I secretly wished my daughter's mom would die.

I had a drunken one-night stand in 2019. I was stationed in Japan at the time and met a Filipino woman at a bar. We hit it off and ended up back at my place. A few months later she messaged me to say she was pregnant, but that it wasn't mine — it was her boyfriend's. Then she moved back to the Philippines. A few more months went by and I got another message. Her boyfriend had done a DNA test and the baby wasn't his. I flew down to do a DNA test, and sure enough, she's my daughter.

I went through the whole process of registering her as a US citizen: passport, Social Security number, all of it. When I said I wanted to bring her to the US to meet my family, her mom flat out said that would never happen. My daughter is 6 now. In her short six years, she's been in a scooter crash with her mom without a helmet, she's been sexually assaulted by a neighbor, she hardly goes to school, she's glued to an iPad all day, and according to her mom, she still needs help using the bathroom properly.

Yesterday my daughter's mom called to tell me she has stage 2 blood cancer and can't afford treatment. She said we should start talking about future plans. I said okay, what's the prognosis? She doesn't know yet. I said okay, then we need to draw up a document that lets me take our daughter out of the Philippines if something happens to you. She hit me with: “I still don't trust anyone around her, not even you.” (I'M NOT THE ONE WHO LET HER GET SEXUALLY ABUSED! I screamed in my head.) I said okay, but if you pass away I need to be able to bring her to the US, so we have to prepare for that. She said no — she wants me to raise my child support to pay for her cancer treatment. I already send her $1,200 every month; she doesn't work and lives off the child support.

Getting this off my chest: in that moment, the only thought in my head was, I hope you die sooner rather than later so I can rescue my daughter from you. I feel horrible for thinking it, I really do, but that's honestly how I feel. I just want to give my daughter as normal a life as possible. I don't want her to lose her mom, but her mom is literally steering her toward a life of poverty and sexual exploitation, and there's nothing I can do about it.

I have a consultation with a lawyer next week to see what my options are. Has anyone here dealt with leaving the country with your child when you were never married to the mother? So far she's refused to draw up the document that would let me leave the country with our daughter, and I'm scared that if she dies without doing it, I'll be completely screwed when it comes to getting custody.

I'm on her Filipino birth certificate and her CRBA. She has a US passport and everything. I've done everything I could to support her over the years, and I'm ready and willing to raise her full-time as a single dad. I just know that fathers have no rights in the Philippines.