Just looking for advice on a custody thing.

I got divorced in April 2017 from my wife. When we divorced she put down that I wasn't fit to have visitation of my kids without court ordered visits. I had to go to court ordered classes and other things to prove otherwise. After a few months I received 50/50 custody of my children with my ex-wife.

Our custody agreement was that she would have the kids monday and tuesday and I wednesday and thursday and we would rotate weekends. I would pay child support and also neither of us would move out of the city and if we did we would have to reagree on something for custody.

In february of this year she moved to tennessee leaving me with the kids full-time and her getting them on holidays. We agreed that she would give me the child support back and that to help pay for travel she could keep this money on the months she picked the kids up. I didnt want to pay for a lawyer to get this all settled in court, so we just had a verbal agreement.

A couple weeks ago, she was jailed for Domestic Violence (she slapped her boyfriend, or atleast that is what I was told). Because of this I had to quickly hop on a plane and fly out, spending quite a large sum of money to do so last minute. As well as the children saw everything. She was in jail for 10 days total and the charges were dropped, but this doesnt change what happened in my eyes.

In the past three years my ex-wife has attempted suicide, nearly succeeding and being in the hospital for almost 3 months. She has been in and out of psych hospitals. She is seeing doctors for mental health for this. But now this Domestic Violence arrest.

These extreme issues happen probably every 6-9 months. Where she is basically not capable of watching the children at all because she is in a hospital, jail, etc.

She has also been too busy to pick the kids up on many many many occassions in between these extreme issues. All of which has violated basically everything we agreed on in our custody agreement.

After this arrest I feel like I have dealt with enough and I also feel as if my kids have been put through enough. I am thinking about going into a lawyer and getting full custody of my children and not allowing her to visit them unless she comes to Texas where I know I could get to the kids if needed.

This would also remove most of her stressors because she could leave that back home and come to visit and only think about the kids, which I dont think she is a bad mother. She just has mental health issues and has bad life choices. And if something did come up, I would just be down the road and could come get them if need be.


I know that this is only one side, but I tried to just stick to the facts of the situation. In my situation what would you do?...