The Report

Months and months of worry, stress over the turmoil that our blended family was having, awkward and hurtful questions and an assessment to support our family that turned into an investigation and what felt like a witch hunt.

Many of you would’ve read in my last blog post that family life has been incredibly difficult. We have tried to use all of our own knowledge, read and investigated any help we could access, tried many different techniques but ultimately we were still concerned over the safety and well-being of ALL of our children and ourselves.

The technical term was Domestic and Parental abuse (Household member determining) and we had a very confused and angry boy demonstrating and initiating abuse amongst the rest. When we had tried everything and all else failed we called Social Services and alerted them of the abuse that was happening after James’ school asked us to try them again with their backing.

What was our final hope seemed to spiral out of control. Our social worker was meant to be assessing us but the process seemed more like an investigation and a witch hunt. The help we were meant to be getting somehow was focused on me and the abuse that I am doing towards the children and Hannah. There was no other premise or evidence to go on apart from the dislike and lies of the above child and historic evidence of my own childhood abuse and adoption and my physical and mental health.

We felt total despair.

When all else fails.......

Well it has been 4 months since I last wrote a post on the blog and many have speculated that after nearly 10 years of blogging that I had finally chucked in the towel.

The blog is and will always be a place for me to express my thoughts; despite rumours, I’m not that bright and the blog is exactly what it says on the tin.

To write about a life that I wasn’t living, hiding away aspects that were difficult, made me feel like I was being disingenuous; something that I try passionately not to be!

Yet, to talk about some of the things that have been going on also felt like a betrayal towards Hannah. A lot of the story wasn’t mine to tell and it could easily be taken the wrong way. A majority of the problems here have been with “A”, Hannah’s youngest.

Be a Man's man and Man up!

The two phrases in this title really get on my nerves.

Growing up I had it and you can only assume that it was a sign of the times. However, I see it regularly in different aspects of my life and now see it with my children.

One of my first posts that really got shared and read as a blogger was called Gender Identities in Children. In the post, I shared how the boys like baking, cooking, playing with dolls and even having their nails painted. It didn’t bother me. It has never bothered me. If they like and want to do something then I am happy for them to do so. The way that I have seen it is “If it isn’t harming anyone then it isn’t a problem!”

Yet, for some unknown reason we, as a society, are still sharing with each generation and peers that boys things are for boys, girls things are for girls, that boys and men should “Man up” and men should be “Real Men: A Man’s man”.