Custody Battle Outcome
So I’ve had a thought for a while. If Eddie and Shannon had gotten a divorce around or before S2 E7 (after Eddie moved to LA) before Shannon had seen Christopher again, who do you think would’ve gotten custody? Since they have a child, as part of their divorce, they would need a custody agreement. Now, as we saw, Eddie wasn’t really too keen on letting Shannon back into Christopher‘s life so I have a feeling he kind of would’ve fought for full custody with no visitation. Although I think Shannon would’ve gone for joint custody. But if it had to be, Christopher had to live full-time with one or the other, I have a feeling it would’ve been Eddie. Now before I explain, I will say I am not a huge Shannon fan. I don’t hate her just don’t care for her now I like Eddie, but he’s not my favorite character.
But I have a feeling it would have been Eddie to win for custody mainly because of the abandonment issue. Well, yes, Eddie himself did admit to Buck that he left first, the courts are not gonna count deployment as abandonment, especially because he kept in regular contact with his family when he could. Shannon though left in the middle of the night and had no communication between her and Christopher. Now technically Eddie could get a divorce on sites of abandonment instead of just being unhappy, but for Christopher, I think it would be grounds for the judge to say that she would need supervised visits before a court would agree to joint custody. And well, yes, Eddie did have a means of communication which is how she ended up at his house to deal with the whole school issue. A father should not need to call a mother to talk to her child and a judge is going to see that. And well, yeah, she could argue that she was caring for her ailing mother like Eddie said she did not come back after her mother‘s passing so that could be used that something negative against her in court.
Plus also environment, Eddie is a firefighter, which is technically a government worker, who has meaningful connections with his team and his community plus he has actual family living in LA as well as home healthcare for Christopher plus insurance. A judge is also gonna see the fact that Eddie is trying to put him in a private school to get him better education, as well as seeing that Eddie is taking him to physical therapy keeping up with Christopher‘s medical needs and he also has a house big enough for him and Christopher. Shannon, however, does not have the same environment. From what we seen the only family she has is her mother who has passed away, and since we do not know what she does for a living, we cannot guarantee that she could provide the same sort of support for Christopher’s medical needs or school. Plus she did not even know that Chris and Eddie were in LA, so assuming the fact that she expected to be living alone, she would only have some sort of one bedroom apartment. And one thing I do wanna mention is the fact that a lot of people have gone online saying that she had a very high chance of having postpartum depression and while I can completely agree on that she certainly could’ve, from what I have seen postpartum depression can last to up to three years. Chris was around five when she left and even if she did have postpartum depression at that time, I feel like a judge would need an actual diagnosis from a doctor saying that she had postpartum depression in order to excuse or least understand the abandonment.
So with all of this, I kind of have the feeling that a judge would award Eddie full custody, and then give Shannon supervise visits with the intention of working her way up from supervised visits to unsupervised visits, and then perhaps further down the line, joint custody. If you think I’m wrong, or if you have any positive or negative points on either Shannon or Eddie or both, I’m open to hear them because I wanna see other point of views that I might not have thought of. Also sorry that this is so long. I just had so many points that I wanted to cover.