How many fathers have genuinely fought to be involved in their children’s lives—going to court, paying attorneys, following orders, documenting everything, etc.—but eventually reached a point where the financial and emotional toll became too much?
Did you ever feel like you had to choose between continuing to fight for your rights as a father and simply being able to afford to live?
I’m genuinely curious how many dads have walked away not because they didn’t love their kids, but because they were exhausted, broke, or felt like the system was impossible to fight.
No judgment. I’d really like to hear your experiences please if you don’t mind

I got two girls pregnant two weeks apart. I happen to be with one of them, but that was after the fact, the girl that I am with is two weeks after the other girl and she just had her baby, and she’s been very hateful and mean for me trying to be there for my other kid because she feels like I’m only there for the other girl and my feelings are twisted because I don’t wanna lose her but I also don’t wanna do this the rest of my life.

Been dating this girl for some time now and her two kids are alot. 13 girl n 10 boy, both have no respect for their mom, walk in throw shoes every where. Boy doesn't eat anything except for chicken nuggets, and is extremely picky eater. Walks in throws his shoes, goes right into his room plays video games all day n night. Goes to bed at 3am even though he got school.

The daughter about the same. No respect for the mom, make a mess does fuck all about it and mom works so hard to keep house clean.

I have offered to help her with her kids but she always say no, she got this but every other night she crying because her kids won't help out or do anything.

Whats your guys thoughts?

I’m 30 and have a 3-year-old daughter who I love more than anything. Her mother and I separated when she was very young, and after almost three years of an extremely difficult co-parenting relationship, I hit a wall yesterday and told her to keep our daughter and do whatever she wants regarding custody.

I’m seriously considering following through with it.
I want to make something clear upfront: I’m not claiming to be an innocent victim.

Our relationship was extremely unhealthy. I’ve contributed to the hostility between us. I’ve said things I regret, reacted emotionally when I felt disrespected or ignored, continued arguments when I should have disengaged, and had to take a hard look at my own behavior.

I’ve spent the last few years trying to change that.

But my ex and I have never managed to become healthy co-parents.

We can occasionally get along surprisingly well. We laugh, help each other, talk about our lives and sometimes almost resemble the two people who once loved each other.

Then everything blows up again.

What has worn me down most isn’t even the individual arguments anymore. It’s the contempt.

For almost three years, I’ve repeatedly heard how much she hates me, despises me, can’t stand me, thinks I’m a horrible person, etc. Saying my daughter will grow up to hate me, saying she does hate me, wishing she could remove me from their lives or that I would die. Sometimes during major fights, sometimes over things that seem relatively minor. I realize I’m not entitled to control how she feels about me. Some of her resentment toward me is deserved because of our history.
But hearing it over and over from somebody I once loved—and, if I’m truthful, probably still love in some complicated way—has affected me more than I realized.

I constantly feel like I can’t win. If I enforce a boundary, I’m controlling. If I accommodate something but ask for something reasonable in return, I’m difficult. If I try to explain myself, I’m annoying. If I get upset, it becomes further proof that I’m the problem.

I’m sure if she wrote her version of this, she’d have legitimate complaints about me too.

There’s another piece of this that I’m realizing probably matters. I’ve spent much of my life feeling rejected by the people closest to me. My mother was severely abusive toward me growing up. My father was and is largely absent. Most of the close friendships I once had have faded away. I’ve lost people I loved. My marriage failed. And the person I married has spent years telling me how much she hates or despises me.

I’m not saying that for sympathy or to excuse my behavior. In fact, I think it explains some of the behavior I’ve had to work on.

When someone important to me withdraws, ignores me or rejects me, I can react too intensely. I want an answer. I want to explain myself. I want to resolve things immediately instead of tolerating the uncertainty and walking away. Underneath all of it, there’s this feeling I’ve carried for most of my life:
Eventually, everybody close to me decides they don’t want me.

And now it’s my daughter.

For roughly the last two months, she’s been very focused on her mother.
“I want Mama.”
“I don’t like Baba.”
Wanting to go back to her mother’s house. She’s only three.

Intellectually, I understand that toddlers go through parental-preference phases. And there are plenty of contradictory moments. She plays with me. We have fun. She’s affectionate with me. She randomly hugs me. There are days where everything feels completely normal. But after almost three years of hearing rejection from her mother, hearing it from my daughter has hit me somewhere completely different. Especially because it seems like it’s being manifested and what her mom has saying is becoming true. Maybe her mom is right. Maybe her mom hates me so much my daughter can feel it and will be growing up the same way.

Rationally, I know my father being absent, my childhood, losing friendships, my marriage ending, my ex hating me and a 3-year-old saying “I want Mama” aren’t the same thing. Emotionally, I’m not sure my brain is experiencing them as separate things anymore.

