I have a six year old daughter that is very much afraid of her own mother. I am divorced from her we have been divorced for about 5 years now. We have 50/50 custody split but my daughter stays with her during the school days and I have her (supposed to have her) every other weekend and I also have extended summers which is almost 3 months and all spring breaks, we rotate holidays. I pick her up from school every day and every day I drop her off it is a huge ordeal. She cries about how she does not want to go stay with her mom and basically crawls onto my lap and will stay there until I have to make her get out of the car (which I feel bad for doing).
Today as a matter of fact she got in the car from school and she started crying about how she wanted to go live with me, that she did not want to be spanked when she got inside. I asked her why would she be spanked and she replied back because I lost my jacket at school and mommy said I would get a spanking as soon as I walked in the door if I didn’t have my jacket. Now this is not the only time, this is every day this sort of thing goes on. Like I also said earlier I am supposed to have her every other weekend, but instead I have her every weekend, alot of times I keep her even on Thursdays and take her to school on Fridays and then keep her until Monday. There was an instant a few months back in where my daughter started crying again and I asked her what was wrong and she said she doesn’t like mommy, I asked why and she said because “I peed in the bed and mommy woke me up and put my face in it. I asked her if she has done that before and she said yes. I even confronted my ex about it and she said yes she did it to teach her not to pee in the bed. I didn’t say much to her when she admitted it but I did go home and called CPS on her. CPS did an investigation and basically just told her that it wasn’t very good to do that because it can wear down a child self esteem, case closed.

This sort of thing goes on constantly, now it’s just got to the point where my daughter is really unhappy living there, don’t get me wrong my ex has a good job, lives in a nice neighborhood all that, she even had a some this past summer with her new fiancé. I’m just afraid that my daughter is being treated like “Cinderella” so to speak. The history goes far back also…When my daughter was born I was the one who held her, took care of her, fed her as my ex did not want to breast feed due to it “ruining her body”. There were times when my daughter was about 1 year old and I would come home from work and my ex would say she couldn’t stand the crying and gave her Tylenol PM to put her to sleep until I got home and could take care of her. My ex would go out constantly and not show up for 3 days at a time while I was at home tending to our daughter. This is how our relationship was. All this was mentioned during the divorce and we even had a child custody evaluator live with each of us for a week to see how our daughter responded to us. The CPS worker though apparently had a grudge against men and tried everything she could to catch me slip up and scrutinize me to stress levels I have never experienced before ever! While she barely did anything to my ex. In Texas it seems that the mother would have to be fully on drugs, prostituting herself out or clearly mentally unstable for them to even consider giving custody to the father.

I could go on and on about what goes on, but what I am concerned with now is the fact that my daughter is really afraid and dislikes her mother which to me does not seem normal for a child, they never did develop that bond because she did not do much with her ever…I take her to every doctors appt. I take her to the park, to the amusement parks, teach her things…I have been the one to accomplish all the little milestones in her life (i.e. potty training, learning how to swim, learning how to ride a bike, etc). I just don’t know what to do anymore, if I get hostile with my ex about it, she is the type to use our daughter as leverage against me, and that definitely would not make my little girl happy. I don’t want my little girl to grow up stressed out and unhappy, because right now she seems like an unhappy child. What should I do about hits, any opinions, advice would be appreciated. Can I take my daughter to some kind of counseling and then may they would recommend something? I just don’t know and it’s got me completely stressed out.
I am sorry for the long post and wall of text, believe me there is so much more, I hope you get the premise though