It was 11:30 on a Tuesday night and I was sitting in my car in a parking lot outside a Walmart, not buying anything, just sitting there because I couldn’t go home and face a quiet house that used to have my son in it.
That was year one of my custody fight.
Nobody warned me about that part. Everyone who’d been through it told me to get a good lawyer. They told me to document everything. They told me courts favor mothers and I needed to be prepared for that. All true, all useful. But not one person looked me in the eye and said: this is going to take something from you that you didn’t know you could lose.
The Thing Nobody Talks About
When men talk about custody battles, we talk about the legal stuff. The money. The strategy. We don’t talk about what it does to you mentally to spend two years being told, in a dozen subtle and not-subtle ways, that your relationship with your kid is provisional. That it has to be argued for. That some judge who met your son for thirty minutes gets to decide how much of his childhood you’re allowed to be present for.
I’m not someone who talks about feelings easily. I’m an ENTJ. I process things by building systems and moving forward. But I’m telling you: the emotional weight of a prolonged custody battle is unlike anything I’d experienced before, and I went through a divorce I didn’t want, financial stress I wouldn’t wish on anyone, and years of watching my relationship with my daughter Anna Mae get systematically dismantled through parental alienation.
If you’re in the middle of a custody fight right now, I want to name some things nobody named for me.
The Grief That Has No Name
There’s a specific kind of grief that comes from missing your kid while they’re still alive and presumably okay. Your kid didn’t die. You didn’t lose them to illness or accident. They’re just… at the other house. And society doesn’t really have language for how brutal that is.
When my son Tanner was with his mom during a stretch of the custody dispute, I had no guaranteed visitation timeline I could count on. Some weeks I’d see him. Some weeks something would come up. I’d be sitting at my desk trying to build a business and I’d think about what he was doing right now and the thought would just sit there, this heavy useless thing I couldn’t do anything with.
Grief counselors call this ambiguous loss — loss without the social recognition or closure that death brings. Research from Dr. Pauline Boss, who coined the term, identifies it as one of the most difficult psychological states to process precisely because there’s no ritual for it, no card that says “sorry your child is at a different house and you have no idea when you’ll see him next.” (Source: Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Harvard University Press.)
The Isolation of Being a Fighting Father
Here’s what I noticed: when I told people I was in a custody battle, the response split almost exactly in half. Half the people I knew were supportive. The other half got a look on their face like they were doing math, trying to figure out what I must have done to deserve this.
That assumption — that a father fighting for custody must be the bad guy, or at minimum must be inconvenient for the kids — is so baked into our cultural DNA that most people don’t even notice they’re making it. But you notice. You notice every time someone says “how does your ex feel about this” instead of “how are you holding up.” You notice when your story gets processed through a filter that defaults to skepticism.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2023 Custodial Parents report, mothers receive sole or primary physical custody in roughly 65% of arrangements. That statistic exists for a lot of reasons, some of them having nothing to do with bias. But a subset of it is this: when fathers ask for equal time, they have to fight harder to prove they deserve what a mother is assumed to have by default. (Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Custodial Mothers and Fathers and Their Child Support, 2023.)
The isolation that comes from fighting that fight, mostly alone, mostly not talking about it because men don’t do that, is corrosive in ways you don’t notice until you’re already pretty deep in.
What It Did to Me Specifically
I stopped sleeping well. I’d wake up at 2am with my brain running strategy simulations about hearings that were six weeks out. I’d lie there calculating money I didn’t have. I’d wonder if I was doing the right thing by fighting, if the fight itself was hurting Tanner, if I should just accept less than I deserved to make it stop.
I got bad at answering texts. I stopped reaching out to friends because every conversation eventually came around to “how’s the custody thing going” and I didn’t have an answer that didn’t exhaust me to give. I put on probably fifteen pounds in year one. Not because I stopped caring about my health but because sleep deprivation and chronic stress do that to a body, and I didn’t have bandwidth left to fight it.
I’m telling you this not to be dramatic about it but because I think a lot of fathers in custody fights are experiencing exactly this and assuming it means something is wrong with them. It doesn’t. It means you’re a human being under sustained, serious stress fighting for something that matters more to you than anything else in your life. The response is proportionate.
What Actually Helped
Therapy. I resisted it for about eight months because I’m me, and then I went, and it was one of the better decisions of the whole two years. Not to process my feelings in the abstract but to have someone help me separate what I could control from what I couldn’t, and to stop spending emotional energy on the second category. That reframe alone was worth it.
Finding one other father who had been through it. Not a Facebook group, not a forum — one actual person I could call who had sat in the parking lot outside the Walmart, metaphorically speaking, and come out the other side. He told me things I needed to hear that nobody else could have told me because nobody else had been there.
And this sounds smaller than it is: I started protecting Tanner weeks differently from non-Tanner weeks. When he was with me, I was fully there. Phone down, no work calls, no custody paperwork. Just him. When he wasn’t, I worked like a person on a deadline, because I was. I couldn’t let the grief of missing him bleed into the weeks I had him, and I couldn’t let the fear of losing him paralyze me during the weeks I was supposed to be building.
You’re Not Invisible
I won. After two years and an amount of money that would have paid for a house, I have 50/50 custody of my son Tanner. He’s six years old and he calls me Dad and he knows I fought for him, in terms a six-year-old can understand, which is: “Daddy wanted to be with you all the time, and now he can be.”
But I want to be honest about what the win looked like emotionally: it didn’t erase the two years. I still have nights where I feel the weight of what that fight cost. I’m still working on some things. The win was real and worth it, and it didn’t make the past retroactively easier.
If you’re in year one of a custody battle and you’re sitting in a parking lot somewhere at 11:30pm not sure how you’re going to get through the next six months, I want you to know: what you’re feeling is real, it’s not weakness, it’s what happens when a good father is put through a system that wasn’t designed to make this easy. And it’s survivable.
You’re not invisible. Your relationship with your kid matters. Keep fighting.
If you want to talk about what helped me get through the process, or the specific strategies I used to protect my mental health while staying aggressive about my legal case, I write about it here regularly. Subscribe below to get notified.