The day a family court judge separated my children – and sent my son to live with my ex while I kept my daughter: How my harrowing custody battle should act as a warning to others

I vividly remember the moment I realised my custody case wasn’t going to go as planned. It was a hot August day and I was crammed into a windowless meeting room with my barrister in Oxford County Court.

It was the first time I’d met him and instead of looking calm and in control, he was sweating from cycling there, and rifling through the court papers he’d only had a day to read.

Along the corridor in a larger, windowed meeting room was my ex-husband with a team of sleek female lawyers.

‘Well, what do you think? How will it go?’ I asked my barrister, hoping for reassurance. ‘I’d say you’ve got a chance,’ he said, reading through his opponent’s brilliantly crafted position statement. ‘It’s a fine-grained case. It could go either way. But it’s worth us trying.’

This wasn’t the confident start that I’d counted on. I felt sick and frightened. It suddenly seemed clear that this was going to be a fight, and that no one in our family would emerge unchanged.

I pictured my two children. I’d left my eight-year-old son and my two-year-old daughter behind in the care of my new partner’s mother that morning. My son would have finished his new Lego and incorporated it into an intricate police chase. My daughter would be pottering around the garden collecting sticks.

It was an ordinary day for them, but an extraordinary one for me. I’d never been in a courtroom before and now wished I’d never come. Our daily life together felt suddenly under threat.

I’d never expected to find myself in this position. When we split up three years earlier after 12 years of marriage, my husband and I used mediation to work out our finances and child arrangements. We’d agreed 50/50 custody for our son from the start, and decided our daughter would start staying overnight with her father once she was six months old.

My work as an English professor was flexible, but my husband had a more complicated schedule, so our son went between us for one or two-day periods. It gradually became clear how difficult this was for our son, as it is for many children split between two homes.

He always found transitions ­difficult and now almost every day was a transition.

I got a kitten to help with his nightmares and, miraculously, she made a real difference, snuggling into his room at night.

Our lives were just about working. Both my ex-husband and I met new partners, whom we ­introduced loosely to the children as part of the roster of friends they were used to seeing.

Then came lockdown; the rupture that derailed so many lives. My ex-husband didn’t have time to help with weekday homeschooling, and I faced being crammed into a tiny upstairs flat in London with two energetic children.

The previous year, I’d rented a house near my partner in the country­side for school holidays, finding motherhood much easier with a garden – we’d loved it there, giving names to the local donkeys.

My ex-husband agreed that I could go to Oxfordshire for six months.

Almost immediately the new rhythms made sense, and looking back it seemed clear that our hectic London life hadn’t been working well. I realised how bad the continual changes had been for our son.

Out of the city, our daughter built sandcastles in the shared garden with the next-door neighbours’ ­little girl, and they told us about her idyllic nursery, with a vegetable garden and chickens.

At the weekends, the children went to their father and came back excited by their exploits. Once, he came to us and I left him to spend two nights in my house, joining them for a collective Easter egg hunt at the end.

After a couple of months, I realised that I wanted to stay in the countryside for good. Months of negotiation and professional mediation followed, with the unusual result that he was prepared to let me keep our daughter with me. This was because she had been mainly with me since birth.

But not our son.

Court seemed the only answer. I was hopeful that this didn’t need to be acrimonious, suggesting that we could both do it without lawyers.

I consulted a solicitor and she said that if I just took a reasonable approach, it would go well. If I lost, my children would indeed be ­separated, and the courts didn’t like to do that. So I was hopeful.

But the court case that unfolded over three hearings and five months was a grim and desperate time for all of us.

The legal process felt like a ­monster that kept getting bigger, eating up more and more of my life. And it ended up being horribly aggressive, our parenting exposed to the harsh light of courtroom scrutiny.

Everything about my life came under attack, including my work as a journalist and author. They even produced an article I’d written about ambivalent motherhood – where I talked about the conflicting feelings you have as a working mother – as evidence of my ­maternal unfitness.

After five days fighting in court, I braced myself for the news I’d been dreading: my ex-husband had won.

The judgment arrived in the evening and I read it with my partner, then went back to reading my daughter a story, holding back tears. Afterwards I cried, distraught at the verdict, feeling that I’d let down my son.

The children were to be separated during the school week, but together for weekends and holidays, alternating between us.

Despite that first solicitor’s ­opinion, I understood how the judge had reached that verdict. My ex-husband’s legal team had run a brilliant case, while I’d cobbled mine together, bringing in different barristers for each hearing because I couldn’t afford a solicitor. I could understand the view that, by ­moving to Oxfordshire, I’d taken the children away from him.

