Virginia Lawyers Weekly

A father whose work for a defense contractor takes him all over the world has lost his bid to keep his 5-year-old son in Roanoke.
Roanoke Circuit Judge Clifford R. Weckstein rejected the recommendation of the guardian ad litem and approved the mother’s plan to take the boy and join her fiancé in Cheyenne, Wyo.

Saying that he had not discovered any relocation case that involved a noncustodial parent who spent so little time in his “home” city, Weckstein said Oct. 17 in Miles v. Miles (VLW 008-8-222), that it was in the child’s best interest to move to Wyoming.

Under the parties’ 2005 divorce decree, the couple had joint legal custody of their son, with primary physical custody to the mother. The couple agreed they could no longer afford for the mother and son to stay in the marital home. The mother met her fiancé, a physician practicing family medicine, in Roanoke. The boy’s maternal grandmother lived in Roanoke, but she supported the move.

The 32-year-old mother testified that after she and her fiancé became romantically involved, they together chose Cheyenne as a place they would like to live. The fiancé now practices at Cheyenne Regional Medical Center, and he has rented a house. Mother testified the couple plans to marry in the spring.

The mother works for the Court Services Unit of the Roanoke County Juvenile & Domestic Relations Court, but said that, with a master’s degree, she felt “underemployed.” Upon moving to Cheyenne, she planned to be at home at first, in order to help her kindergarten-age son make the adjustment.

For four-fifths of the child’s life, the mother estimated, father has been away on assignment, leaving her “virtually a single parent.”

“Thanks to his career,” Weckstein wrote, “Father is a peripatetic citizen of the world.” A 34-year-old high-school graduate and a Marine Corps veteran, the father works for a Georgia-based company, Sidereal Solutions Inc., which works on defense contracts throughout the world. He testified that his fiancée did not live in Roanoke.

In his present long-term assignment, the father is involved in design and installation of a new communication system for the Marine Corps in the Department of Defense’s newest regional headquarters, Africa Command. The father explained that AFRICOM is responsible for coordinating American military relations with nations on that continent.

Based on the father’s efforts since February 2008 to spend more time in Roanoke and the importance of the father’s relationship with the child, the guardian ad litem recommended denial of the mother’s relocation request. The father testified that his current assignment would allow him to spend three weeks out of eight in Africa, with the rest of the time in the U.S.

Weckstein credited the father’s recent efforts, but he also heard something else in the father’s testimony.

Noting that the father’s work helps “preserve and protect our nation and our enlightened national interest,” the judge said the “centrality of Father’s work in his life was obvious when he was on the witness stand” and that he spoke about his work “with passion that was absent from his voice when he spoke about anything other than his professional life.”

The judge also pointed out that the boy already had to leave the only home he had ever known and the move would not disrupt any established pattern of contact the boy had with his father. The boy would benefit from the fact that a suitable home awaited him in Cheyenne, where his mother could be a stay-at-home parent for some period of time.

“The concept of a parent who ‘lives in close proximity’ clearly implies something more than Father’s pied-a-terre in Roanoke,” Weckstein wrote. The father “is not a swallow returning to Capistrano,” but “a savvy world traveler.” The effort he puts into seeing his son in Roanoke “has nothing to do with Roanoke and everything to do with” the son, the judge said.

In the end, the court concluded, the mother had proved that moving to Cheyenne would be in the best interest of the child.

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