Alienated Parent

I had a phone call from my solicitor yesterday, he had received the final report from T’s Guardian which says she is happy with the way contact is working and the family assistance order has now ended.  So apart from preparing myself for the massive legal bill, I am celebrating a complete victory  especially given where we started from (little to no chance of getting T back).

T is now 13 and a half.  He spent the first 2 years of his life with me.  From the age of 2 onwards, his father did as he pleased around care and contact from T’s school and major decisions, he never cc’d me and consulted me about anything.  For the last 18 months, the role has reversed and I now do the primary care.  The difference between us is that I believe T should have always had both parents in his life and his father didn’t.

Until we find some way of getting hurt and angry ex’s to separate their feelings about the ex’s from their childrens’ needs, it will always remain a difficult area to deal with in legal terms.  We are dealing with emotions not laws.  I am still not really sure what keeping T away from me was about for T’s father, maybe I never will.  I spent so many hours desperately searching my mind, heart and soul to find a way of living with the knowledge that my child was out there somewhere and I didn’t know how/where he was and what he was doing, what he was eating, how he looked and what he thought.  I know now that I am not alone, there are many parents who do not have their children in their lives and it is so very sad that a person has the power to damage relationships to this degree.  There are no words that can help to heal the pain and absence, the loss and sadness, the futility and the uselessness, the anger and the frustration and the huge hole that is left when our children are not in our lives.

There were so many days when I cursed the day I met T’s dad, I am still not sure I have forgiven myself for inviting him into my life and creating a child that bound us forever.  Please don’t get me wrong, I am not saying I regret having T but I wished I had anticipated where the problems I saw earlier on in our relationship would lead.  I wished I had been more honest with myself about the reasons I was creating a life and I know I  cannot change the past though only my reactions to it, forgiveness is hard to give to myself, I will carry on working on that, I guess I must still get some sort of payoff for not being able to yet.

I am so thrilled to have T back in my life, in my care, under our roof and in his bed and to be able to give him love and laughs and haircuts (he seems to be growing it (-:).  T seems happy too.  He had overnight contact with his father the other day for the first time, it seemed to go well and he seemed to enjoy himself and still, as big as he is now, wanted a big cuddle when he came back.  I know I am lucky, I know that not everyone has a fairy tale ending.

I wish you all a very peaceful and loving Christmas, I will light a candle for all of you who are not with their children and another for all the children who are not with their loving parents on Christmas day.  I say a little prayer and hope that your pain and sorrow, tears and fears and your love for your children becomes a gift instead of a millstone because living without our children may not be how we want it but somehow or rather, we do survive it, you are amazing, don’t ever forget it.  My love to you all.  x x x

In Buddhism, Karma is whatever one does or says, from those actions, the intentions bring about fruit either within the present life or in context of a future birth (Wikipedia). I really like the way this is put.  I am not sure I act with Karma in mind but it is a word that fits with my experience with T’s dad.

A couple of weeks ago saw the last meeting between me, T, T’s dad and his wife and children and the Guardian as directed by the Judge when he made the last order.  It follows 4 lots of contact which seems, by and large, to have gone well.  This meeting was to assess these contact sessions, ascertain how me and T’s dad will manage to organise future contact, see how T feels about overnight stays and summarise with the Guardian thereby bringing to an end court being involved with us – hurrah !

During the past 10 years, and I am going to be really honest here, I have wished over and over again that T’s dad would drop dead, get a taste of his own medicine, have something terrible happen to him, I wished he would drop of the side of the world or just be gone from my life because there just seemed to be no way around him.  I couldn’t begin to trust him, believe him or ever think that he was the best parent to bring up our child.  I simply did not have the tools to deal with how I felt about what he had done to me and especially to our son.

I wanted revenge for the pain he caused me by his actions and thoughtlessness.  I wanted him to feel hurt the way he hurt me.  I wanted him to feel the agony of not knowing how his child was, where he was or whether he loved me or even if thought of me.

