A Plea Against an Expiration Date on Fatherhood

Mother Fights Md. Age Cap to Get Support for Disabled Son, 23

A mother from Frederick sat before a committee of Maryland lawmakers yesterday and raised a simple question: Should there be a statute of limitations on fatherhood?

Twenty-three years ago, Vicki Trembow had a son with a man with whom she wasn't married. The man she says is the father moved to California and became a lawyer. She stayed and worked low-paying jobs, and she is now an accounting administrator.

Trembow never sought child support, but now, as Ivan Trembow suffers from a rare degenerative bone disease that keeps him housebound in punishing pain, his mother wants his father's help paying the ballooning medical expenses.

She sued three years ago to force Alan Schonfeld, a lawyer in San Diego who has sent letters and birthday cards to her son over the years, to take a paternity test so she could seek child support.

It was too late. The Maryland Court of Appeals ruled in June that Trembow couldn't pursue support because Ivan is older than 18, the age at which the state cuts off claims to establish paternity. If his parents had married, state law would require support from both because of his disability.

Now the General Assembly is considering a change to the law that would allow Trembow and other parents of disabled children to seek support indefinitely, including for children born out of wedlock.

"The law now protects the deadbeat parents, not the innocent child," Trembow, 55, told riveted delegates on the House Judiciary Committee, crying as she testified. "No matter how hard I work, I cannot keep up with the medical bills. This bill would allow the very validation of my son's existence."

Her attorney, Brian Wise, and the bill's sponsor, Del. Kathleen M. Dumais (D-Montgomery), who practices family law, say Maryland has lagged behind expanding the rights of the disabled and the changing complexion of relationships.

"Tens of thousands of Maryland homes are made up of unmarried couples with children," Wise, who represents Trembow, told the committee. "Usually, there is no need to determine paternity. But sometimes there is, and we need to make sure these children are protected."

Wise argued that current law discriminates against disabled adults whose parents never married each other, violating the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. South Carolina's Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that the statute of limitations does not apply to paternity actions if a child is disabled.

Ivan Trembow could not make the 70-mile trip to Annapolis, but he wrote a letter asking the delegates to approve the bill because his mother "shouldn't have to work so hard all her life, especially not when my father is fully capable of fulfilling his parental and moral responsibilities."

Schonfeld did not return phone calls. His attorney, Jo Fogel, said Trembow's suit would be unlikely to persuade the legislature to change the law.

"Where is the burden on the mother who makes a decision that she's not going to inform the father she needs support?" Fogel said. "There ought to be a limit."

Another attorney for Schonfeld, Cynthia Young, said her client showed Ivan "acts of kindness like an uncle who wasn't related to the family."

Ivan Trembow's health was fine until he turned 11 and a painful bulge appeared in his lower back. His spine began to twist. Doctors put him in a full-torso cast for two years, misdiagnosing his condition as scoliosis.

Instead it was Scheuermann's disease, a genetic and degenerative disorder. Without treatment, Ivan's spine would become so twisted it would crush his internal organs.

At 16, doctors replaced several ribs and discs with steel cages and rods. But the risky surgery only slowed the disease's progress. And the side effects were severe: Some of the nerves that control his blood flow were severed, leaving him dizzy and subject to blackouts. The worst news came, though, at 19, when his doctors told him and his mother that his condition won't be cured and will slowly cripple him. That's when Vicki Trembow decided to seek child support.

"I thought the surgery would cure me," Ivan Trembow said, tilting back in a recliner in the living room of their townhouse. "What I thought was going to be the end ended up being the beginning."

One of the Trembows' five cats, Ivan's companions while his mother is at work, jumped onto his lap. "They know intuitively that he can't lean over to play with them, so they come to him," his mother said. He can bend only from the waist, and even that is painful.

The living room is where Ivan finished his last two years of high school, graduating with honors from Frederick High School in 2001 after working with a home tutor. On a cold February night, he wore a gray T-shirt and shorts, because the surgery made him sensitive to heat.

Ivan Trembow and the man he considers his father have never met. Around the time he turned 18, he said, Schonfeld ended communication. "There was no official, 'I'm not going to call you for a couple of years,' " the young man said. "It just stopped. If I knew my father would be able to just say at this point that my paternity has never been established, we would have gotten that done years earlier."

Several delegates wondered whether fathers of out-of-wedlock, disabled children could find themselves supporting children they didn't know they had. Asked yesterday by the committee's chairman, Joseph F. Vallario Jr. (D-Prince George's), why she waited to pursue a paternity test, Trembow said: "No one can predict how one parent will act in the face of another parent's potential deception and desertion."