AIBU to stick to agreed contact date with birth mum?

[WellhelloMrBond]

Is it unreasonable to have stuck to the planned date for contact with birth mum, which has been on the calendar for weeks? BM wanted to change it because our child was ill at start of the week, even though they are fit & well now (last symptoms way past 72 hrs ago, has been back to school etc)
I work in a hospital & can’t just take/swap random days off at short notice to suit her - especially for no real reason.
We are yet again being accused of all sorts of awfulness for wanting to stick to the agreed plan & not agreeing to a new date.
(We have 6 x year supervised contact)

Yanbu, but in any response I’d concentrate on the impact on the child - these meetings are likely stressful for them and moving it about could be moreso.

Exactly! We have been trying to emphasise the importance of consistency & predictability. TBH we are up until midnight with anxiety in the run up to contact and adding extra days would be awfully stressful for LO :(

I can’t quite grasp how anyone whose child has been taking off them, can show such ungrateful behaviour to someone providing that child a stable home. You are not being unreasonable, they need to make the effort, not you doing more than you already have.

If your child is well enough for school then I don't think you're unreasonable. How did BM find out they were ill? Are you Dad, step Mum, other Mum from same sex relationship, adoptive parent, kinship carer? Is contact court ordered and what does the order say? Will your child be more upset by contact moving or by missing it entirely?

We have managed to persuade bm to go ahead tomorrow - but the unpleasant threats continue.

Is this really in the child’s best interest?
if this is in an adoption context contact, I’d be stopping

is social services still involved? You maybe need to get them back in and get this fixed. Or do one of those parent apps and communicate via that only. Good luck

hope it went well op and your little one is coping ok.

Not sure why the child is no longer with BM, but anything you have threatening etc, just keep it! If the child was taken away, there’s good reason, and threats aren’t helpful if she wants to see your child

I don’t have any experience at all of adoption but that sounds like a bloody awful situation. Your poor DC

Assuming this is adoption related, 6x a year contact sounds incredibly disrupting!
It feels as this might be a within family situation? But still!

Unless you are totally convinced this is in the DC's best interest I'd be thinking about dropping to 2x per year.

We had similar issues. BM constantly cancelled or wanted to move the date.

If it helps, consider that regardless of the rights and wrongs of the situation, BM is a human being who made some poor choices and paid a big price in that she no longer has her child. Also she is probably as stressed out about the meeting as you are.

In the end, the meetings fizzled out as BM couldn't handle them.

At the time I was glad, but in hindsight I wish they had continued.

20 years down the line, DS did contact her as he wanted to find his birth family. Had we had intermittent contact then the whole "finding" them would have been less stressful and we would have been spared the aftermath of him discovering for himself that his birth parents are dysfunctional and unreliable. Obviously I did point this out, but I couldn't stop him getting in touch with them.

But to answer your question, you are not unreasonable in sticking to the arrangements.

What sort of threats is she making @WellhelloMrBond?

The bigger question on why do you only get 6 x a year supervised contact?

How does the BM even know about the sickness if your other child, as that seems odd?

As a kinship carer, I have been through this. I think it was their way of maintaining control over her. In their minds, she 'rejected' them by bonding with me and my children so they'd reject her in turn by canceling at the last minute or wanting to rearrange things for petty reasons. It was meant to make her feel unimportant.

When she was about 12 or 13 she'd had enough and when they continued to cancel things she told me not to bother chasing it up. I think they rescheduled one canceled meeting and then that was it.

She is 17 now and has an Oxbridge offer. I'm not sure how they found out about it, since both of us have social media locked down, but because we share family it was probably a relative. We got a letter from BM only by post, asking if she could take her to tea and celebrate. She has so far declined to reply and I'm leaving it in her court.

The Op is the the full time psrent/ kinship carer I think
Its the Birth mother that only gets six visits a year.

Sadly, I doubt the child being ill earlier in the week is anything to do with the reason she wants to rearrange (unless there’s a massive back story re BM’s health we don’t know about.

if anything, my child having been unwell would actually make we want to see them more!