If I think about it though, revenge is a funny thing, to want to give back to someone who has ‘hurt’ you by their actions suggests that you would have to do the same thing back to them that they did to you in order to cause them to feel the same way you did.  This brings up questions for me like, could you?  Really, could you?  I know I thought I could, in the moment of excruciating pain, I thought I was capable of anything, such was my pain and the lack of control, my inability to rid myself of how much I hurt.  I seemed to me that the only way I could rid myself of those feelings would be to put them back onto the person that had taken my son away, thereby dumping my feelings.

But when it comes down to it, despite feeling like it, it just isn’t in my makeup to do those things back, I suppose it is the fact that I know how much it hurt, that I would not want to be the cause of that towards anyone else and more importantly, putting T through another parent feeling like they could kill is a terrible example for him.

What I found out at the end of 10 years is that payback came without me having to do anything (and maybe it already had but I didn’t witness it). The lesson I had on friday was I didn’t need to do anything because Karma had worked it’s magic, the fruit of T’s dads actions came back to him. The universe provided him with his own set of difficulties and pain.  It came in the shape of T telling his dad that he was not ready to come and stay overnight.  T’s dad told T he was so hurt by this, T held his own, not being manipulated or feeling like he needed to put his fathers feelings before his own or need to fix the situation and try and make it better.  I was so immensely proud of T, he did an amazing job of asserting himself, holding his own and getting his needs met despite his father putting pressure on him by suggesting that he would miss out on his brother and sister.  I stepped in at this point and suggested that T may wish to spend some 1 to 1 time with his dad first and the children are still under 3 and I couldn’t help but think of how much hurt this had caused my 2 older children, but they were older and old enough to know and remember their little brother.  T seemed to know what he needed to do and say though.

So T will continue to see his dad 4 hours a month or more if he feels like it and we can build on it.  T’s dad had to accept this and how the tables have turned.  For so many years, I felt so powerless when his father refused to let me see T and told me any number of reasons as to why, from ‘because I said so’ to ‘T doesn’t want to see you’ aged 6!

During the meeting, I sat quietly and just listened to T and his dad speaking and saw just how far we have come in this last year.  Given the chance, our relationship has flourished and T feels secure and happy most of the time.  We still have our challenges and it’s not all plain sailing but I saw that the foundations we put in when T was first born, the bond, despite my worst fears, was never broken. We still have some bricks to lay but we are heading in the right direction.

Alienation has expanded my ability to accept the things I cannot change, despite, at times, hating what I had to accept. I had no choice but to try and deal with the situation.  At times I don’t think I did deal with it.  I sank so low and had to keep pulling myself out of the mire, hard, sad work.  At the meeting, I saw a touch of that reflected in T’s dad on that day. When T’s dad said he was so hurt by T not wanting to stay, I had to bit my tongue in order not to say ‘now you know how it feels’.  What I did say was that T’s dad has made T, T-centric, everything revolved around what T wanted thereby making T responsible for his own choices.  I said that was why we had parents because children cannot make all their own decisions, otherwise they would never take a bath, eat vegetables and do homework or maybe see the absent parent, especially if the alienating one is encouraging it.

I have a responsibility to make sure that T does continue to see his dad on a regular basis and to carry on working through the difficulties when they arise.  My goal is to give T a happy and healthy view of relationships and no matter how broken and damaged they are, we can still treat each other with respect for the role we each play in our childs’ life.

Acceptance is not taught in schools and should be for it is key to everything that is so very difficult in our lives.  If we don’t accept these things we cannot change, we remain hating, we remain hugely angry and we remain stuck.

T is now 13, he is very bright, intelligent and chatty but his handwriting is terrible and he is stuck in his thinking that he cannot improve.  Another reason to hate his dad for taking T away from school for 3 years or another reason to be thankful that he came back to me so that I can assist him in gently nudging his very fragile esteem and worth in order for him to expect more of himself than staying stuck in his story of ‘I can’t'? Well, two sides of the same coin maybe.

