Courts use calendars. Children use childhoods.
Justin A. Tahai did not set out to become an archivist of his own fatherhood. He wanted the ordinary life of a dad: school meetings, doctor appointments, rides, holidays, and the chance to help his son become better than him. Instead, ordinary parenting acquired docket numbers.
Carpooling to Hell is a raw, documentary memoir of one Maine father’s sixteen-year journey through family court. What begins as a dispute over access expands into protection proceedings, therapy-only contact, records battles, transcript costs, electronic-filing failures, and an archive exceeding 108,000 legal-matter pages.
Drawing from court orders, filings, emails, school and provider records, electronic notices, screenshots, contemporaneous notes, and memory, Tahai examines the brutal distance between rights written on paper and rights that reach a child’s life. He does not ask readers to accept every allegation as fact or every angry conclusion as truth. He shows the sequence, the documents, the contradictions, his own mistakes, and the clock that never stops.
Darkly funny, furious, and deeply personal, this is not a legal guide or a polished story about a blameless hero. It is the story of a father who tried to remain a father and gradually became a records department.
At its center is one question: How much of a child’s life can disappear while adults and institutions argue over whose job it is to make an order real?
Because courts can survive delay. Childhood cannot.
Contains strong language and mature themes.
