A.M. Costa Rica wire services photo
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A case of parental alienation
By Sergio Castillo and Rosa Monge,
Solving Problem Center
Exclusive to A.M. Costa Rica
“Children sweeten pains, but they make misfortune bitter; children increase the care of life, but attenuate the memory of death”, Sir Francis Bacon.
Peter, at age 57, a neighbor of Playas del Coco for five years, had met there several people who spoke his language and share his style of life, which was not complicated. Peter was retired, in good health and had a well-structured routine: at the end of the month, he received his income from his investment in a real estate company, and his pension on the third of each month. Peter used to go to art workshops very often, and drink beer with his friends at the beach in the afternoons.
Martha´s presence uses to make the afternoons better. She worked at a bar at the beach. She was a young brunette, with infinite eyes, legs as long as eternity, and at age 22 she was able to get Peter´s attention because of her beauty and knowledge of his language, which made communication easy between them, we could also say she was very intelligent and very pretty.
Dear Readers, it is not my intention to write about the romanticism in that relation. Let´s just simply say that that was what motivated Peter to accept Martha as a companion.
As already said, after a while Martha and Peter formalized their relationship, and she moved into Peter´s house and gave the home the Latin look by making it look like a jungle, the house was a melting pot of cultures.
One year later, Martha was pregnant and Little Thomas was born. This was probably the point of inflection: becoming a father at 58 was not exactly Peter´s plan. Although seeing Thomas smile was all Peter needed to change his mind.
For Martha things were different, this meant a responsibility she had not contemplated, but she faced it as the majority of mothers all over the world.
The relation between Peter and Martha started to get off balance, they had fights, bitter dinners, the couple ended up becoming distant and it was not because of the age difference. Martha decided to separate from Peter. She looked for a legal assessor and presented several cases in court that ended up getting Peter kicked out of the house, and him paying alimony because of the kid for $4,000 a month. The alimony amount was not the worst part, or to be kicked out of his house, was it to be able to see Tom only twice a month according to the judge´s orders, as it was stated, this because Martha used to present excuses to limit the visitations.
Martha started blackmailing Peter: if he did not pay the gym´s fee, the cable, medical bills, yoga classes, the club, etc, etc, then he will not see Thomas. She even got to the point of not letting Peter get out of the country if he will not deposit the 12 months required by law that is $52K in advance at the Family Court Office of Pensions of the area.
Little by little the situation started weakening Peter, who finally decided to look for legal assistance which helped him stop that phenomena of parental alienation he was suffering.
For more information on this case, Ms. Monge and Mr. Castillo can be reached at emails: secastilloq@abogados.or.cr or problemsolvingcentercr@outlook.com
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The views or opinions expressed by the authors are the sole and exclusive responsibility of the senders and do not necessarily represent the opinion of A.M. Costa Rica. Therefore, the newspaper does not accept liability for the author's article content.
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