Worrying times again.

It's hard to keep any focus on the shop when number one grandson is being emotionally messed up and manipulated by his horrible father again. It's impossible for this child's mother to give him a stable, supportive, happy environment in which he can thrive when his father is systematically undermining everything she puts in place. If I thought he really loved his son I would have sympathy but I don't. He's using the child's unhappiness to spite my daughter for wanting to leave him. He's selfish and wicked.

The backdrop to the last eighteen months has been this horrible situation. It's human nature to try to make some sense of life and at the moment I am falling back on the karmic belief that we get the parents we need to give us the situations we need to face in a lifetime. Perhaps I also have something to learn from this as does his mother, and her father and so on... It's small comfort however when a ten year old is sobbing broken-heartedly because he has to make a choice between parents and it has come to this now - it's impossible for the situation to continue as it has been. He either has to abide by the choices his mother makes for him or live with his father who can be so sweet and reasonable when it suits him. Words are cheap and it's easy for dad to promise all the things his mother can't and rightly won't do like taking him out of school the moment he is miserable without trying to work out what the problem is first. This has now happened twice at two different schools. In ths man's books the teachers will always be to blame. Authority of any sort is anaethema to him but the idea that some form of self-discipline is needed in certain situations, or that talked through the trouble (the difficult maths homework for instance) might take on a less horrendous proportions, this is never considered. To barrell in shouting about everyone (behind their backs of course because the man is a coward when it comes to confrontation) is the only way he knows of dealing with any difficuluty. On the other hand once he has got his way and the child is living with him he he will shout and bluster at him when he loses patience, ignore him, get drunk in the evenings and kick things about, row with his new woman in front of the boy and so on. This man has two daughters who have no self-respect or self-worth so that all they have been able to see for their futures was, in the case of the youngest, to get pregnant at eighteen by a lad with an asbo (well now she can be on the social) or for the other a job in the Co-op up the road. They are intelligent, could have gone to University, but they have never been out of Scotland or done anything with their lives to be proud of or to look back on with a sense of fulfillment because they never thought they could and never saw the point of making an effort.

I don't for one moment think that achievement is everything but to do the best we can with what we have is vital - the motto at the school his grandfather has paid for is Plus Est En Vous and that is what we desperately wanted him to absorb to counteract this spineless attitude of low-expectations, the culture of blame in which everything outside oneself is seen as an excuse for failure. For an intelligent child the result of that attitude will be depression and deep emotional trouble in the future.

We still don't know what the outcome will be. I have parcels to pack and a daughter to support who is white with tension but carrying on with her work because she has to earn a living. I'm a bit-part actor in this drama and can make very little difference to the outcome. I'm left seething impotently and I have a headache.