Is it over?

I'm a whirling mass of emotions today. I've heard from daughter's mum's boyfriend that it all kicked off at their house last night and it's completely over between them. The police were involved in trying to eject her mum from the house, mobile phones were broken and it sounds like a real shit-storm.

Thankfully, daughter has been with me this week and didn't have to be involved in the drama. So is this the start of better, more stable things for us both?

What I can be sure of is that daughter is going to be hurt pretty badly. She already seems quite mentally strained and stressed - she's having problems in her social group at school which are obviously being compounded by the stress she feels with the general situation, so I've made her an appointment with a counsellor who specialises in children which should help her gain some perspective and hopefully some confidence, as well as clarify how she's feeling about this whole saga with her mother.

I'm trying very hard not to get my hopes up, which I think is one of the reasons my emotions are so mixed. My fear is, should I dare to dream that things will settle down and we'll have the opportunity to set up a new life for ourselves on the basis that her mother can't or won't provide a stable home for daughter, something will pop up and bite me on the arse and dash my dreams.

That said, I won't keep it in for long. This weekend is an opportunity to spend some time with daughter and have a chat about what she wants to do. I'm seeing my parents for a walk on Sunday which is another opportunity to clear my head, and I'll talk to Sophie's other grandma over the weekend to get her take on what we should do to move forward.

I don't mind admitting that I'm scared. I'm scared that this whole experience might be too much for daughter to handle and she might follow the path her mother took at a similar age in similar, tumultuous circumstances. If that were to happen and she were to start going off the rails, I honestly don't know how I'd cope.

I'm scared that I'll start the whole process of taking daughter on full-time in an official capacity, give up my bachelor's residence in favour of more suitable accomodation for the pair of us, go through the form-filling and interviews involved in benefit and Housing Association applications, only to have the whole process derailed by... Well, by her mother, to be honest. That's the main spanner I can foresee dropping into these works and messing things up.

One would hope that, at the point of having lost yet another relationship, having totally given up on two kids and rapidly alienating the third, any normal person would fight to the death to claw it all back and provide a stable basis for her family. But this is no normal person we're talking about, and I'm concerned she'll just do a bunk and disappear, which would leave daughter with a mum-shaped hole in her heart. Unfortunately, I've felt it before and I'm feeling it now - I really do hope she just disappears. It'll be easier on daughter in the long run, because I honestly don't believe she'll ever sort her life and her head out sufficiently to give our daughter the mother she so obviously wants.