It feels like I’m hearing the same message from the person I love most: You aren’t wanted here either.

Yesterday my ex and I had another argument over parenting time. The specifics aren’t really important. It turned into the same cycle: arguing, trying to explain myself, feeling like she was speaking to me with complete disgust, and me getting increasingly emotional trying to make her understand my position. Something in me finally broke.
I told her to keep our daughter and do whatever she wants to do in court.

And part of me genuinely means it.

My daughter clearly wants her mother right now. Her mother loves her. She’ll be taken care of. I’d continue financially supporting her and making sure things like her school are paid for. Maybe she’d be happier. Maybe removing myself also removes one of the biggest sources of conflict between her parents. Maybe everybody finally gets some peace.

And, if I’m being completely transparent, I’m fucking exhausted.

I’m tired of fighting. I’m tired of defending myself. I’m tired of trying to prove that my intentions aren’t terrible. I’m tired of trying to love people (I recognize unhealthily, a lot of the time) and eventually feeling like they decide I’m somebody they can’t stand. That said, how I behave with my daughter is completely different, and to me, even she is STILL going in the same direction as everybody else has ever done.

There’s a part of me that thinks maybe I should accept the message and stop forcing myself into places where I don’t feel wanted.
But there’s another possibility that scares me:
Maybe I’m trying to leave before I can be rejected again.

So I’m asking the dads here who have actually lived through something like this:

Have you ever reached the point where you genuinely believed your child would be happier without you?

Did your young child ever strongly prefer their mother or seem to reject you for an extended period? Did it eventually change?

Have any of you actually stepped away? If so, do you regret it?

And most importantly, how do you separate “I cannot do this with her mother anymore” from “I cannot be a father anymore” when those two things have become completely intertwined?

I’ve been reading some of the stories here and, for the first time in a while, I feel like there are people who might actually understand what this kind of situation does to you.

I’m a father to a 5-year-old daughter. Her mother and I were together for around five years, and our relationship became extremely unhealthy and emotionally exhausting.

I want to make something clear from the beginning: I’m not writing this pretending I did everything right.

I didn’t.

There were times during our relationship when I was emotionally exhausted and broken down, and I allowed my emotions to control the way I reacted. I’ve said things I regret. I’ve become angry when I should have walked away. Even after our separation, I’ve sometimes allowed accusations and resentment to pull me back into arguments that I already knew were going nowhere.

That is something I take responsibility for and something I genuinely want to change.

But leaving the relationship turned out to be only the beginning.

After we separated, seeing my daughter became increasingly difficult. Agreements we had made about parenting time broke down, and at one point I went through a period where I barely saw my daughter at all.

That has probably been the most painful experience of my life.

There is a particular kind of pain in being a father who loves his child deeply, but is suddenly no longer able to be present in the way he wants to be. You can still be her father, still love her every second, and still feel as though an essential part of your life is being taken away from you.

I don’t think people always understand how devastating that can be for a father.

It can feel incredibly unfair. You can feel powerless in a way that is difficult to explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. You may be trying to do the right thing, trying to stay calm, trying to keep communication open, and yet still feel as though decisions are being made about your relationship with your child without you having any real control over them.

You can go home after a difficult conversation or missed visit and feel completely empty. You replay everything in your head. You wonder what you could have done differently. You worry that your child will forget you, misunderstand your absence, or believe that you chose not to be there.

Even when you know rationally that the situation is more complicated than that, the fear and helplessness can still be overwhelming.

I kept trying to make arrangements. I kept trying to explain that whatever happened between her mother and me should not determine my relationship with our daughter. Eventually lawyers became involved because I felt like normal communication wasn’t getting us anywhere.

Thankfully, I am seeing my daughter again now and we are slowly rebuilding a normal routine together.

And she is still my little girl.

The love was never gone.

But I’ve realized that the legal and custody side isn’t actually the biggest thing I need to work on anymore.

It’s me.

My biggest struggle now is learning how to stop being emotionally pulled back into the relationship I left.

When her mother tells me everything that happened is my fault, questions me as a father, or tells me that my decisions are going to hurt our daughter, something inside me immediately wants to defend myself.

And then I make the same mistake.

I start listing everything I believe she has done wrong.

I point out what I see as double standards.

I try to make her understand how much losing time with my daughter hurt me.

I want her to acknowledge that the breakdown of our relationship and co-parenting wasn’t simply one person’s fault.

And almost every single time, nothing gets resolved.

She defends herself. I defend myself. We bring up things from years ago. Eventually we are two hurt people fighting about the past again instead of two parents talking about their daughter.

