I Won Custody Twice. Twenty-Six Years Apart. Here's the Rest of the Story.
MAIN BIO
Carl Dixon is a U.S. military veteran, IT professional, and father of four. Twice in his life, in two different decades, against two different mothers, he has won Sole Managing Conservatorship of his children — not through luck, and not through a system that made it easy, but through documentation, composure, faith, and a refusal to let anyone else decide who he was as a father.
The first time, he was in his twenties, blindsided the same way most fathers are — no plan, no playbook, just a fight he didn't choose and couldn't afford to lose. The second time, decades later, he had one: the same discipline the United States Army had built into him, applied to a family court system that was never built with fathers in mind.
That second fight became Won Twice — and then it became seven books, because one book was never going to hold everything that actually needed saying.
THE LONGER VERSION
Carl enlisted in the Army at nineteen, months after his mother's death, with a child on the way and nowhere else to turn. What started as an act of survival became twenty-five years of discipline that would later carry him through Basic Training, a deployment to Waegwan, South Korea, a career in network engineering, and — when it mattered most — a custody battle that took his job, his savings, and nearly a hundred days of his life waiting on a single signature.
He is currently raising three of his four children full-time, homeschooling his youngest, and co-parenting the fourth with the same discipline that got him through everything else. He is, by his own account, still learning — about fatherhood, about grace, about what it actually means to build something worth passing down.
His books span memoir, practical legal strategy, military service, faith, humor, and the raw, real-time work of rebuilding a life after a legal fight ends. He writes the way he talks: direct, occasionally sarcastic, never pretending the hard parts didn't happen.
WHAT HE BELIEVES
"You can't be mad at someone for making a decision they genuinely believed was best for their own life, even when that decision doesn't include you."
"My children don't need me to defeat their other parent. They need me to be their father."
"The courtroom wasn't where I won. The victory was won in all the ordinary days before the hearing, when nobody was watching."
PERSONAL
Carl is a competitive chess player, a veteran who still uses military discipline in his daily life, and — by his own admission — someone learning to trust love again, on his own timeline, after two marriages that didn't survive but taught him almost everything his books are actually about.
He lives in Texas with three of his four children.
Discuss Your Learning Objectives With Our Team
Submit the inquiry form to initiate a detailed conversation regarding customized learning strategies that align precisely with your institutional goals.