The Calm Before The Storm

For several years after the initial court application and after Sarah reneged on our agreement in court things did start to settle down.

I was there every other Friday, as close to 6pm as I could get due to the traffic, and I never ever missed 1 contact visit with Sonny – so much for the accusation of being unreliable and not caring for Sonny.

I am not going to detail ever single visit that Sonny had with us but it’s fair to say that things over time did improve and me and Sarah found some common ground in how best to work with each other for Sonny.

Did Sarah and Margaret change in how they encouraged Sonny in the importance of having his Dad and spending time with his paternal family, no I wouldn’t say they did that at all but what they did was they no longer stood in our way and they accepted that contact was going to happen not because they said it would but because they knew the courts were going to support contact with me.

There is a very distinct difference but that said for a number of years everyone got into the rhythm of Sonny see us in Manchester.

Sarah pretty much stuck to our agreement of alternate weekends and sharing half of Sonny’s holidays which was such a big things for us as we were then able to have a run of days together where we could sit back and relax and slot more into family life as opposed to worrying about cramming as much as we could into a couple of days on a weekend.

As the contact developed Sarah allowed us to take Sonny away on holiday for a week. This was an absolute dream for us, we always thought she would lose in court once everyone knew the facts but taking him away on holiday seemed like a very distant and unlikely opportunity.

That said she allowed it so we hastily booked a week away and on the 14 of July 2007, nearly 3 years after Sonny was born, we landed in southern Spain where we all went away as a family.

It was an amazing to be holiday on with him. Just to be by the pool and the beach all day doing what family’s do. Being in restaurants and making adventures for him in beautiful surroundings. We’ve got fond memories of that first holiday with him, dressed in his City kit toddling around.

Sonny may read this one day as an adult and think “I’m not a baby anymore” but those are our memories and they meant so much to us as we just couldn’t do those things without Sarah allowing us to do. Maybe if one day Sonny ends up in a similar situation to what I did then he’d understand (I’d never want that to happen by the way).

The more time we spent with Sonny the more his relationships developed with us for the positive. Whilst Sonny was close to us all he became very very close to my Dad, his Grandad. They literally fell in love with each other and they were really best mates – The day Sonny left he broke our hearts but none more so than his Grandads.

As the years passed the contact grew stronger and I can’t honestly say I remember too many issues with Sarah over this period. We were getting on very well, the upheaval and unrest had subsided. There were a couple of things that happened where I think she did return to her old self and showed a lack understanding for our position but in all things were positive.

Several more holidays came and went with Sonny over in the Canary Islands and we ended finding a lovely hotel that we returned to a number of times as we all had such a good time. By this point Sonny was really happy with us and never asked for his Mum, he was with u and she was happy in his world that we’d created with him.

Things improved that much with Sarah and I that at one point we actually agreed to take Sonny on holiday together, we thought it would be nice for Sonny to experience being away together with his Mum & Dad. Obviously neither of us were in a relationship at the time so if there was ever a time it was going to happen it was then. We actually went away a couple of times and had really good holidays and believe it or not we did actually try to work on a relationship for a short period.

That ended after a few months but at the time we thought it would be worth a try for Sonny mainly and it was done with the best of intentions. My family was not happy about it understandably and I doubt Sarah’s was either but we did it for Sonny. Obviously it didn’t work out and we separated but we remained on good terms and contact continued as it had done for the period prior.

What happened in 2010 was effectively the beginning of the end though – Sonny out of the blue just said he no longer wanted to come to Manchester, he was 6. We couldn’t believe it. It came out of nowhere and it really upset us all. Obviously we tried to find out what had happened.

Initially Sarah let us speak to him over the phone, I may have even drove over to speak to him about (I’m not exactly sure) but I do remember speaking to him a number of times. He would say that he just didn’t want to come over. I don’t think Sarah was behind I just think it was something Sonny came out with one day and it stuck.

After several contact visits had passed literally the only thing that Sonny said was that “Auntie Jo’s dog scares him”. We knew this was made up nonsense and he was probably in his own way just trying to give us something but we couldn’t get to the bottom of it. Sonny had a great relationship with his Auntie Jo’s dog, they loved each other and Sonny was not scared of him. If we thought what he was saying was true we’d have kept the dog away from him but we knew he was making it up. Like when he told us he Grandad Ken used to hit him with hammers, we knew it was a kid just being a kid and we never actually mentioned it to Sarah.

The problem we had really was that Sarah refused to try and make sense of any of it, her position was “you just need to leave him and he’ll come out of it when he comes out of it”. That for us was unacceptable and poor from Sarah. She should have been firm with him from the get go to find out what was going on. After all she lived with him, we were nearly 2 hrs away and any phone calls had to be pre arranged. I remember I said to her “what if Sonny said to you he doesn’t want to go and see your Mum & Dad, what would you say to that, the same thing you’ve just said to me”…her response, in typical fashion….. “that’s different….” – and there was the old aged problem, it was still buried there in her subconscious, she didn’t believe we were important enough to Sonny, classic parental alienation.

After a number of calls from us all Sonny eventually agreed to come back, we were under strict instruction from Sarah not to discuss it with Sonny. We did though as we thought it was important to get to the bottom of it but he never told us anything other than he “just didn’t want to”.

Obviously for us there was much more context to this situation than Sonny would understandably understand. We’d been through hell with Sarah and Margaret, fighting aggressive parental alienation through the family courts. Him just saying he didn’t want to see us was potentially a major problem, a court problem as we would have had to get the bottom of it if he dug in and never came back.

The way Sarah handled it is why I believe it was effectively the beginning of where we are today with Sonny. Not seeing him for over 11 years and the last communication he personally had with me was upsetting.

When Sonny said he didn’t want see us Sarah should have issued code red and got it sorted out. If she really cared about Sonny and his paternal family she would have nipped that in the bud immediately. Instead she pandered to Sonny pretending what he was doing was normal. Sonny was now old enough to see how easily his mum could invoke parental alienation indirectly. To this say I don’t believe Sonny forgot that. I think that he realised that if he ever wanted to do that same thing again he could, and his Mum would support him and we would he left on the outskirts again.

That is what I believe, do I think it was his fault – no he was only 6 but I think he learnt very quickly that him mum would enable him to do it again in the future.

And he did, when he was 8 – and it crushed