My name is Brian L. Jackson. I am a Tulsa father’s rights attorney here with Dads.Law. Where fathers are not disposable. The situation I’m describing is, for a lot of us guys who are married fathers, it’s the worst-case scenario. You worked your eight or nine hours at work, you’re coming home expecting to be greeted by your wife and kids and suddenly you come home to an empty house and they’re gone. Maybe there’s a dear John note, or maybe there’s not. You have that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. How do you deal with that?

Well, a couple of pointers I can tell you. If she’s left and it’s pretty evident she’s left. You need to move on issues of custody and visitation as quickly as you can. Now that may mean you file for divorce. It may mean you file legal separation, but you want to get some kind of a visitation order in place quickly because you don’t want to allow her to establish a status quo where she’s a single mom with the kiddos and you’ve had no involvement.

You want to be careful how you interact with her during this period of time because there is a very real risk of some kind of allegation materializing really early on in the process. If she’s worried about losing custody of the kids and you give her even a slight chance of trying to get PO, you run a real risk of her using, weaponizing, that against you to get custody. So in other words, you got to mind your P’s and Q’s. Don’t be texting her a hundred times begging her to take you back or call 10,000 times, begging her to take you back.

You should ask to talk to your kids and try to keep in touch with them. I think if a situation like that happens, you want to be very careful about broaching the subject with her about fixing your relationship and just focus on making sure you’re still involved with your kids. Make sure that you are providing some kind of monetary support to the kids, especially if you were the primary breadwinner because you don’t want to get in a situation where she can claim some huge arrearage later. If you are served with a protective order, then don’t contact her at all. Do contact a good lawyer.

You probably do want to pull the trigger on some kind of legal proceedings pretty quickly so you have some way to enforce your rights to see your kids, and that’s why you need a good lawyer. And one place you can find a good child custody lawyer in Tulsa, Oklahoma is Dads.Law where fathers are not disposable.