‘Our daughter-in-law called police’:
Being forced to get on with daily life while being denied all access to your longed-for grandchildren would be barely conceivable for most grandparents.
But when faced with the threat of the police knocking on your door if you so much as pass on an address for a relative to send a birthday card, it is not hard to imagine being plunged “to the very blackest place on Earth.”
This has become the daily reality for one middle-aged couple, who are by no means alone in being cut out of their grandchildren’s lives.
They have never met their youngest granddaughter, who is now three, and have not seen her older sister since she was a toddler.
Their son, the girls’ father, is separated from their mother and has been warned that if he has any contact at all with his own parents he will be denied all access to his daughters.
His parents accept that, faced with this ultimatum, however awful, “there really is only one choice”.
They try to remain positive about the situation and are hopeful that in the future, something will change.
But they are also realistic, as the grandfather told The Telegraph: “We would love to have grandchildren to spoil and to cherish. We are well aware though, that as time goes on, we get older and will have missed out.” He cautiously welcomed proposals to give grandparents a legal right to have access to their grandchildren.
“It’s definitely a step in the right direction,” he said. “But it’s not about our rights, it’s the rights of the child to have a relationship with their family. And no one else has the right to hold that back from them.”
He said that both of his sons had enjoyed happy family upbringings but
‘We live with the threat of the police being called if we so much as acknowledge our granddaughters’
that everything changed when his older son met his former partner.
“It’s ruined our family life,” he said. “She’s incredibly controlling but there is very little we can do.”
The grandfather said when his son and the woman separated, he came to live with his parents but when the pair temporarily got back together he was essentially banned from having any contact with them, an arrangement that has continued even after they split.
“After Christmas, the police knocked on the door and said we had been accused of harassment. I had passed their address to a relative so she could send a card and my daughter-inlaw reported us. We live with the threat of the police being called if we even acknowledge the girls’ existence.”