Legal Question in Family Law in Washington

First, if you can, hire an attorney to help you. Beg, borrow, or steal to get the fund together if you need to. Second, regardless of whether you have an attorney, you need to prepare a response to his petition and file it with the clerk and mail a copy to your ex.

Make sure you explain, in detail, your past history with this man and how he has effectively abandoned his daughter for seven years due to his history of alcoholism, among other reasons. If you have his letter he wrote you for housing, make sure you keep it handy to show that he was wanted you at one point to lie to the military so that he could get better housing. This is important, because it serves as evidence that he will lie to suit his own needs.

Having written all the above, here is what most courts will do. Since it is the policy of the state legislature to reunite parents and children, even where they were separated due to the fault of the parent, most likely, the court will appoint either a guardian ad litem to speak on behalf of your child, or appoint a parenting evaluator to determine what is the best way to proceed to get some visitation for the father, assuming this is in your daughter's best interest.

Either way, you are going to have an opportunity to tell your side of what happened to that person and they will hear him out as well, and eventually, produce a written report with their recommendations on how to proceed. Most often, the court will adopt that set of recommendations, but not always, and you can challenge the recommendations, especially if you can demonstrate that they are based on faulty findings or a faulty investigation.

Typically, if the father can demonstrate serious remorse for his stupidity in the past of abandoning his child, and can convince the court via the parenting evaluator or the guardian ad litem that he is sober, which may mean a period of random u/a testing, then he will be allowed some type of graduated visitation schedule. Typically, he'd start out with professionally supervised visits (to be paid for by the father 100%) then go to part of a day's visit, until your daughter is comfortable enough to go for an overnight visit.

If he is out of state, he is going to have to fly in to exercise these visits. If over time they actually build a relationship, and your daughter is comfortable around him, and he demonstrates to the court that he is now responsible, then she will be allowed to ultimately travel out of state to visit with him, say for summer vacation, spring break, part of winter break, etc.

Bottom line: get an attorney if you can, because this stuff is not formulaic, and there is no "one size fits all" solution out there. Facts matter, and in each case, the facts are at least slightly different.