To be fuming at her for this!

[Sicksicksick9]

I own a caravan in Wales and I invited my best friend and her 4 children to come to it for the week for a free holiday with my DS4 her DC are 12, 8 8 and 9 months. started off well but 4 nights in and at 9pm her youngest started being sick now she’s been sick and her and all her kids have been sick at this point it’s now midnight and she’s like I wanna go home. We came in my car though so I’ve now had to cut my DS holiday short to go home in the middle of the night in a 3 hour drive sitting with kids being sick she’s refusing to let me drive my own car stating “not being funny but you’ll make everyone sick with your driving!” My DS is terrified of sick my friend has shouted at him to stop screaming when everyone’s being sick I just feel like this isn’t fair. I think if it was me I’d have seen the night out and got my partner to pick me up in the morning but she was having none of it!!
im angry to the point I don’t think I want to be around her anymore
not drip feed but earlier in the week she passed me her phone to fix something and she’d text her partner complaining about my DS because in her words is “a fucking nightmare” for crying over wanting a donut the crying lasted less than 5 mins yet I’ve listened to her youngest cry every hour of the day and not complained to anyone. Anyway am I being unreasonable to be fuming at going home in the middle of the night when her partner could have picked her up in the morning

That's not what fully comp means. It means you MAY BE insured on other people's cars 3rd party. It does NOT mean everyone else in the world is insured to drive YOUR car. Does she have her own policy that covers her for another person's car??

Just to let you all know we’re now home and I will be keeping her at arms length from now on!

I’m glad to hear. Hope you and your son are feeling ok

You were very kind to offer your friend and her children a free holiday OP but I think sharing a caravan with anyone other than your immediate family is a no go - to accommodate someone’s 4 kids was probably never going to be a walk in the park! Hope you manage to escape the sickness bug! Your friend doesn’t sound particularly grateful.

You did your best, when you bring her home, leave her there. You are not her keeper or her maid, and she sounds entitled. Nothing further in this friendship for you. No more free holidays and be glad you had a lucky escape, disappointing though it is.

I am glad, I would have been livid.

Glad you made it home okay. I figured that you were probably sleeping while we were all reading and posting.

Is she insured to drive your car? Nobody but DH (who is named on the policy) drives mine!!!

Cancel the cheque

Good to hear it!

Hope you both stay well.

To be honest I think you were mad in the first place to invite a friend with 4 kids. Just no!

Can you put a piss trigger warning please?

Thank you for explaining, that does sound very hard. I’m glad you were able to recover somewhat. Do you know what caused it? Apologies if too personal.

Thanks for sharing your experience, for 7 years I’ve been trying to help my daughter with her phobia. She’s had CBT but it all became a bit difficult during the lockdown years.

i think it manifests itself in different ways, my daughter would avoid soft plays and going to places where she knew someone had been sick. At age 16 now she had managed to avoid any bugs for 8 years!

it has been and still continues to be challenging for her.

to see people trivialising it and even mocking OPs son for his fear and anxiety is not nice, only hope they never have to encounter this.

There’s actually a really interesting programme called the “Thrive” programme (I definitely encourage anyone who’s suffering , or has a child who’s suffering, to give their podcasts and Instagram videos a listen!) that helped me understand a lot about where it stemmed from for me. Apparently, most emetaphobes will pinpoint a traumatic v*ing event that “caused” the fear, but as you go through the program you learn that the fear isn’t actually of v itself, but actually a fear linked to loss of control and a belief that you cannot / will not cope with v. There are also specific personality traits that sufferers share (perfectionism, hyper vigilance, high disgust propensity, aspects of social anxiety, ruminating) that create a perfect storm for emetaphobia to kick off, and somebody without these personality traits just won’t develop the phobia even if they’re exposed to the same “traumatic” v event. You need to work on understanding and addressing those traits, to be able to deal with the root of the emetaphobia itself.
Full disclaimer - I thought this program was brilliant but I started it when I was in the thick of raising a 1yr old and returning from maternity leave, and just didn’t give it the time or effort required to really work through it. The work I did do has helped me and given me so much more understanding of myself, but I’m definitely not cured. I plan to go back to it at some point though, when I have more bandwidth.

I managed to avoid a stomach bug from the age of 18 to 34, then caught one from my son when he went to nursery. It caused me to spiral hard because suddenly none of my avoidance behaviours could be relied upon when he was literally bringing “the threat” into my home 😅
I’ve outlined some details of the Thrive programme, which helped me somewhat, in my last post. They have a version specifically for kids too. It’s meant to be more effective than things like standard CBT as lots of psychologists don’t really understand emetaphobia - it’s an extremely complex phobia that presents quite differently to most other phobias and permeates sufferers lives to an extent that most other phobias don’t!

Be very careful just because your both fully comp doesn't mean your insured for each others car unfortunately

Also tell that bitch to fuck off if my so call fried did 1 shout at my son I'd smack her in the mouth and 2 if she spoke to me like that and did all of those things she's wouldn't be going home in my car or by me I'd of thrown her shit out the caravan and told her to take her spoilt bitch attitude to a hotel there's being a go with the flow person but she's just taking the piss

Thank you that’s interesting, it makes sense and helps to explain a bit about why it becomes so all encompassing for some sufferers. I can imagine how much that might ramp up when you have children too. Out of interest, do people tend to struggle with pets for the same reason, or is it different because it’s not contagious to people usually?

Thank you for this information, it’s very useful and I will look into it for my daughter.

@PremiumD we have pets and if they get sick it won’t affect my daughter, nor is she bothered if she sees me vomiting during a migraine episode because she knows it’s not a bug she can catch

Apart from the issue with the car insurance, which I totally missed at first, is that this is a touring caravan. Unless your friend has taken a towing test or has "grandad rights" for towing due to passing her test before 1997, then she's highly unlikely to be insured. A caravan big enough to sleep 7, loaded with all their stuff and pulled by a 7 seater car is going to take you over the combined 3.5 ton weight limit.

I voted yabu cause you should of just told her no and waited until morning

Glad you're home and have decided to cut her off.

I think you did well. It's not a bad plan to just let her have her way when she's stressed with sick kids. Why argue and add to an already awful situation. By then, I imagine you just wanted to get rid of her anyway. But yeah, she sounds really overbearing so now you have the last word, which is no more words at all to her. I think she lost a good friend. Best wishes.

@Sicksicksick9 seems to me you need to work on your assertiveness.

You’ve allowed your friend to bulldoze you because you haven’t stood up for yourself.

So for that reason alone, YABU.

She was probably only insured to drive your car on a 3rd party basis meaning it’s legal but if anything happened they would only cover the costs of the other car and not yours. You took a big risk letting her drive if you hadn’t named her as a driver on your policy.

The caravan remains in Wales I think. But still. Awful behaviour from this woman.