She must be seeing a lawyer...what now?

[Awoken]

I've been pretty depressed for the past few days, and I've been avoiding the forum here and anything to do with my sitch in general. I likely shouldn't post this as I'm feeling pretty pitiful now.

I was able to get monday afternoon free, so I did some research. I looked for fathers rights groups in my area and only found the "100 black men" group. I then went searching for attorneys.
I met with another attorney on tuesday morning, one that has a history with W's attorney and that favors father's rights. She is AV rated, and seems to have a great reputation. She was blunt with me, and said many of the same things my other attorney said.

She said that 50/50 custody in my county is granted when both parties can prove cooperation in parenting and are able to live reasonably close enough to each other. Since W and I are already having problems over some custody issues, she thought this didn't look too good. She recommended two choices: 1) let my wife have physical custody, but work for the best terms possible, or 2) fight it out, knowing I have a good case. She could not estimate the cost of fighting it out, but gave me some min. numbers. Gaurdian Ad Litem or Psycologist: 8k, 5k retainer, but expect it to go up to 25k. THEN, considering the reputation of W's lawyer, lots of delays and extra costs.

I'm back where I was before. I could possibly raise some of the money with personal loans/credit cards. But I'm considering D17's college needs in one more year.

W appears to have stopped her abusive drinking. I'll see what happens this weekend.

I'm starting to think that the best thing for my kids is going to require the hardest sacrifice from me, including less time with them. I simply don't know what to do. For now, I'll just keep trying to be the best dad I can, and try to work on me some more.