I’ve made the biggest mistake today with School and my DD will pay for it

[Year5For3days]

DD is 9, Year 5.

Going on residential trip for 3 days at the end of November with School.

Had a meeting about it today to discuss some minor adjustments we’re talking small things like sleeping arrangements and giving of medication we’re not talking huge issues or things that can’t be overcome which makes me feel even worse. I’ve had a bad feeling about it since it was announced. I don’t know why; DD goes away with her dad (my ex-husband) and Scouts (Cubs) all the time and I never feel weird or strange about it. Scouts have never had a meeting with me about it I think that was why, but I know they’re different to school.

I told the Deputy Head running the trip how I felt and it descended into an argument between me and her. I didn’t mean for it to happen and I know she feels strongly about it, she’s run the trip every year since she started working at the school in 2013 (which is the year before DD was born ironically) and nothing has ever gone wrong, ever apparently. They’ve had 1 minor injury in all those years - a bumped head on the last day and the child still got on the bus and came back to school with them, and 1 bout of sickness where 2 kids were sent home, otherwise it’s always ran without a hitch.

But I have a really bad feeling about it, and I can’t describe it. It’s not about the money, I’d happily pay for DD to stay at school or keep her home for the 3 days. I couldn’t describe it and that’s why it turned into an argument I think, I’m keeping my stance that DD is not going, and the DHT wants her to go. Things got a bit heated; no-one swore or threw insults around but I did end up crying. And the DHT did say several times “I don’t get what the issue, I can’t see any reason (DDs name) can’t join us” and another teacher heard the discussion and came in to try to mediate unsuccessfully. Meeting ended with no resolution as it was end of the day and I had to join the queue to get DD and DHT had to be with her class.

I’m now worried that DD is going to be seen as strange or odd. DHT is DDs Maths teacher (but not class teacher) so I didn’t want to make things worse.

I don’t think anything can reassure me that it will be ok. I don’t know why I feel like this. DD went away with Cubs in the summer and that was wild camping for a week 3 hours’ drive away, not anything like the school trip which is staying in a hostel less than an hour’s drive from home still within the same county we live in and I had absolutely no qualms sending her with Cubs in fact I cheered after I’d dropped her. She was fine, worst thing that happened was she got stung by a nettle but she coped. And I don’t think that’s what I’m worried about.

How bad are things going to be for DD next week? Or will they be trying to get her to persuade me to send her? As I said I’m not concerned about the money.

Wow you are so selfish and due to your anxiety you can’t see it.

You said your daughter wanted to go.

Yet you’re deciding she can’t because you have a feeling! This is where you put your child first, above your own feelings and send them on their way without them even being aware of how you feel and you certainly do not give them any negative or anxious vibes.

you realise you’re setting your daughter up for years of misery by modelling this behaviour to her?
You have to get over this and put them first. It’s not your right to decide she misses out on this, it will exclude her from the friendships group.

Could you volunteer to be an extra parent helper on the camp? Would you feel better about her going?

Step back a little and look at your thread headline - you’ve made the biggest mistake at school and your daughter will pay for it?

you’ve made a decision that you don’t want your daughter to go on this trip - if that is your parental choice then it’s not a mistake, or anything to feel bad over, you have a premonition and don’t want her to go.

yeah, you got upset at the meeting, but teachers are very used to seeing that.

cut yourself some slack and either let your daughter go or don’t - entirely your decision - and move on from the meeting.

just imagine what your and your family's lives will be like, if the worst thing does happen and you all suffer from a tragic outcome

Anyone could die any day. There's no reason to think it's any more likely because of the unspecified bad feeling of someone with a diagnosed mental illness that's based around having unwarranted bad feelings about things.

It almost feels like you're threatening OP with the spectre of potentially being "responsible" for her DD's death, when if that did (bizarrely) happen, surely the worst part would be the actual child death, not the unheeded vague anxiety symptoms. And the DD isn't going to bloody die FFS.

@Year5For3days As a 16yr old, I had to go on a private French exchange on my own from London to near the Spanish Border -
Parents thought it would be ''Good for me'' to travel alone.

I was terrified.
I was sure the train would crash, I got into a real state about it- crying at school as I thought I'd never see my friends again.

Ferry and a couple of train changes all alone...the thought was so scary.

Had to go- and the trip was fine.

My mind had made up the fears.

