TN Dad Gets Parenting Time Over Long Weekends After Mom Relocates
Tennessee law case summary on custody, parenting time, and relocation granted in post-divorce and family law from the Court of Appeals.
Maryam Mubashir v. Mubashir Mahmood – Tennessee post-divorce relocation and parenting time
The husband and wife were married in 1997 and had three children before their 2009 divorce in Hamblen County, Tennessee. The husband was a physician in Morristown, and the wife did not work outside the home. However, at the time of the divorce, she had completed a cosmetology course and was in the process of obtaining her license. The court awarded her $3000 per month in alimony for 48 months. The wife subsequently moved to Texas.
In 2013, the case was before the court again, and the trial court granted the husband parenting time for the children’s fall vacations in even-numbered years, half of the two week Christmas vacation, five weeks in the summer, and certain holidays. This reduced his parenting time from 159 to 57 days, and the trial court approved the mother’s relocation to Texas. The husband then brought an appeal to the Tennessee Court of Appeals.
On appeal, he argued that the trial court should have also granted him parenting time on weekends. He argued that he should have been granted alternate weekends with the children. He also appealed a number of financial issues. On the parenting time issue, the Court of Appeals first noted that it was not its place to “tweak or micromanage” the trial court’s orders. However, it did note that since the husband had been granted certain holidays, it made sense to also attach weekends that were adjacent to those holidays. It noted that this was a minor alteration and did not undermine the essence of the trial court’s plan. Therefore, it ordered the plan modified to accommodate the husband’s request for those weekends.
The appeals court also ordered modification of some of the property awards made by the lower court.
For these reasons, the Court of Appeals remanded the case to the trial court.
No. E2013-00480-COA-R3-CV (Tenn. Ct. App. Feb 19, 2014).
See original opinion for exact language. Legal citations omitted.
