Work 'unofficial' compressed hours - issues

[Willthisworknow]

When I came back off mat leave, my 2 heads of dept and immediate boss agreed to this. In fact, my immediate boss does it but both told to keep it quiet from other members of dept as HR might not agree. As you can imagine, this helps greatly with child care costs but it does interfere with biz practises. I have 3 direct line reports and they've all cottoned on but I don't officially confirm or deny. But just been on hol for 2 days, off on 'compressed' day today but someone arranged for me to be on an important call to win business but I didn't see it till today. Because I didn't confirm, they cancelled the meeting with the potential client and now I feel stressed and guilty hat it's my fault. When I got in touch with the person arranging the meeting they said the client was fine to move till Friday but it is so stressful! I can't afford to officially go part time as we are in debt and have 3 young children in nursery plus I like to have a day with the kids and take them to clubs etc. but at the same time I worry the unofficial nature of it means ill get into trouble in the long run even though I do more than my hours ESP when kids go to bed. We had redundancies last year and some folk naturally left the company so workload is crazy - so it means missing a day really means work suffers (or other colleagues are contacted with folk complaining you're not around). If I worked that day, I know I'd end up working yet another 10 hour day.....but......not sure what to do. Know it will be easier when middle child goes to school but another 1.5 years before then. Any suggestions? I work far too hard as it is....

[flowery]

Where do people normally think you are on your day off? How did anyone manage to book anything in for you - do you not have shared diaries and therefore blocked your diary out for that day?

Doing it in secret doesn't seem sustainable. Also bear in mind that it's not up to HR to agree or disagree, it's the bosses decision. Sounds to me more like they are concerned with setting a precedent and/or annoying other team members than HR tbh.