maintenance of your children and their father’s actions with regard to his obligations in that regard.

Your Family Court order obligated your ex to pay one-half of his children’s maintenance and you say that he failed to obey the order and was in arrears. It seems that this man is an exceptionally selfish person and unnatural in saying that he no longer wants to be their father, as if children can be shed off as one can a coat! You have not said whether you attended court on the September date and if you did whether you informed the court what he had told you. This should have caused the judge to order a warrant to be issued for his arrest because his statements and his disobedience of the Court’s orders are some of the clearest example of contempt of a court.

You have asked what steps you ought to take about the situation. Clearly, you must go back to the court office, and if he was to pay his portion of the childrens’ maintenance to the court for you to collect there, you should see the collections officer and ask for assistance to work out exactly how much he is in arrears and for what exact period of time. Then you must go the the clerk who prepares the summons for him to attend court to answer for his disobedience of the maintenance orders. You owe a duty to your children to proceed against this man, who is denying their right to be maintained not only by you, but also by their father and against whom a court order exists. He must be made to understand his role and his legal duty and the consequences of his disobedience. He must learn that he can go to jail because the judge has the power to have him locked up until he pays all that he owes for his childrens’ maintenance. The children also have the right to have a relationship with their father, though this is breached more often than obeyed.

By the way, I hope that in working out the total sums due for each child’s maintenance, that you also added their share of the household expenses to the expenses for their individual personal necessities. When their father left, you three continued to live together and were and are using all utilities, food, cleaning materials for the home, gas for cooking, cable charges; in fact all household general expenses together. These expenses must be split into three and one-third of these expenses must be added to each child’s individual expenses (for their clothing, shoes, transportation, lunch money, etcetera), to arrive at the most approximate correct total needed for their maintenance. He should also pay one-half of their educational and medical expenses. If you did not calculate their maintenance in this way, you must do so and apart from ensuring the summons to obtain the monies still in arrears, you should apply for a variation of the sum you had claimed for each child.

You said you had a relationship with him for 91/2 years, and if you lived as man and wife during these years and you were both single persons, then you would after five years together have been recognised in law as common law spouses. You have to date made no application to have this status declared by the court and thereafter you could have applied for maintenance for yourself. I do however, respect your position in not pursuing this but proceeding for your children’s best interests,

I do however strongly advise you to make your application for the custody and care and control of your children, so that you have the legal order in your favour. This would ensure that you will be fully in charge of your children’s manner of life, upbringing and development. You really must do so and do so now in order to secure their future wherein you would not need to ask for and obtain their father’s consent for them to be able to do something or the other and he refuses to consent. Please protect your children properly, especially as you now know better the kind of man he is.

Go to the Family Court as quickly as you can. You ought not to let him get away with his intentional contempt of the court and his intentional disobedience of the court orders made on your applications for the best interests of your children. Please act now!

Margarette May Macaulay is an attorney-at-law, Supreme Court mediator, notary public, and women’s and children’s rights advocate. Send questions via e-mail to allwoman@jamaicaobserver.com; or write to All Woman, 40-42 1/2 Beechwood Avenue, Kingston 5. All responses are published. Mrs Macaulay cannot provide personal responses.

DISCLAIMER:

The contents of this article are for informational purposes only, and must not be relied upon as an alternative to legal advice from your own attorney.