T was due to see his dad this weekend and we got a call early on Saturday morning saying he was ill and had to go to hospital.  I took the opportunity to let T know that his dad loves him and that he felt terrible about letting him down.  His dad was beating himself up and making a really huge deal about it.  T understood perfectly that by his dad taking care of himself, it may ensure he stays on this mortal coil a little longer for his other children too.  I talked to T about being let down and how sometimes it was unavoidable, I had breast cancer a few years ago and couldn’t always make it for contact and his dad gave me hell.  I am taking the opportunity to handle it in a careful and understanding way to give T some balance and insight.

So, Karma comes to all of us in one way or another and there is learning in every situation we find ourselves in, if we stop being blinded by our difficult feelings for a minute, we can see it but it takes hard work and discipline and those are 2 things I am still learning how to do better.

The Wright Stuff on channel 5 this morning were  discussing Fathers who lose touch with their children.  Of course, there could be many reasons, one of which was the massive depression that can set in when you can’t see your children as much as when you lived in the family home.  The pain becomes so great that it is easy (in the short term may be) to stay away, especially if the mother is hostile.  Then there is the divorce resentment, you left me and I will pay you back by not allowing you to see the children or by making it as difficult as they possibly can to see/maintain a relationship with your children.

Stories of fathers spending thousands of pounds on court action in order to try and maintain contact are common.  The court process, it seems to me, is so divorced from the reality of the situation and it simply cannot respond quickly enough to the immediate needs of the parents and children, it can take weeks to get contact issues into courts and by then the damage can start.  Parents that cannot put their feelings aside need support to heal from the damage of a broken relationship, where is the help ?  In our society today, religion is on the out, media tells us we can have it all and no one wants to go to deep for the same reason as the court/lawyers don’t touch it, emotions drive us in the heartbreaking situations, GP’s are stretched, counselling is expensive and there are few places to share how it feels to leave your home and your children.

If you feel there is nowhere to go, no one understands how difficult it is to maintain contact or you are coming up against a difficult ex, please get in touch.  I cannot promise to fix the problem but I have two ears and some experience.  Don’t give up on your children or as importantly, don’t give up on yourself, you deserve to heal whatever happens after you left.

It has been a little over a year since T came back to us.  We have had many tears and much laughter.  The work of reconnection and getting to know one another continues and we have a much stronger connection than we did a year ago.  I still sneak a look at him when he is asleep and just marvel at him being in his bed curled up under our roof, finally, so wonderful that it brings tears to my eyes still.

For me, much of this year has been about coming to understand how what has gone on has impacted upon us both (and all of the family).  T is a wonderful boy, I am enjoying him so much, he is funny, confident in some areas, very grown up in some areas and bright and he can be really, really hard work.  The parts that have been difficult have been the defence mechanisms that T had in place and probably his only way of surviving and we have gently been showing T that there is no need for these defences, no one is attacking him.

For the most part, it feels calmer in our home, there is a security in our boring routine that instills a feeling of stability, something T actively craves, things remaining the same instead of the constant change and chaos that seems to have been a constant in his previous life with his dad.  It is easy to slip into this routine with school setting the pattern.  T has reconnected with friends in our neighbourhood with some of the kids that were here before he left and at school the boys that he was friendly with have drifted a little but he has made new friends. T has had some support from the very wonderful Domestic Abuse unit and although he has had only a few sessions, it has really helped him to explore some of the changes and the way he feels about them.

I have found on a much deeper level that having T come back into my life has been such a relief, the pain and heartache of not knowing, constantly wondering, constantly missing him, constantly working to take the higher path and not feel murderous tendencies towards his father, the constant justifications I made to myself that if I had been more this and less that T would have still been in my life, the overwhelming sense of loss that never left me was awful.  I am so hugely grateful that the powers that be conspired to bring my son back to me, I know I am lucky, I know I am blessed in some way, that Karma has been done and I know how many parents do not ever get the opportunity to see or be with their children and I feel so sad for them.  All of that ‘stuff’ has stopped and the vast amounts of energy that I expended over the years has stopped being spent but it has left me almost burnt out.  I thought that now T was back I would be freed up to live my life more fully but the opposite has been true.