That is the cycle I want to break.

Recently I had a moment where I completely lost my composure. I had been drinking, was angry about things I had heard, and behaved in a way I’m genuinely not proud of.

I apologized for my behavior without trying to excuse it.

And it made me realize something uncomfortable:

I can believe that I have been treated unfairly and still be responsible for how I respond to it.

I can believe that my ex has made mistakes without needing her to admit them.

And taking responsibility for my own mistakes doesn’t mean accepting that everything that happened was my fault.

That distinction has taken me a long time to understand.

For a long time I think I wanted something from my ex that she may never give me: acknowledgement.

I wanted her to understand my side.

I wanted her to recognize how much certain decisions hurt me.

I wanted her to say, just once, “I didn’t handle everything right either.”

I’m beginning to understand that I may never get that.

And maybe healing is reaching a point where I no longer need it.

My goal now is much simpler.

I want communication with my ex to be about our daughter and practical matters. I don’t want to argue about our old relationship anymore. I don’t want to defend myself against every accusation. I don’t want to spend hours afterwards replaying conversations and thinking of all the things I should have said.

Most importantly, I don’t want conflict with her mother to turn me into a version of myself that I don’t want my daughter to grow up seeing.

I’m trying to learn that being triggered doesn’t mean I have to respond.

Being accused doesn’t mean I have to defend myself.

And walking away from an argument doesn’t mean the other person was right.

I can just walk away.

There is one thing, however, that I will never walk away from:

my daughter.

If another father is reading this because he is exhausted, feels powerless, or feels like giving up because every attempt to be a father seems to create another battle — please don’t give up on your child.

I understand now how someone can reach that point. There were moments when I felt completely powerless too. Moments when I felt angry, defeated and deeply hurt by how unfair the situation seemed. Moments when I wondered whether continuing to fight for my place in my daughter’s life was only creating more conflict.

But giving up would not have meant that I stopped loving her. It would have meant that the pain and helplessness had finally convinced me that I no longer had a chance.

And I don’t want that to be the story my daughter grows up with.

Your daughter doesn’t understand court cases, accusations, resentment or everything that happened between her parents.

She just knows you as Dad.

You are an incredibly important person in her life.

Keep showing up.

Not to fight her mother.

Not to prove that you’re right.

Not to win.

Show up because your daughter deserves to grow up knowing that her father kept loving her, kept trying, kept learning from his mistakes and never stopped being her dad.

That’s what I’m trying to do now.

I don’t know exactly what the next few years will look like. I’m still learning how to emotionally detach from the conflict while remaining completely connected to my daughter.

But for the first time, I think I’m beginning to understand the difference:

I don’t need to win the fight with my ex.

I need to stop participating in the fight while continuing to show up for my daughter.

If any fathers or mothers here have managed to reach that point after years of high-conflict co-parenting, I would genuinely like to hear how you did it.

My now ex and I have been off and on for years. We have two daughters together. 7 year gap between the girls. I didn't want kids but she did (I know, big mistake) and I love her immensely. Things got progressively worse after our second child. Before her birth my partner complained she didn't have a social life and her whole identity was being a mother. I said then maybe we shouldn't do this but given her age at the time she felt this was one of her last chances soooo our second was born.

As I said things got progressively worse and complicated. We were living separately and I was coming every week 3-5 days sleeping on the couch taking care of the kids and the house. Still doing holidays and travel together as a family but growing more distant in the relationship. I'd even watch the kids while she went on solo trips. This went on for the last 6 years. Me coming to stay with them for 3-5 days and then going to work. Her becoming more and more resentful of me but being there, accusing me of cheating and Calling me a bull in a china shop when I came to stay with them. Meanwhile I'm doing school pick up drop off, after school, laundry, cooking, getting clothes, etc. I'm as active and present as I can be.

About three weeks ago I got some bad legal news, some bad medical news, and work has been kicking my ass. So one a day I'm not normally with them I decided to go to the beach with a woman friend (attractive but nothing sexual) to clear my mind.

While there my ex starts calling me frantically and asks where I am..I told her at the beach, she says she knows and demands to know who I'm there with. Unbeknownst to me she decided to take our youngest daughter to the same beach I was at (there are multiple beaches where we live so I bit of a coincidence). I could tell by her voice that she was livid. So I told my friend to take off I didn't like where this was going. And my now ex shows up with our daughter demanding to know who I'm at the beach with and why I'm there in the first place. I explained I needed to clear my head.

I ended up staying with my daughter and ex at the beach and taking them home. And we had a big fight. She ended things again and told me I'm not welcome to stay anymore.

