My DD and my god-daughter have until recently been really close friends. My GD's mum is an old friend who I love to bits and we have both supported one another through the breakup of marriages and LTRs and been on holiday together etc. We are respective god daughters to our DDs.
For about five years the girls were inseparable: regular sleepovers, days out together, really close. My DD is 11, hers is 12. My DD adores hers.
About 3 months ago her DD (the god-daughter), who is a year older than mine, suddenly started being really horrible to my DD. The context is that she has started secondary school and is approaching puberty etc. For totally understandable reasons, I think she wanted to branch out and put some distance between herself and my DD. My DD idolises her and I think has been a bit slow to pick up on this and to take hints that the older girl needed more space etc. All fine and, while sad, understandable and part of the natural order of things.
However in more recent times, the GD has started sending my DD really horrible WhatsApp messages, basically bullying and belittling her, trying to create hostility with other mutual friends etc. Quite shockingly horrible stuff and way beyond normal teasing. Although my DD blocked her for a while, she has unblocked her recently and its restarted again (lower level stuff but still snide, mean and unpleasant).
My DD has been extremely upset by this. I'm also quite upset as I feel the mum (my friend) hasn't done enough to deal with this. I realise the girls need some distance and accept that but I feel the mum wasn't proactive enough. Her attitude throughout has been "I can't get involved". While I accept that she can't force her DD to want to be friends with mine and that her loyalties are ultimately with her child, I feel she should have tackled the cyber-bullying more proactively and I think she owed it to my DD (as her god-daughter) to contact her and find out how she was after it happened, rather than simply washing her hands of it.
We're now in this weird impasse where we (the adults) have very civilly accepted that our daughters need some space from one another and we have made plans to meet up. No cross words have been spoken although I'm privately still quite upset and pissed off about it. Our friendship will be OK over time but I feel quite reticent about meeting up with her at the moment, there's a huge elephant in the room and I don't know how to talk about it with her.
But the big question is how I support her daughter as a godparent in the aftermath of this. I feel a sense of responsibility to her but its difficult to prosecute this if our daughters can't get together and I'm also struggling quite a lot with anger about what she did to my DD.
I don't want to just drop her - my own godparent did this and basically forgot he was my godparent and it was shit -- it still hurts now and I'm in my 50s. But its difficult without direct contact, which is near-impossible at the moment because we can't see the other family with the girls. And I also don't feel I can be a godparent without noting that she was extremely unkind to my child and that this sort of behaviour has consequences. It would seem very odd to me to have contact with her and not mention this. But obviously this opens up all sorts of cans of worms, it would be dependent on the approval of her mum and I don't know how to broach this. I wouldn't say something to her without her mum's approval.
I'm probably being precious and it may be that its best left for a few years, but I don't want to end up being a passive, useless godparent through fear of confrontation.
Anyone been through similar and have any advice as to how to handle this?