Opinions on this?
A brief recap - my kids live with me, on Social Services' insistence, as XAGF is not safe to look after them full-time. She's attending an alcohol counselling service once or twice a week, as well as AA sporadically. She's been claiming to have been sober for five months but, while she gets breath-tested before contact with the kids twice a week and has always passed, I'm not convinced that she's entirely sober at other times.
Anyway, to the point. Today there was a regular meeting with me, XAGF, the child protection social worker who's running the whole show, and XAGF's alcohol service case-worker. The meeting was to talk about having a trial overnight for the kids at XAGF's house.
During the meeting I started getting the feeling that XAGF wasn't sober, but I didn't know what to do about it. On the one hand, I've grown to loath the whole "elephant in the room" thing and felt that I should've brought this out into the open. On the other, XAGF is gonna do what she's gonna do. That she may have been drinking at a time when she didn't have the children with her isn't, really, my problem. Plus I didn't want to get into a "You've been drinking", "No I haven't!" thing :chatter
Once I started considering that XAGF wasn't sober though, I started feeling very uncomfortable being there, sat next to her in this meeting and playing the "Let's all pretend XAGF is fine" game. The whole situation made my skin crawl, a real visceral reaction, a need to just get the hell away from her. Ugh.
In the end I didn't say anything in the meeting but had a quick word with the social worker afterwards, raising my concerns. Interestingly, the social worker also suspected that XAGF wasn't sober, but seemed less concerned. It took me a good couple of hours to calm down though.
So, what would you have done? Stood up in the meeting and called her out, or ignored it as Somebody Else's Problem? How about the almost overpowering urge to just get away in a situation where I can't? Any ideas on how I can deal with this better next time would be great!
Thanks, Mr B.