So I've read all the responses up to here. A lot of very good insights.
due to "facts" I think I missed, I need to change my advice. Basically, the clue here is to look closely at what the women are saying. They don't have their heads messed up with a lot of sentimental values, and judge by the inscrutable wisdom of the ages. . . . .
I can understand, being a man, wanting to be a man and just stand and deliver all the good a man believes he ought to do, while loading it with all the sentiment values men can conjure up. It's tough to love someone who is proving to be a bad choice. Basically, I could argue that's the mistake God makes for all of us. . . . . it's just what we do. . . . unless we just don't know how. The men who don't know how to do that are the moral equivalent of women who just can't value the man who does know how to do that, and tries to. . . ..
When I was going though a similar divorce, my lawyer brother told me to forget the kid girl I was step-dad to. Because, he said, sooner or later it's gonna be one of those "no good deed goes unpunished" scenarios. The departing wife was willing to twist everything she could against me as long as it made good script for the judge as it was. . . . sooner or later she would have invented some similar lies about my conduct towards the step-daughter.
money isn't worth fighting for, nor is a kid.
yes, you have a relationship with the kids. Tell them you love them and that you will do anything you can to help, but it's all gonna be in their mom's hands. Leave it at that. Let the kids and the mom figure out what to do with that. Tell the wife you're just gonna be gone unless she asks for your help or involvement in some way. Give her the divorce, let her have her student loan and her education. Just tell her it makes you feel sick to fight about it further than that.
And get the lawyer and tell him to hold that line. That's all.
If you don't make the point that it's her education and her loan, she'll be taking you for everything you have the rest of your life. If you don't make the statement to the kids, to the wife, and to the court that you are willing to do what you can for them, you'll be signing off on your parental rights forever. Tell the the kids, the wife and the courts what you earn and offer to help in a way commensurate with your actual parental rights and the influence you're given, so far as you're able. By the time the judge realizes that is what you're saying, there's a fair chance for joint custody. . . . and by the time the judge realizes the kind of life the mom is likely to give those kids, you may get full custody.
At the very least, it will give that woman pause to reconsider her ways. . . . . long, long, overdue.
To this day, your sentimentality without appropriate cautions has just made you an enabler to a type of person who's comparable to an alcoholic, only in this case it's not alcohol but the addiction of some women to manipulable men.
And that is what the women in this thread have been trying to say, nicely.