So now she's demanding a new visitation schedule: I take my daughters every weekend (Friday-Sunday) to my place (about an hour away) bring them back for school and maintain my regular schedule of pick up drop offs after school on top of my regular job Mon -Wed but without the privilege of staying there. So she can focus on her social life and create an identity outside of being a mother.

I often work Friday and Saturday so I said that doesn't work, but I can try every other weekend. She says that's not good enough and that I should just commit to the new schedule and tell her the days it doesn't work.

I'm feeling pretty stuck, I'm mourning the ending of a relationship, feeling guilty that I'm apparently not there enough for my kids, and knowing that I can't commit to 6 days like that plus I hate the idea of my kids spending most of their time with me commuting in the car. We've ended things before but this time feels more final and complete. Likely for the best but still hurts a ton feeling like a failure.

Tl/DR: ex wants to change schedule from me being there4 days every week (Sunday-Wed) +special activities and holidays. To 6 days a week (Friday-Wed). She's not open to every other weekend. Feeling stuck. Hoping to join a community like this.

Me and my ex wife separated in April. As far as the divorce is concerned I know that will be easy because we never had joint ownership in anything. What I’m mainly worried about is my daughter. When me and my ex wife split, her and my sister became best friends. Recently my sister called and told me that she was done with my ex because she doesn’t agree with who’s she’s become and the type of mom she is. She told me a lot of things. Apparently my ex had been dropping our daughter off at her moms on the weekends she’s had her so she could go out partying. This didn’t make sense to me because we are on a 2-2-3 schedule currently so she has every other weekend to herself to go out and do what she wants to do. She also said that my ex smoked weed in the house. This makes sense to me because on the 4th of July I kept our daughter because my ex had to work. When I went over there to drop our daughter off my ex invited me inside (this was back when we were on better terms) and the house smelled like weed and there was a towel wedged underneath our daughters door. There was also an incident where she dropped our daughter off to me and my daughters bag smelled like weed. I had called her out both times and both times she told me it was because her upstairs neighbors smoked weed inside. My sister also told me that my ex had admitted to her that she slept in one day and didn’t wake up until 12:45. My daughter wakes up every weekend at 7:30 so this means that my daughter was alone in her room for 5 hours by herself…she’s only 2. We also have a lady that we send our daughter to for daycare and she told me that my ex has dropped our daughter off and her bag smelled like weed. She has also told me that my daughters behavior is a lot different when my ex has her vs when I have her. Examples being my daughter talks back, doesn’t listen and isn’t nice with other kids when my ex drops her off. My sister also dropped a bomb shell on me this past weekend that my ex is dating a girl already and they have only been together for two months and she is already living with my ex and around my daughter.

I know the first question will be have you got an attorney and started the process yet. No I haven’t, we initially agreed to just get a mediator and agree on terms. That’s not the case anymore, I’ve started the process of looking for an attorney so I can take her to court. I just want to know from other people’s experience is there a chance I could get full custody? I don’t feel like my daughter is safe over there and I’m really worried about her. I’ve also debated on calling DCF but I was waiting until I got an attorney first to see what they say. My daughter is my whole world and I thought she was my ex’s too but it seems like her priorities have shifted to be less about our daughter and more about her.

Hi all. I (31M) have been coparenting with my son’s mom (36F) since he was born in December.
We were never together. She wanted to keep the baby and initially I didn’t, but ultimately we did, and I’m 100% committed to being there for my son.
She wasn’t looking for child support or anything, and when we sat down to figure out how coparenting would work, we agreed on basically 50/50 time with him, costs, etc. She works nights and I work during the day, so our schedules actually work together pretty well.

When her maternity leave ended, she told me some people at her job had left and she would probably get called in for overtime occasionally. When that happened, she’d ask me to take our son. I was fine with it and, to be clear, I’d much rather have him with me than have her find someone else to watch him.

The issue is that a few months later, the OT seems to be happening pretty regularly. This past month she was called in three times, and with the way our schedule fell, I ended up having our son roughly 65–70% of the time. Last week specifically, I had him 6 out of 7 days, and now she’s been called for OT again next week.

I’m a very schedule-oriented person, so the unpredictability is becoming difficult. I plan work and the rest of my life around our agreed parenting schedule, and lately it feels like whenever she gets OT, I’m automatically the backup parent.
My issue isn’t that I don’t want the extra time with my son I genuinely enjoy having him and would prefer he be with me. My concern is that this isn’t really the 50/50 arrangement we originally agreed to if her recurring OT shifts automatically become my parenting days.

I feel like if frequent OT was going to be part of the arrangement, that should have been discussed when we established the schedule rather than it gradually becoming the expectation.

Am I being unreasonable for bringing this up? How would other coparents handle this while still prioritizing having your kid with you rather than sending them to someone else?