There is absolutely no way the school will have the staff to manage looking after a parent with anxiety as well as a class of year fives.

This is a trip to benefit the child. Not to help the OP.

I imagine that the school were thrilled when the permission slip came in for the OPs dd. They will want her to have this positive expression with her peers. A child with a parent with anxiety is just the child these trips are for. Where that child can take small managed steps to becoming independent. Having fun with her friends. Now her mother doesn’t want her to go because of a feeling.

OP it's your anxiety talking. You say about an incident before that you were proved right about and your anxiety is using that against you to convince you that your fears are founded. You cannot predict the future and nor can your anxiety, but it can control you and prevent you and your daughter from doing things. You can't put your finger on it because it's just a bad feeling - a bad feeling caused by your anxiety.

Now you think that this upset is going to be used against your daughter and the teacher will think she is strange or will use your dd to try to make you let her go. This will definitely not be happening. The teacher is fighting for your dd, they probably know she would like to go and really want her to have this opportunity. They will not take you stopping her from going out on her in any way, shape or form. They will not use her as a pawn to try to argue against you.

OP why don't you just email on Monday, apologise for things getting so heated, explain that you suffer with anxiety and are going to go back to your doctor to check your meds and say that you have realised you were being irrational and you would like dd to go on this trip. They will understand.

DD wants to go and at the end of the day that is the only thing that matters.

Daughter will probably love it!
We shouldn't stop kids from having fun.
Trip will be risk assessed to the max - Let her go, don't hold her back with unfounded fears.
Gazillions of children go on trips and have a great time.

There have been equally alarmist and shaming responses in the other direction - about ruining DD's life and having everybody talk about her and exclude her for the rest of the year....

It feels like this thread has triggered a lot of people's anxiety!

OP, you sound like a good mum to me - taking care of your DD's health issues, managing a tight budget and being a single mum with little help and care from her dad, while still encouraging his time with her, sending her on frequent life-enriching opportunities like the cubs, and taking the proper medication and self reflecting on your own anxiety and what is best for your child.....

Whatever you decide, don't let the extremist rhetoric on this thread get you down. Im confident you will find the right route forward.

It's really interesting.... normally when a woman talks about her gut instinct about a man in her life , we give it great credence. Eg if she says 'I can't put my finger on it... something just doesn't feel right' we tend to tell her to listen to her gut.... that you don't need to justify calling it off, if it doesn't feel right.... that our instincts, even if we can't explain it, are there to protect us and almost always right.

Why is this different?

One of them is a vulnerable intimate relationship with another individual who's likely more physically powerful than you and is statistically the person most likely to be your abuser or murderer, who if he has nefarious intent has every incentive and plenty of ability to use all kinds of tricks to pull the wool over your eyes and manipulate you into short-term and long-term situations that may be very difficult to escape, as well as a societal infrastructure to draw on that protects him from suspicion and repercussions, all of which is evaluated through the kind of one-on-one interpersonal interactions and relationship which human brains are most acutely sensitive to and interested in analysing.

The other is a school trip.

To answer your question - your daughter won't be treated any differently to how she always has been.

Maybe the Deputy head was having a bad day too. You've no idea what she could have just dealt with before seeing you. So maybe she didn't deal well with her own incredulity.

School will have paid already for your daughter's place. They won't get a refund because she doesn't attend.

I get you on the feeling of dread. Things like that can feel do real. But you can't pass that onto your daughter, you just can't. You can't hamper her life experiences because of how it makes you feel. You just can't. Let her go.

People rarely apologise to teachers. Send a note or a card. Thank her for making you see clearly (bit of a white lie there). Get that relationship back on track.

Karen

Because women have been programmed over millennia to read the most subtle of cues from men. Cues, which they cannot necessarily put their finger on but may save their life. Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.

I agree. think the same is true about our need to protect our children.

If your daughter isn't sure about staying maybe that's what's driving your own feelings..

Why isn't your daughter sure, bigger/different group of people maybe?

But that's rubbish when the OP is wanting her dd out of a school trip in case she dies. It's ludicrous.

Protect her from what?!

My mum had these unspecified anxieties about me going places all my life and it frightened me as a child and drove me crazy in adulthood. All it did was cause me to miss out on life experiences and be stuck with her when I should have been with friends.

Or more likely her daughter is picking up on her irrational fears!

Yeah I also noticed this, it isn't relevant or 'ironic' at all.

