I made him an offer he couldn't refuse (or so I thought)

As things progressively got worse I knew I had to take action. I felt the right thing to do was at least ATTEMPT to civilly come to an agreement before just filing. Unfortunately I knew that probably wouldn't be the outcome but I had to at least try.

Currently I was the primary parent but our schedule was very inconsistent. Since she wasn't yet in school, the days she went with her father changed week-to-week. Sometimes it was a weekend, sometimes weekdays, sometimes twice in one week, sometimes no visits at all for a few weeks. So for many reasons this needed to change- for our daughter's sake.

My offer was this:

We keep the schedule pretty much as is but with more definitive standards.
Our daughter would continue to live primarily with me and she would be able to spend every other weekend with him as well as one weekday after school. (Basically the same as the standard court schedule would be) I would, as always, continue to be flexible when it came to family functions, special occasions, and last-minute emergencies and/or events.

I would be the custodial parent and therefore make all major decisions concerning her well-being, education, medical, and religion. I would discuss important issues with him and absolutely take into consideration his opinions and viewpoints, but ultimately I would be the final decision maker. This is pretty much how it had been all along, but just not on paper. I consulted him for every major decision and it was always World War 3. He had a lot of opinions on what I should do and how I should do it, but with none of the responsibility. I was always the one to handle the major issues, and I was  definitely the one that financially provided for those issues. (Child care, medical..and so on) If there was an opportunity to fight me on something he almost always took advantage of those opportunities.

One example would be that he never really had an opinion regarding her religion. The very week that I started taking her to a non denominational church, he took her to a Buddhist temple. (for the record I have nothing at all against Buddhism, but he did things like this just to create conflict and with no regard for how they affected our daughter.)

I also offered to not request any child support from him. I would not ask for a penny from him if he would agree to these terms. And I would financially provide for everything in her life.  (As it had been her whole life up until I got married, then it was my husband and I providing for her.)

                       His response

He not only refused my offer but instead he responded by letting me know he was going to counter file for full custody and demand child support from me. I later found out that he was defrauding the welfare system by pretending to be her sole provider. Since we had no court order in place he was getting away with it. (This gets brought up in one of our many hearings, but I'll get into all that in a later post)  He also started telling Cindy I was trying to remove him from her life. This is when things got much worse.

That was when I firmly decided it was time.