Living with the supreme amount of stress has left me feeling totally exhausted, the effects of vast amounts of stress hormone, cortisol left me with insomnia, anxiety, inability to concentrate, palpitations and for me, not being able to find a paid job.  I went to the Dr and we talk about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and the trouble with my ‘symptoms’ is that they could be any number of things and there is nothing much to be done, my Dr said she is not surprised that I am feeling this way.  I manage them by pacing myself as much as I can.  I worry about not being able to bring in money, we are financially stretched and have been (like so many other people) for a long while but I want to be able to support my son financially and not feel like my partner is having to carry that load.  It is something that can come up in arguments at times and I am very sensitive to it.  I brought my two older children up without a penny from their father and really it is a matter of pride, I know.  I feel good about working and providing and I don’t when I am not.  I have to remind myself that being here for T when he comes home is working and providing (just unpaid at least financially) that the security I provide him is the most precious thing I can give him right now.   I do feel a bit better thinking about it that way.  I think, most of all though, it is the frustration that I have worn myself out in the previous years.

I am trying to be gentle with myself and give myself some time to replenish my resources.  We live in the most beautiful part of the country and I am surrounded by inspiring and uplifting scenery even on a grey day.  And just for today, although I feel tired, I also know where my son is (a lovely maths lesson) and what he will be eating for lunch (I made it for him) and I am so grateful.  I extend my deepest compassion and empathy to all of you parents who are wracked with those saddest and most difficult feelings of ‘not knowing’ about their children, perhaps the most wicked thing of all about Alienation.  I liken it to a tug of war, both parent and child are holding opposite ends of a rope, I was just never sure how hard T was holding his end. I don’t believe that our lost children ever really let go of the other end for they cannot deny their genes, cells and roots but I also know that it goes no where near the sense of loss we feel when we do not have our children with us.  My thoughts and love go out to you all x

T is going to see his dad in a couple of days, it will be the first contact that he’s had that is not part of the contact order, or rather it is the ‘to be agreed’ part.  After the first contact session following court, T was so excited and wanted to spend more time with his dad straight away.  I talked him into sticking with the court order and take things slowly and T was (surprisingly) very agreeable. I did feel a bit worried about how he would take this news but with the Guardian in the back ground to bring in as back up if needed, I suggested that we stick to the scheduled visits as the court had ordered as we still have plenty of time to have more contact. T amazed me at how well he took this direction and understood the reasoning, I sighed one big sigh or relief.  It leads me to wonder (again) about the nature of the hold his dad had over T whilst he was living with him.

The next contact session, T was completely the opposite and T came back saying he wanted to stick to the 4 hours a month and didn’t want overnight stays yet (we are on a wait until after September when school starts back, a direction from the Judge as he felt it may be less helpful for T to go back to school and worry about over night visits – amazing that the Judge was so sensitive).  I don’t know what happened during that contact and did not want to push him but I suspect that it may have been that he spent more time with his little brother than with his dad, I guess more will be revealed one of these days.

This weeks ‘off schedule’ visit is from 10 till 4 and they will be going to the zoo. I was not sure about it but I looked inside me and I honestly can’t find a reason why not apart from the fact that I will never trust T’s dad.  T seems happy about it and is keen to go as he hopes he will be spending some quality time with his dad.  It will be the longest time T has spent with his dad for over a year and obviously this means there is more time to pump T for information but I think T will hold his own, I have seen him be assertive now and trust that T knows how his dad uses the information now.  It is such a difficult area to discuss, I don’t want to censure anything (not that I could) but I tell T that dad can ‘make mischief’ with almost anything that comes his way with respect to our lives.

