Court Opinion

ID: 9849395
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 04:39:31.021788+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:19:21.893419
License: Public Domain

Judge BECTON
concurring in the result.
Although technicalists could argue that the trial court was overly concerned with the “best interest of the mother,” in my view, the record supports the trial court’s determination to reinstate custody to the mother. After all, the father was essentially given temporary custody for the 1983-84 school year, the trial court specifically noting that the mother could request a hearing “in June of 1984 after the coming school year, to determine what is then in the best interest of the minor child.” And, to me, that seems imminently practical, considering (a) that the mother had exercised either joint or sole custody of the six-year-old child during the child’s first five years; and (b) that the only reason the custody order was amended was because of the mother’s alcoholism.
I do not believe a person’s temporary incapacitation because of physical problems or sickness should evoke a different response than temporary incapacitation due to alcoholism. Significantly, in addition to finding that the mother had “adequate facilities ... to afford generous care and love and affection for the minor child,” the trial court, even when it granted the father custody “was of the opinion that [the mother] . . . was making an *603effort to control her [alcohol] problem and had made substantial progress but a sufficient time had not elapsed to demonstrate that it was in the best interest of the child to award . . . custody to [the] mother.” Finally, the decretal portion of the order reinstating custody in the mother is supported by what the trial court labels as finding of fact and conclusion of law number 7:
7. The finding in the 15 August 1983 order that both parties were fit and suitable parents remains undisturbed but the accomplishments of the child’s mother since that time constitute a material change of circumstances affecting the welfare of the child and justify a reinstatement of the custody provisions contained in the 13 April 1981 divorce judgment, it being in the best interest of the child that she be returned to the mother’s custody subject to her father’s visitation privileges.