While it has looked for quite a while now as though mothers who relocate the children, even without the statutorily required notice, can do no wrong, there is at last a Court of Appeals opinion upholding a trial judge who transferred custody of a three-year-old to the father after the mother moved to Florida with a man she had met in a bar while the Virginia National Guard husband was deployed overseas. The Court’s unpublished opinion, Vanderveer v. Vanderveer, 19 VLW 462 (9/28/04), does point to some variables that might be helpful to know about if the Court of Appeals ever thinks about these issues the same way in some other case.
The paternal grandparents had been seeing the child while his father was stationed at Guantanamo Bay, but the wife did not bother to notify them before she moved. The trial judge articulated his reasons very carefully, going through the factors listed as making up best interests of the child in Code § 20-124.3, and Judge Fitzpatrick decided that there was nothing in the way of reversible error here. The trial judge did say that walking out on the deployed serviceman was indeed a troubling aspect of the case, and frankly acknowledged that the adulterous cohabitation was a factor — not just because of the moral “atmosphere” to which he referred with studied ambiguity, but mainly because it could not augur well for the child that the mother had moved in with a man who had no legal obligation to support her.