These days, text messaging is common. The majority are inane little updates on where you are or what you're doing, how to meet up later or how much you like each other. Short, sweet and to the point. It's the perfect communication for the beginning of a romantic relationship where you don't want to seem like you're too eager and are not in need of anything more than just a "thnkng of u" type message. And they are good for busy parents who need to coordinate the carpool and the pick up, what's for dinner and could you bring home some milk.... easy, short, sweet.
It's a shorthand where 3 letters can carry a world of meaning. But none of it is good when a relationship goes sour and the code is angry. It used to be that you could walk away and cool off before saying something that you'd regret. But no longer. If you think better of what you're saying to your spouse or your soon to be ex or your co-parent ... and you try to walk away... these days, you're likely to be chased down with a series of angry shorthand, accusing you of all manner of nastiness, making all kinds of veiled (and explicit, in shorthand) threats. If you are wise, you will not respond, but failure to respond is not taken kindly. In this information age, if we do not answer the phone on the third ring, if we let it go to voice mail, if we do not respond immediately to texts and within a day to e-mails, we are being disrespectful to the person who tried to reach out and touch us with their communication.
I text on occasion, but my disagreement with texts is what I've seen in divorce and custody cases. If you choose no longer to be life partners with your co-parent, then there is bound to be some anger, and with anger come misunderstandings. If a misunderstanding can develop in person, then the misunderstandings created by the shorthand of texting are multiplied exponentially. With a text, every punch of the button can be digging the pit of anger deeper and deeper to a point where productive work as partners in parenting is no longer possible, at least for now. And you never want to be the one who made co-parenting impossible, as this is often one signal to the judges that you should spend less time with the children. You want to be the one who kept the peace, who tried, who did not make it worse.
While texting is cute and interesting during a courtship, and informative during a workng partnership, it breaks down when anger and resentment start creeping in and causing the relationship to deteriorate. There is a right way and a wrong way to do texting in divorce and custody issues. Like with every separate co-parenting issue, keeping the emotions in check is the better choice. Go back to the "I am here, where RU?" texts. They are perfect, and sometimes necessary, when making decisions on where to pick up the child, who is available to pick up a sick kid from school, or what is the schedule this evening.
The wrong way to text, and the ones you have to beware of, are the angry ones, the accusing ones, the ones that threaten to withhold the kids forever from each other, to kidnap the kids if the other parent does not cooperate, all those things that are so tempting and at the tip of your tongue, but better left unsaid because you do not REALLY mean them. Worse is if your new romantic partner gets wind of the text war and decides to impersonate you and send a responsive text to your ex, that you didn't even know got sent (yes, I've seen that happen, too).
Expect these texts to create problems, to increase the anger and make co-parenting more difficult. Expect them to show up in court and expect the possibility that the texts used against you will show you to be a jerk, and will have enough foundation to get admitted into evidence. Expect the texts that you want to use against your ex will be questionable, difficult to decipher, and lacking in foundation so the judge might refuse to hear them entirely. Worse, expect that when you counted on a text to verify that you did pick up the kids on the day that you're being accused of leaving them abandoned in the school yard until well after dark, that this is the text that will not be available to you 3 months later when you try to find it.
E-mail is much better for this. It provides a more clear record. You can take the time to spell out things rather than talk in shorthand, and a whole converstaion thread can be printed up without messages being lost in the shuffle quite as easily. And you are not counting on a telephone company record. You can keep the record on your own.
Be aware, if something said via text is relevant to your case in court, you probably need an attorney to present it. Developing an adequate foundation for the admissibility of texts, particularly when you have limited funds for subpoenaes for the phone company, is a difficult task, not for the feint of heart, and better left to someone who has had a good course in "evidence" as well as coutinuing education on laying legal foundations, and admissibility of new technology in the courtroom. It is not enough for you to review the exceptions to the hearsay rule and determine that this falls under an exception as an admission of a party-opponent. There are other foundational issues that must be laid before you get to that point in court.
Which is not to say that bad texts from your ex cannot be great for your case. Sometimes, bad texts have been the lynchpin of my case, and they pass or fail on the basis of how well we were able to collect foundational evidence. A truly evil series of texts, clearly threatening to kidnap the kids or to hold them hostage to payment of money, is a wonderful way to prove your point. But if your best evidence is text messages, you want a backup plan.
I advise all my co-parents to try to develop an e-mail habit. Check your e-mail every day. Make sure the kids don't have access (don't have your password). If there is something worth informing your co-parent about, write a draft, go to lunch, then re-read it to make sure it's informational and not emotional, before you hit the send button. And avoid texts except for when there is an immediate need, such as that you're late for a pickup because of traffic, or the kid forgot his tuba at the other parent's house so is there a way to bring it to the school before band practice in a half hour?
And save every last one of them, forever, in a reliable file. No need to print it out if you have a backup drive or cloud. Yahoo is great for that, or any of the off-site free e-mail options. Just get yourself a file labled "co-parenting" and move all e-mails to and from your ex to that file, so that until the kids are all 18 years old, you will be able to show if your ex is being reasonable or if you are, and 10 years from now, when your ex claims that you did not do something, you can prove that you did... (or visa versa). Texts just can't do that.
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