?

There's many kids who can’t go on these trips due to disabilities etc

Actually that’s discrimination and shouldn’t happen.

OP my type 1 diabetic child went on residential. That’s something to worry about. Everything was meticulously planned with school, he was fine and had a brilliant time. They looked after him amazingly.

I agree with the pp that none of your posts mention if your DD actually wants to go, which I imagine she does. Please don’t make her feel that she can’t tell you this.

Have a word with yourself. You need to apologise to the Deputy Head first for arguing with them

No she doesn't. Unless you also believe the deputy head should apologise for the same thing? People are allowed to disagree with teachers, they're not your superior.

OP it's perfectly ok for her not to go if she's not that bothered. If she really wants to go then you should try to push past your own fears. I get you completely, my child is autistic and I worry myself to the point of tears about trips and stuff outside of my comfort zone for her. However I always push past it, if it's something she really wants to do. Eg she really wanted to go on a trip that was going to France, the thought of her being out of the country so far away was hard for me, but I didn't show it and was enthusiastic and happy to her about it, she went, had a great time and I am so glad I didn't make a fuss and put that on her shoulders. Same with several other challenging trips. However when it came to the year 6 residential, she didn't want to go so I didn't make her. I kept her off for the week and we went to Center Parcs instead, it was great.

Also don't worry about how your dd will be treated, they will not single her out, teachers are mostly lovely and way too professional to do that. They know it's your issue so might moan about you amongst themselves but they do that about most parents anyway 😁 so I wouldn't worry about that at all!

But that's rubbish when the OP is wanting her dd out of a school trip in case she dies. It's ludicrous.

I think I have read all OP's posts, so forgive me if I have missed it, but I don't think she said what the fear is- death or whatever else.

If it is a specific fear of death then I agree that it is more likely pure anxiety.... but for example, it could be a fear of abuse picked up from a vibe from a teacher or some atmosphere between children. It could be fear of her child having an incident related to her health issues, picked up from subtle cues in her child's physical or emotional presence. It could be a fear that bullying her child has experienced during the day but not told her about will deepen if she's gone overnight (picked up from sensing her child is unhappy and scared). Etc etc...

I'm just not comfortable with someone's instincts around her child's safety being dismissed so categorically just because she has been transparent enough to say she also has anxiety... especially when she hasn't experienced anxiety for other trips that theoretically should be riskier.

I honestly think you have blown this out of all proportion and you are being incredibly selfish and wallowing in all of this with your friends who might well think you are a little bonkers..

Just let the trip happen and stop fussing

@Mummyoflittledragon, I am very sorry that you and your DD have such a difficult and hard time. I know very well about always having an extra undercurrent of fear running through your mind because of being a mum to a particularly vunerable child or children.

However, I think what the OP is probably experiencing is the same, or close to the same, dread and foreboding I felt when my DD faced having a tonsillectomy, that dread is in a different field or even dimension, to my normal strong feelings of fear that I hope I manage to keep a lid on for at least most of the time.

By the way, I forgot to add in my previous (above) reply to @Year5For3days, that my DD has subsequently had an operation for a different medical condition, and I only had an understandable and acceptable level of concern both beforehand and during that operation. She was fine afterwards.

I am sure that you have done everything and more @Mummyoflittledragon to enable your DD to be able to protect herself, whilst having the confidence, and feelings of being loved and supported, to even contemplate doing some of the things that many others have never even considered being dangerous or too difficult to try. You sound like an amazing Mum, and I am not, in any way, trying to belittle or negate how awful your (and I believe my) feelings of fear, and - very hidden in my case - despair, that can almost overwhelm me/us(?) at times when most people would not even think there was any cause to worry at all.

This thread is very hard for me to read because parental anxiety that prevents a child doing something, thus damages them, bothers me a lot. Please speak to your GP about your anxiety. I implore you to then reconsider, allow her to go.

The reason your DHT was seeming cross was probably because she had a premonition too, one based on years of experience of meeting anxious parents such as yourself. That your behaviour will carry on and your dd will be adversely affected. That your behaviour will continue with the next big trips such as French exchange and Duke of Edinburgh, with friendship issues and teacher issues. Until they leave school having missed out and having absorbed your fears, becoming a scared and anxious individual.

yes that sounds awful, but it happens all the time in teaching, and all teachers can do is watch helpless.

please get help OP.