I can’t help but wonder what sort of contact T really wants.  He seems to change his mind quite regularly about what sort of contact he wants and I am not sure what this change of mind is based on but perhaps he is just not sure himself and maybe I just need to be reasonable and consider carefully how T is after these visits.  It is still amazing to me that T having been so close to his dad does not, at the moment, want more time with his dad and I think part of the reason is because, although we are boring, you know regular life, work, bedtime, staying in one place and school, T knows where he is, he is comfortable and has confessed to being a home bunny.

I try to be relaxed about these visits outwardly but inside I am all over the place, I know it is the right thing to do, I believe T needs to have his father in his life and I think that he is now drawing inevitably maybe, comparisons between his dad and my partner as both men and fathers and maybe for that reason I relax because S is such a good role model and T is learning through osmosis.  I guess once you have experienced something so unpleasant as alienation, it is very difficult to trust that it won’t happen anymore.  I guess that the work is in what me and T do in strengthening up our relationship and re-bonding, which we are still doing (which parent and child isn’t?).  It is sometimes very hard and I have often had to face myself and my failings as a mum with what T says to me but that will hopefully teach T that he to can reflect upon self and this is one of the most useful self help tools.

Over the years that I was apart from T, I experienced some very uncomfortable feelings when it came to dealing with schools, for the most part, teachers, the women in the office and even the headmaster or head of year were deeply suspicious of me.  From the first nursery that T attended through to the last secondary school before T came to live with me, they have all displayed suspicious and at times, unpleasant attitudes towards me.

For the most part I believe the reason for these attitudes is because my ex spoke to the schools about what was happening in T’s life and explicitly told them that I was to have no contact with T at all.  I had parental responsibility and had a court order and even after going into schools with this evidence they still treated me with contempt.  My ex had told the schools his view of the situation first, what should happen and what sort of person I was and of course even though it wasn’t true, anyone who has two sets of information will have to take both sets of information and try and  figure out which one is telling the truth and possibly the information that comes from a father (why has a father got custody of the child??) will have more sway.

I would suggest to anyone that has school age children and are going through difficulties that look like PA.  Print out some description of the alienation symptoms and write a covering letter stating that you have parental responsibility.  You should be able to have access to reports, they should ask you to attend parents evening, even if your child does not see you.  If they are not agreeable, write to the LEA and the governors.  You have the right to know how your child is doing at school.  I worked hard at giving a different impression of myself than the one presented by my ex.

It is awful, if you have to go to these extremes  and I wanted to stamp my foot (and did) because it is so unfair.   For me it was my last hope of maintaining some contact with how my son was doing that drove me because nobody else was telling me anything anymore.  Slipping out of your child’s life is all to easy when you have a manipulator who is hell bent on getting you out of their life and your child’s life too, staying in it takes some courage to stand up for your rights.

There have been times when I have really struggled to understand why people do not believe parental alienation exists after all I had all the evidence, a gap where T should be in our lives.  If a child no longer sees or has contact with their non resident parent and the relationship was previously close and loving, what has gone on for this separation to happen?  I know that in telling even close friends about the PA journey to losing T, they just did not seem to believe me, it was more like telling someone of a conspiracy theory, shadowy truths and the terrible feeling that I must had done something to aid getting to this place I had arrived at.  And in the bigger picture kind of a way, maybe I did, I will always take responsibility for the things I do HOWEVER, at no point did I never want my son to be in my life.

I have so many emails from parents who do not have any contact with their children any more, they are not murderers or paedofiles but are treated worse then if they were.  That are children have been stopped from continuing a relationship with the absent parent and more often than not, the extended family as well just on one parents say so is the evidence that PA exists surely?

Here in the UK there are several names for a situation whereby a parent doesn’t see/have contact with their child that has been created by the other parent.  Implacable Hostility, Hostile Aggressive Parenting, Oppositional Defiance Disorder are just some of the things that came up whist I was trying to work out what was happening.  As well, of course, there is good old separation and divorce.  So there are already various names for what is happening between 2 parents and by implication, the child.  I think I went through many of these things as tried to grab onto them by way of trying to understand what was happening.  By the time I got to Parental Alienation, it had actually happened.

