Another holiday, another drama

Just when you start to think the holidays will start to get better, you find out abusive people from your child’s past were given your child’s phone number. Now the only people still in contact with said abusive people are the biological family members: her bio sister and her bio mom.

These people (not biologically related) did what they always do and tried to bribe their way back into her life. They offered her gifts and money and when she said yes, then they said they would only give her those things if they could see her in person. The original offer was that they would mail it until she said yes, then suddenly it had to be in person.

My partner and I were not surprised. This is what they have always done. They tried offering us money and vacations and when we said no, they tried to get the children taken away from us.

We also know about previous homes where these people were involved and they would give them money until they did something they did not like then they would pull the money until their demands were met. Classic manipulation and everyone fell for it.

When we were offered the money and gifts, we did not know about the history with other placements. We were just uncomfortable with the whole idea. We wanted to provide for our children ourselves. We ended up in mediation with them over visitation and they wanted the kids on weekends, all summer, and winter and spring breaks. We would have basically been glorified babysitters and never seen our children except evenings after school. They would not budge from their demands, even when the mediator told them they were unreasonable. Suffice to say, mediation failed.

Our daughter has asked to change her phone number. We reminded her that if she changes it and gives it to the bio family, they will probably just give the new number to them as well. She has decided that she does not want to communicate with them through the phone any longer. She said that if they want to communicate with her they can use her social media accounts.

We are curious about how this will go. I highly doubt she will be able to go without that tether to her bio family. However, part of me is hoping she can do it. Both her bio mom and bio sister tell her how awful these people are and yet they can be the only ones who gave them her number. Our daughter has not connected it to her social media accounts and when I googled her it did not come up.

We told her we would change her number once, but it was on her to actually maintain her own security by not just giving her number away. We hope she will have learned a lesson about trusting people with something so personal. Once people have your info, they can do whatever they want with it. I hope she is able to learn and grow from this incident. I am also so sad and hurt on her behalf that this happened to her. Hopefully, we will come out of this mess stronger than before.