I think people have had the understanding for many years that whatever happens with the separation of parents, that the kids automatically go to the mother. The fathers don't know their rights.
I have three adopted children with Phil, and for years I was fighting in court with him over being able to see my kids. I was always going back and forth to California, going to court, and I was never able to get a project going.
I didn't expect to be doing a whole bunch of Amber Browns. And because it was just one book, and the father had moved away, I didn't realize I was going to have to deal more with shared custody, divorce and all those issues.
Arabs have the right to visit everywhere in the Land of Israel, and Jews have the right to visit every place in the Land of Israel.
My parents' marriage was already shaky when I came along. They split up when I was five, and I didn't see Dad all that often after that - four or five times a year.
When my parents got divorced, there was a custody fight over me. ... and no one showed up.
My mom and dad divorced when I was 8 years old, but my Dad never left my life. We would go over there on weekends and he'd be playing his guitar, listening to Bobby Blue Bland and B. B. King and KBLX radio while he was out in the garage painting custom cars.
Our children are better served by speaking not of visitation versus custody, but of parent time.
Using kids as pawns in a divorce is awful.
I met with my lawyers. They gave me all the wrong advice. For a long time I refused to accept the child was mine. I should have met her, arranged a DNA test and accepted my responsibility.
My parents were divorced when I was three, and both my father and mother moved back into the homes of their parents. I spent the school year with my mother, and the summers with my dad.
Until I separated from Parker, I had never been without them-and it's the hardest thing to share them. But we're trying to give the children the semblance of having whole lives.
You may have even an ex-wife or an ex-husband, but you can never have ex-children.
My own parents divorced when I was six. I was raised with my brother Joel by our mother on the East Coast, visiting my father in Los Angeles during holidays. When your parents are divorced, you don't know anything else, do you?
Many states favor joint custody.
My second husband, Eric Villency, is the father of my beautiful boy Ronan Anthony. Even though we're divorced, I'm still very close with his family.
You see much more of your children once they leave home.
I've had many friends over the years who have been in same-sex relationships, and the family denies hospital visitations when one is sick. Or when the estate is settled and people who have built a life together has everything taken away from them either by the families or the taxman.
I'd see my daddy about once a month, and I missed him. I would have loved to have had more of him. He was tall, attractive and very quiet, very gentle. He had a wife who I don't think ever really liked me much.
When it comes to determining child custody, however, sexism is the rule.
In an open adoption agreement, you agree to a minimum number of visits - a floor, not a ceiling. It's enforceable.
So the news that divorced fathers are to be denied a legal right to a relationship with their children, in the long overdue review of family law published this week, fills me with horror and despair.
My ex-husband is my family.
I don't have children that I've lost in a bitter custody dispute. But I see an enormous wound in kids due to a lack of their dads.
My parents separated when I was 2, and my dad always lived in Chicago and my mother in L.A. I'd go back and forth and sometimes spend the summer with my dad, but L.A. was home.