I have spoken so many times about Parental Alienation to various people including my Barrister and their eyes glaze over.  I have asked often just what exactly the problem is with PA (S).  It is obvious to me that my son was alienated from me by his father.  My solicitor has told me that partly it is a commitment problem, if the legal world stick with that label, it may well change again in time with different explanations and more research done, there is a cost implications, there are not enough experts, not many professionals are aware of this and therefore would have to be trained, the list goes on.  But I have another suggestion and I think it is because we all have the capacity to alienate.

Simply put, anyone who is not on good terms with their partner has the capacity to alienate their children even inadvertently.  We can all do it at some time or other to another person even in the slightest degree.  We have probably all put down another person to make ourselves feel better at times, this is, to my mind, is how alienation starts.   The real problem though is that there is no one else in the room when alienation is going on the child/ren.  It is simply his word against mine as to what was said and in a court of law the only thing that the law has to work with is the state of a child’s mind.  Now how many people have you met lately that you would trust with your child’s mind?  I would get garlic and silver bullets out to keep CAFCASS away from children now.

In my past, over and over again, my ex said things to me or about me in front of T, that were of such a derogatory nature but I couldn’t prove it, all I had was a little boy who was rapidly becoming more and more rude, angry and hostile towards me.

Whilst going through the court process, I asked almost everyone that I came into contact with about PA and what they thought about it.  I did not ask about the syndrome part of it as that applies to the child.  Simply, I wanted to know what other people who work with parents thought about Alienation.  I have not met many people who work in the legal world who seemed happy with the term Parental Alienation.  So if you have been through the alienation process and your child is no longer a part of your life and you feel that no one is listening, it seems to me that it could well be that the people who you are talking to you shut down because in their heads either a) it does not exist because there is no label or b) because they believe you did some alienating yourself.  I still cannot see just why that should mean that PA should not exist though.

To me, we have every right to speak freely of another person but we also have a responsibility to make sure that our susceptible children are not around to keep receiving a message about another parent.

If we can get others to identify, to understand that they may be doing the alienating behaviour themselves if only in a very mild way, then maybe we can get others to start to understand better just what alienation is about and exactly where it starts.  The next step would be to explain why someone would want to do that in the first place.

T is a month or so off being 13.  For the past year, I have been so grateful to have him back in my life.  Inevitably along with T’s return comes some problems and difficulties.  I have had the wonderful and sometimes difficult but always a learning and growing experience of bringing up 2 other children who are now into their twenties. My partners 2 boys who are teenagers now have also given us all kinds of challenges in terms of how teens can be. And we are rewarded often by them all when they are wonderful and sweet, it makes all the hard work and arguments worthwhile.

T, of course, is a slightly different kettle of teenage fish.  Yesterday whilst lazing on the sofa, he saw that the cat wanted to come in and said ‘mum let the cat in’ I retorted ‘no you let the cat in’ to which he replied ‘ lazy’.  I was so annoyed, we had words after this exchange.  It really presses my buttons, the slave mentality he has!  That I am just there to wait on him.  This morning, I had made his packed lunch for school with nothing sweet in the house, I gave him some money to buy something at school.  He came down stairs this morning and saw the money and said ‘no lunch then’ in such a snarly way.  Now I know I am a sensitive little flower but I am also a women who wants my male children not to take women for granted, not to expect a woman to do something he is perfectly capable of doing, I want them to be able to take care of them selves, learn to cook and learn what it takes to run a home because these things are so under valued by all of us (and yet when they are not done, everyone notices).

There are things that need to be done in a house to keep it running and as a responsible parent and woman, I have to do things for my children and my partner because I have the time when I am not writing.  But the education of teaching our children to become adults has to cover valuing self and each other.  We are reaching a time in T’s life where he needs to learn to do things for himself, learn to take responsibility for himself.

