We get an email today, the school has offered free school photo pack to Sam.
Charlie writes back and rejects it straight away. A bit odd, because when I booked parent teacher appointments, Charlie was annoyed that I booked them without discussing first and said we had to talk about these things. Double standards are really just a method of Charlie’s control and make it harder to parent the children.
Sam is playing with my phone before school. I show her my sisters holiday photos. Charlie walks in and pushes in to see what’s on my phone. Immediately she starts talking about it as if she knows where they are. I am pretty sure she has never been to this place.
She is so anxious, why can’t she just let the children know their family. She spends next ten minutes walking around talking about going to visit her family. She tries to distract Sam off the phone and push me around to get Evan ready for her to go out.
After 10 minutes of flustering around the house, she heads out, still talking to herself about her family and rushes off to work leaving the front door open. We all do the best to ignore it, but I know the children have picked up on it too. I feel so tense when Charlie is on the edge like that, yet nobody has done anything or said anything to her to put her in that place, she just does it to herself.
Charlie has been very twitchy again. I’m not sure why. She had an assignment and stayed up late to do it, but says it’s submitted now. However Charlie is most definitely edgy all day. She is hard to talk to, making underhand remarks and being noisy around the house. I have been trying to avoid her. I did test sending Evan with some chocolate treats for her earlier but no thanks for that.
In the evening, I try to explain over tea that I’ve booked parents teacher appointments with the school. It’s just so hard to explain to Charlie that I didn’t know a good time to book and just made sure we got something before the slots went.
First Charlie tries to tell me they are all virtual this year, then she gets confused that she didn’t know they were coming up and asks if they are on different days. Parent teacher appointments have only ever been on one day. Eventually I manage to explain that I couldn’t think of a good slot because Sam and Ollie both have clubs on a Wednesday.
Soon after, Evan won’t sleep. Says she has a sore patch and eventually after trying a few other remedies I decided to give her a bath. Charlie intrudes and whisks Evan away to make her own mind up – no discussion with me. So I give up on the bath and go to hang out with Sam, 1 minute later and Charlie is downstairs to see where I am. Evan is running around the house one hour past her bedtime. So I pick her up and get back to the bath we were going to do.
I can hear Charlie talking to Sam and doing her whole “This is not your real home thing”. I am doing the best I can not to be provoked by Charlie’s passive aggressive mood. Finally, Evan is asleep, I go to say night to Ollie and we talk about his science project. Just as I leave the room, he says “Daddy, don’t fight with Mummy”, once again I realise he can see the signs too and is already stressed.
Sams’s teacher invited me to meet before school today. She showed me a writing piece by Sam describing the argument from camping in July
Sam had written how she was upset by the incident and scared for me, it’s the first time I’ve seen Sam open up about how she feels on the issues Charlie & I have. It’s all pretty sad, I never wanted this for the children.
I discussed with her teacher that I know it is bad, but don’t have any good options either right now. We agreed to keep Sam linked up with the school Chappy.