My nightmares are continuing – almost 2 years on since being a non-custodial mum

“Please let me just hug them – I will only be with them for a minute”….
“What are you doing here? ” my husband’s nanny asks with a shocked look on her face.
I look at my daughter’s face, whom I haven’t seen for a while. She is unsure: it’s clear she wants to hug me, but she also knows how angry her nanny will be if she does…Her hand is held very firmly by the nanny’s hand so she cannot let go to come to me.
“I was in the school for a meeting. I’ve only just noticed you go by. I didn’t know you were here.” I find myself stammering, shaking and apologising for my very presence in my own children’s school to a nanny who has no parental rights over my children – she is their nanny not their parent. Why am I apologising? But I know the power she has to make life even more difficult for me whilst the children are in her care, so I avoid a row and swallow my anger. Like a mother bear, I want to protect my children from another female who is trying to step between me and my children so that I can’t get to them. I hope instead that she will see how desperate the children and I are to give each other a quick hug.
“We won’t be long” I plead, so longing just to hold them for a few seconds.

“NO, we are going now. There is no time for a hug. We’re leaving. Come on kids” Her face is taught with anger, showing clearly how much she dislikes this situation. She is entirely dismissive of me, the words almost spat out with no effort to apologise for her inability to be accomodating of my request. She could stop for a few minutes if she had wanted to. There was no serious deadline she had to meet. So why can’t or why won’t she permit this little request? Do I also detect a certain look on her face as she grabs hold of both children’s hands and whisks them off to the exit of the school? I don’t know. All I know is that they are looking back at me, clearly distressed, while I have to just stand there looking into their dear faces, whilst another woman takes my children out of the door without a second’s feeling for mine and my children’s plight. I feel a huge surge of strong feelings: anger, resentment, frustration, shock, hurt. The very core of my motherly instinct is ripped. This stranger to our family, no relation even, now has the children she’s always wanted. At 50, she has never been married nor has had her own children – something which has deeply upset her. Instead, she’s found another way of having children: taking mine instead.

It’s just a dream, I tell myself when I wake crying. Except it’s been the pattern of these dreams for quite some time now. The dreams are always the same: I am back in my own home, one that she now lives in. I am unwelcome in their even though, in real life, I am still the owner of that home. In this dream home, she is the one who is in charge of my children. In these dreams, I am sometimes a ghost, sometimes I am merely invisible, a mere on-looker whilst all my children, the nanny, my ex husband, his guests ignore me as they simply look through me. When I am visible in these dreams, I am constantly reaching out to my children in all manner of ways: I am trying to feed them, I am trying to hug them, to talk to them, to protect them from a stranger……….always trying to be close to them. Invariably, I am met with palpable hostility from both the nanny and my ex husband – “why is she still here, when this is our territory now” is the unspoken question that hangs in the air. There is no attempt on their part to be hospitable, accomodating, kind or compassionate for the children’s plight or mine. They make it clear that I am now in their territory, their home, their space, their rules. I stand in my own home, with my own children and am made to feel like I’m the intruder, the unwelcome pest.

Although these are my dreams, these dreams are simply a representation of what is happening in real life, in my real situation, in my real experience of how my ex husband and his nanny treat me. The discomfort  in his employee’s face is painful and hurtful to see and experience and I ask myself what I might have done, or what he might have told her, for her to treat me in this way. She treats me like I’m an irrelevance, like she’s the mother and I’m her employee and one that she doesn’t like at that. Ocasionally I stand up for myself and tell her not to treat me in this manner, but there is never an apology on her part, nor any change in her behaviour.

I bitterly resent this. I carried those children in my womb for 9 months. I gave birth, screaming with the pain and bear permanent physical scars from the births. My eldest had to be pulled out as she’d got stuck and I live with the scars of that birth today – a constant reminder of her bond to me. I breast-fed each child, waking several times a night to feed them, comfort them, nurse them, sleep with them to keep them calm. I slept beside their beds in hospital as each of them had their various baby illnesses: diabetes, tonsilitis, pneumonia, meningitis. I held them when they were scared in hospital, comforted them till they fell asleep in my arms, argued with the doctors when I instinctively knew that they were not giving my son the right treatment when he was vomiting with his diabetes, spending hours by their sides unable to sleep whilst their bodies fought off various infections.

Now, in my dreams, my children are being told by their nanny to call her “mum” – to hear them say that about another woman who has come into their lives and taken over, rips me to the core. When my youngest daughter is with me, she often calls me my nanny’s name and call’s her nanny’s name mum, before quickly correcting herself. For this child to have another woman in my shoes is clearly confusing for her and hugely upsetting for me. I remind the children that they only ever have one mum and one dad. Nobody else in their lives will ever be their mum or dad. Other people can play those roles and provide huge support, kindness and comfort as did my step father who has looked after me since I was five. But he is not my dad – my real father is my dad. I love my step father as much as I love my dad, but that doesn’t make him my dad.

There is a bond which is never broken between parent and child and when a stranger comes into the children’s lives and tries to break that bond, it is the cruelist and most hurtful thing they can try to do to both the child and the parent. But this behaviour comes from a deep insecurity, selfishness and unkindness on the part of the person breaking that bond. Because they don’t have their own children, they seek to take on somebody else’s. It happens in many animal species where one animal who has no children, tries to take another animal’s offspring. We are just animals too fundamentally. What is playing out in front of my eyes is another female animal trying to steal my children.

My children are hurt, angry and resentful about the way this nanny treats me, but what can they do? They are only children with no power over the way the grown ups in their lives are behaving. They tell me they desperately want to be looked after by their mum rather than by a nanny but there is nothing they can do about it. They are forced to accept her even when their dad is supposed to be looking after them. He employs her even at the weekends and during his holidays with them. She even spent Christmas with them! Even when he came to collect the children from me, he brought the nanny with him on the 4 hour journey! It’s as if he is treating her like his surrogate wife even though she already has her own 8 year long relationship with another man and she is certainly not my ex husband’s type…..I don’t understand why he is doing this other than to think that he doesn’t like being on his own, either with himself or when he’s with the children. He has to have a woman around…..

When will these dreams ever stop? Even the sleeping tablets that have been prescribed for me by my psychiatris for post traumatic stress disorder brought on by having my children taken from me, don’t stop these dreams from penetrating my refuge of sleep. Sleep is meant to be my place of healing all the hurt in my daily life, all the stresses that we all go through, yet mine just brings further haunting, further distress that lingers throughout the day, playing on my mind as I go through each dream scene feeling each hurt afresh.

Oh God, if you ever listen to any of my prayers, listen to this one: “Please let these dreams stop and let me heal…”