The day Lila was born was the best day of my life and I mean that in a way I don't know how to explain to someone who hasn't felt it. I had never felt that before. Not once in 46 years. That feeling that you will never be alone again. That you will always have someone to love completely and someone who will love you the same way back without conditions or history or any of the weight you've been carrying. Just completely. I had never felt that. And then I did. And then it was gone.
When Lila was five months old her mother took her to her parents house for a week. That week became five months without seeing my daughter. And those five months became four years of false allegations and DSS investigations and lawyers and judges and courtrooms and a woman I thought I knew showing me every day how wrong I was about that. Five DSS child abuse investigations. All of them started by her. All of them went nowhere because there was nothing there. But that didn't stop the next one. Nothing stopped the next one.
Nine days after she left she started using the system against me. Nine days. I didn't know she had that in her. I thought I knew who she was. She seemed gentle. She seemed reasonable. And then I saw what she actually was and I understood that I had been living with someone who was now fully committed to destroying me and using every tool available to do it. The court didn't just allow it. The court became part of it.
I want to be honest about who I am because it matters to this story. I am not a man who has lived clean. I lived wide open for a long time and I left damage behind me everywhere I went. I accumulated a criminal record. I did time. I caused destruction in my wake for years and I own that. Around 30 I started rebuilding. Not on the same foundation as everyone else. I understood that. I was starting from a different place and the stigma of that followed me and I accepted it as the price of the life I had lived. I became a man I am genuinely proud of. A man with integrity. A man who doesn't run from hard things. A man who can be trusted.
None of that mattered once she decided to burn it down. Because all she had to do was point at my past and the court was ready to see exactly what she needed them to see.
I filed for custody because I wanted to be a father. That was my whole reason. That's it. And the family court system that I walked into looking for help became one of the most oppressive and destructive things I have ever been put through and I have been through some things. It didn't protect Lila. It didn't help us coparent or communicate or repair any of the damage. It handed her mother a stage and a sympathetic audience and it burned everything else to the ground. Four years. And not one single decision made my daughter's life better.
On May 22 after weeks of daily harassment my ex-wife filed a contempt motion against me for not complying with a court order to complete a psychological evaluation. I want you to understand what I actually did. I went to four different organizations seeking an evaluation. I contacted Pitt County directly asking for clarification on what the court required. The court would not give me a clear answer. The only specific direction I ever received came from opposing counsel — the other side's lawyer, not the judge — recommending I go to one specific forensic psychologist who requires $8,000 upfront and $500 an hour after that.
I am on food stamps. I cannot pay my mortgage.
Judge Wendy Hazelton ruled I was not compliant. She gave me 30 days to complete a full forensic psychological evaluation. If I don't she will jail me indefinitely until I do.
Pay $10,000 you don't have or sit in jail until you figure it out. That is the choice the court has given me. And from a jail cell I will lose my business and my house and everything I have rebuilt from nothing and whatever is left will be handed to my ex-wife and then child support on top of all of it so that while I'm on food stamps and losing everything I have to work harder so she lives more comfortably.
This is not an accident. This is what it was designed to look like. A situation where I cannot comply so the court can say I chose not to. I started a GoFundMe that night because I had no other option and I didn't know what else to do.
Years ago when all of this first started my minister friend Dave used to meet me at a coffee shop every week just to make sure I was still upright. One day he asked me something I wasn't ready to hear. He said what if you just let go. What if you walked away. What if you let her mother have her.
I couldn't hold the question in my brain. There was no version of me that could even look at it. I would never stop fighting. I would never quit. I would never stop wanting to see my daughter every single day for the rest of my life.
I still feel all of that. Every bit of it.
But I am sitting here watching the sun try to come up through the clouds on a Sunday morning and I am a man who has always fought and I do not know how to be any other kind of man but I can see now what this fight has cost. What it has already taken out of me. How much of me is left. Dave was right. I know he was right. And the hardest thing I have ever had to hold is that the harder I fight for her the more it looks like aggression. The more I refuse to quit the more it becomes evidence that I'm dangerous. The more I love my daughter and show that love by fighting for her the more the court uses it against me. I have spent four years watching passion get reframed as mental illness and determination get reframed as a threat and a father who wants nothing except to be in the same room as his daughter get reframed as someone who needs to be locked away.
Another friend called me recently and asked the same thing Dave asked. He said Michael what if you just dropped the custody case. Would she stop. Would the court stop threatening to jail you.
I don't know. I have never been able to ask myself that question until right now sitting here in the dark watching the sun come up knowing what's coming on day 31.
I don't have an answer. I don't have a plan. I don't have a lesson or a silver lining or anything that makes this make sense. I have the truth of where I am standing which is that I am a father who has fought for four years with everything he had and I am watching the fight itself become the weapon they use against me and I don't know what comes next.
What I know is that Lila is my daughter. That doesn't change. The court doesn't change it. Her mother doesn't change it. Whatever happens in that courthouse on day 31 doesn't change what I am to her or what she is to me.
That is the only thing in four years that has never moved.
— Michael Brandon