By Michael Phillips | Family & State
Christina Avgerinos found one of my Medium articles. She had to search for it. She then read it closely enough to quote it back to me in a message through Our Family Wizard — a piece about getting suspended from the platform for a year, and about a line I’ve tried to hold since: that private individuals in a story, even one that badly needs telling, deserve to stay private when the piece stops being about a system and starts being about them.
She wanted to know why the Substack pieces that she then spent time searching for that named her and my son Dylan, and where they live (I don’t provide any address), were still up. She called it hypocrisy. She signed off, “-Tina.”
I want to sit with that email for a minute, because the objection isn’t really about the writing. It’s about what she had time to do instead of the thing she’s court-ordered to do. She ignored my messages about school starting last month. Prior to that, I last heard from her in May.
I want her to find these articles. I want others to be able to find them so they know the kind of person she is — someone who would deny a child a relationship with their father. Because to me, that’s child abuse.
The record she’s asking me to forget
I haven’t had a relationship with my son since January 2024. That’s not a rhetorical flourish — it’s the last time the court enforced my parenting-time order, and the denials that got us there are documented month by month, going back to February 7, 2020, when she first lied to remove me from our then-marital home.
Some of it, from the case file:
- October 2020: Christina changes the password on Dylan’s pediatrician portal and refuses to restore my access, after I’d previously had it.
- January 2021: “Christina is refusing to work anything out with me and is denying me any time with Dylan today or next Monday, two days Dylan has off from school. She finds every excuse in the book.” She’d responded to 6 of 33 messages that month.
- December 2021: I tell our co-parenting counselor I’d asked nineteen separate times since August for a single full day with Dylan. Rejected or ignored every time.
- February 2022 virtual-visitation log: of 190 call opportunities that year, 55 were denied outright. Christina initiated 15 of 104 calls logged to her; her mother initiated 52.
- March 2024: three consecutive in-person visits were denied the week I got my car fixed, including my birthday and my son’s birthday. Two FaceTime denials in the same week. “I don’t understand what you’re doing or why you didn’t allow me to have my visit with Dylan today… I expect you will work out makeup time for each of these denied visits.” No response.
- Same month, to a friend: “67 days. I don’t get it. It’s Dylan’s birthday this weekend, it’s Easter, it’s also my weekend… she’s going to deny me all of that.”
“That’s the pattern the record shows: not a single hard year, but four of them.”
That’s the pattern the record shows: not a single hard year, but four of them, with the same shape — a request, a non-response or an excuse, silence, and then, when I raise it, the accusation that I’m the one causing the harm.
The part that’s actually new
None of that is new. What’s new is that somewhere in the middle of not responding to requests about Dylan’s school, his medical care, his therapy, or when I might see him, she found these articles. She read past the parts where I talk about crossing a line I regret, into the parts about why — and she wrote back the same day.
“The record of my son’s life goes unanswered, but the record of my writing gets read in real time.”
I don’t think that’s hypocrisy exactly. Hypocrisy would require her to believe her own objection. I think it’s something more familiar to anyone who’s spent years on the other end of this: the record of my son’s life goes unanswered, but the record of my writing gets read in real time.
I told her, in the reply I sent, that the changes I made to get back on Medium were about platform compliance, not about her. That I wasn’t going to pretend documented events didn’t happen because she’d rather not be part of the story. And that what actually concerns me is the gap — the one between how closely she tracks what I publish and how little she tells me about our son.
“What actually concerns me is the gap — the one between how closely she tracks what I publish and how little she tells me about our son.”
I’ll take that gap over a response to her email. It’s the more honest answer to what she actually asked.
That was my Sunday. A message from someone who clearly worries about herself more than our child. How was yours?
Christina Avgerinos is the plaintiff in the underlying custody matter. The visitation figures and message excerpts above are drawn from the case record — Our Family Wizard logs, filed timelines, and court exhibits — cited in prior installments of this series.
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