Oh, maybe it's just me, but I can absolutely see her having a fight with her dad that caused her to move out of her mom's house. Maybe her dad rattled her cage about her living with an alcoholic mother when she had a choice not to. But he would be assuming that her choice not to live with her mother would be to live with him - not to move out of her mother's home nor come to stay with him. If you go with that idea or something similar then the other two time lines of Lois being age 12 when the divorce happened and Sam not being a father for 17 years would be about right. The bit about 17 years would have made Lois 9 or 10 but it seems I also remember something in the series about Sam being mostly gone before there was an actual divorce.