Losing the court case changed my life and changed the course of our family history.

But it also inspired me to write a book, Custody: The Secret History Of Mothers, that I hope can change other people’s lives and help ­mothers in particular who find themselves in the agony of a court process.

I’ve studied thousands of custody cases over 200 years of history and sat in as a journalist on countless cases in the present.

It’s become clear just how much difference a team of expensive ­lawyers makes, and how swiftly hostility can escalate and character assassination begin.

Looking back, I don’t blame my ex-husband for fighting for his children, or the judge for deciding that our son was better off with him.

The problem is that the process gets out of control without anyone being to blame – creating a winner and a loser when the aim should be compromise and mutual respect. My ex-husband and I went from being able to hunt for Easter eggs together to not being able to look each other in the eye.

I came to another, grimmer ­realisation. I felt in my case, and in other cases I’ve witnessed, that mothers are held to different standards in court than fathers; we’re still somehow expected to be selfless, passive, even obedient, and criticised for being too ­confident or determined.

I have got to know a local mother who won custody when she split from her husband when her daughters were a baby and a toddler. But when they were adolescents, he won them back because the court thought she was too close to them, and that was why they didn’t like their father.

I met the mother, whom I’ll call Anna, when I sat in on her case.

In court, I watched as this ­usually confident woman broke down, veering between trying to assert herself and trying to plead, and finding that neither had any effect.

‘There are harsh lessons to be learned,’ the judge stated in his judgment.

‘I am convinced that the mother has the ability to stop poisoning the well and can give – if she chooses to do so – a positive ­message to the girls that they are free to enjoy a sound relationship with their father.’

The night Anna lost, she called saying she’d never felt so low. What had she done wrong, she asked. I couldn’t answer.

But as a mother who’d also lost custody of her son, I cried alongside her. There are many stories like hers that need to be told.

Anna’s daughters did what was required. They spent six months moving between separate boarding schools and their father, only seeing their mother a couple of times a month. Their meetings were overseen by a contact supervisor to ensure she didn’t speak negatively about the father.

‘It was degrading seeing them in the supervised contact. We were all self-conscious. They hated seeing me accompanied by the social worker when I went to events at school, as if I had to have a babysitter,’ says Anna.

Anna was hopeful when they went back to court. The daughters could announce their relationship with their father had improved. They hoped they would be allowed to return to their mother.

But the social worker and judge still blamed Anna. ‘Having heard the mother in court today, I believe there remains a core of conflicted attitudes towards the father,’ the judge said. The arrangement had to continue for another six months.

Hearing the news, Anna’s older daughter, Clara, ran away from school. She managed to call a taxi to her mother’s house and hid under her bed. By the time Anna got home and found her, Clara was too panicky and tearful to speak.

The morning after Anna told me what happened, I remember watching a video of a mother ­elephant that had gone viral. The elephant’s baby had been killed by a lorry, and in the video, she stands there, pressing her head into the lorry, mourning.

We are moved by maternal ­suffering and commitment, but somehow as a culture we fear mothers or dismiss them just as much as we celebrate them. And in Anna’s case her love for her children was seen as dangerous, their need for her intolerable.

Clara was allowed to stay with her mother, and her sister would soon follow. The school couldn’t take responsibility for children who ran away – or threatened hunger strike, as Clara was also doing. And the father permitted them to return, though he still got to set the terms.

The judiciary and the Ministry of Justice know that the ­adversarial court process is bad for children. I’ve sat in on cases in the new Pathfinder courts trialled across England and Wales that aim to take a problem-solving rather than an adversarial approach, and am hopeful that if our case had been in one of those, we might have had a less bitterly divisive time.

When friends ask for advice, I tell them not to go to court at all if they can help it, but instead try all the mediation they can.

If you do end up in court, then you should know that the court process has its own dynamics that can end up taking over, ­subjecting every aspect of your life to relentless scrutiny.

Anna and her daughters’ lives will take time to settle, but ours are calmer now.

I’m lucky my ex-husband is a good father. The further we get from court, the better we’ve collaborated in putting our children first.

Recently, my ex-husband and I sat with our daughter watching our son perform in a guitar concert.

Seeing him stand up for the applause, almost as tall as I am, grinning with excitement, I felt sure that the love in our family would survive the ruptures.

Custody: The Secret History Of Mothers by Lara Feigel (Harper Collins £25) is out on January 29.