Of course T has had a helping hand in not valuing women.  His father had a very poor relationship with his mother, she failed to protect him early on in his life and I believe that he has spent the rest of his life projecting his pain and anger onto all the other women in his life (I must have got the lions share).  I am sure during the time that T was away from me that he heard his father put me down.  When I was working he told me constantly that I should not be counselling because I was so damaged myself, I would simply reply that he should take care his own side of the street.  Whilst training, I always looked at myself and my behaviour, I did a 12 step program 17 years ago.  Continuing to take an inventory of self is one of the most important aspects of recovery, I continue to do it everyday, I have awareness and I practice everyday.  I want T to learn this to.

T has an attitude towards me that is thinly masked and at times if not rude then he is angry towards me.  Not much different from many other teenagers I am sure but with where T has come from it is not difficult to work out that some it is clearly from being alienated.  So when I am presented with a young man who just wants to put me down in every sentence he speaks, I want him to really take a moment and think about what he is saying and why.  Alienation taught him some stuff, so I am not surprised and he is perhaps used to it but hasn’t really stopped to think about what he is saying.

Communication is so very important, it is the most important thing to me, with words we have the ability to express our love, joy, pride and anger but it must be done appropriately otherwise we hurt others and ourselves.  I have a rule about being impeccable with my word that I learnt from The Four Agreements by DonMiguel Ruiz.  He says ‘speak with integrity.  Say only what you mean.  Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to a group about others.  Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love’.

If I can teach T these life skills in the time that I have to try and turn him around, I will do all I can, in the meantime I will try to be the example.  It is not always easy and I am no saint but I do aspire to be a better person and I so want that for my son.

There have always been some difficulties for T with my partners children.  I believe that some of these differences were stirred up by T’s dad from the very beginning of our relationship over 8 years ago.

I imagine that for most of us in a step situation there is always some jealousy and insecurity, it goes with the territory.  Add into that the fact that my step children only visit, means all kinds of differences in the dynamics of how our family works when the steps are here.  My elder step son E is now 18 and the younger one  T(2) is 13, my T is 12.  So technically, they could get on but they don’t.  This weekend T made virtually no effort to get on with T(2).  As T(2) came down without his big brother this time, this meant he got to spend some quality time with his dad.  This leaves T(1) putting himself on the outside.  I more or less strong armed T(1) into spending some family time with us on saturday night so we could watch a film together and the resentment was massive.

I have talked to T about this situation for a long time on and off now.  There are a lot of things that he notices about how differently S’s boys are treated but ultimately the thing that probably balances all of this out is the fact that T spends more time with S then S’s boys do.  This is difficult for S, he feels guilty.  Sorry this is complicated i know.  T(2) and E also have a step father so they get the pay it forward effect of another different parent at their house with their mum, so I guess it all works out in the end in terms of who gets what in the parenting stakes.  But it is hard to let go of the feelings, the keeping of someone else’s child in shoes is also in the mix there somewhere. It’s not major but every so often these thing do surface.  It can be hard to talk about these things but we do eventually and probably more than anything it comes down to acceptance really.

I would say though from my point of view that if T were to have another parent who was going to be in his life more than his father (for the moment anyway) I could not ask for better than S.  He plays guitar and T(1) is learning, he works in an interesting environment and he has had his own experience of being pushed from pillar to post as a child so identifies with T(1).

In these days of endlessly complex family set ups and break downs that children can drive wedges between parents and partners, they can be divisive and manipulative and they can cause all kinds of difficulties.  But the challenge of if not getting everyone to get on with each other, at least being civil and accepting of each other, can be difficult at times.  I often feel these things are luxury problems but I still hope one day, things will change.  Any family takes effort to make things work and this one is no exception.  I have to admit to feeling exhausted at the end of a step children weekend, having more boys in the house, doing more cooking and being on the lookout for trouble brewing is tiring but when S leaves for his long 300 mile round trip back to Wales, I do feel a sense of pleasure and satisfaction that we have coped and given for the most part, everyone in our family a good weekend.  Even the cats are happy, they have an extra lap to sit on.