Custody Battles
Community property laws were never intended to be a winning lottery ticket where simply being a woman meant you would be taken care of without lifting a finger.
My mother was a full-time homemaker for years and the house was spotless and she cooked from scratch and kept up the yard, did the grocery shopping etc. When I was twelve, she began working for pay and often worked sixty hours a week for pay while keeping the house spotless and cooking from scratch.
After years of apparently having a policy of refusing to teach me to cook and clean, she had me take on duties like making sure the water didn't all cook out of the roulade and loading the dryer occasionally. It certainly wasn't a big burden.
Rest assured, very few women today do what my mother did. My family viewed me as not a serious cook while people around me joked about wanting me to have a chat with their microwave queen wife because I bought groceries all the time and we clearly weren't living on microwave meals.
I don't currently own a microwave. I hate microwaves. This is not a place to get tips for how to microwave anything.
That's from a kind of About page on a site I run called Nutrient Dense. It got a jumpstart when I began thinking about an Internet acquaintance whom I suspected had probably moved his girlfriend out of his life and kept custody of the kids and what they might need.
So hypothetically, that site or one like it could serve to help a single father and his kids figure out how to cope in the absence of Mom.
We still tend to give custody to the mother and it's probably often done without thinking too hard about it or examining the details of the family situation. These days, almost NO ONE does what my mom did and many wives are microwave queens or they order delivered food.
In a well-off family, there may be a raft load of services the equivalent of a household of servants of old. There may be a maid or cleaning service, laundry service, landscaping service etc.
And you don't have to be super wealthy today to go online and download an app and order groceries where you just go pick it up or even have it delivered. So many wives today no longer play some essential central role where if you don't give Mom custody, you can bank on the health of the kids PROMPTLY going South or something like that.
My mom was a walking encyclopedia of the health issues of my father and the dietary restrictions required to keep him going. That's not uncommon in older couples who have been together for a really long time.
It's not necessarily the case in a lot of other marriages where she's a much younger second "trophy" wife or she has a career of her own and taking care of him and the kids isn't really all she does or even necessarily primarily what she does.
In the movie Liar, Liar, the conniving, unfaithful wife wins her battle for half the assets by proving the prenuptial agreement was unenforceable. And then her lawyer gets upset when she wants to sue for custody of the kids for two reasons:
1. Hit him where it really hurts.
2. Child support means yet more money.
When my father was a child, microwave meals and fast food places and the like didn't exist. His mother cooked a great deal. There were no prepackaged bags of snacks or similar.
Society has changed in myriad ways and hand in hand with those changes, the status of women has been slowly changing. Those changes are empowering women to be more able to pursue paid work and serious careers.
They are also creating a situation where some women intentionally take advantage of societal expectations and existing laws born in a time when large families were the norm and homemaking was critical work and extremely laborious and time consuming.
You can now marry well, have a few children and pay other people to do most of the women's work and then sue for half his assets plus custody of the kids and child support while not really earning any of that because you aren't someone of good character working her butt off like my mother was.
See also:
If you are a judge, I suggest you make more of an effort to check what the wife really contributes to the family.
And ASK the kids privately which parent they would rather be with. If the answer is "Daddy," work on a plan to cover any gaps in his parenting and women's work skillset and give him custody.
A child in an abusive situation may not want to tell you they are being mistreated and may not really know how to tell you. But they can tell which parent they LIKE better and you should take that seriously as important information in determining the best interests of the child.
Pro tip: Don't leave your child with anyone they don't like. Babies can't talk, but they can cry. You can tell if they don't like someone and their dislike of the person may be the only evidence you have that the person is actually abusive when you aren't around.