A Mum Preparing for a CAFCASS Call After Submitting a C100 Form

The letter came on a Tuesday. I saw the envelope on the mat, official looking, and my stomach did that thing it had been doing for months. A small, tight twist.

It was the confirmation that someone would be ringing me. A safeguarding call, they called it. I had to be available between certain hours on a specific day, and they would phone to ask me some questions about Sophie. About her dad. About what had been happening.

I sat on the bottom step and read it twice.

I had filled in the C100 form three weeks earlier, sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop and a cold cup of tea, while my mum took Sophie to the park so I could think. The form had seemed enormous at the time. So many boxes. So many places where you had to summarise nine years of marriage and two years of slow, awful unravelling into neat little paragraphs that fit in the space provided. I'd actually had help in the end, someone who did court form completion services walked me through the wording on the trickier sections, because I kept getting tangled up trying to say everything at once. I had done it. I had pressed submit. And then, honestly, I had tried not to think about what came next.

Now what came next had a date on it.

I told my sister that evening over the phone. She said, sensibly, "Just be yourself. You've got nothing to hide." Which was true, but it didn't help, because the thing about being yourself in a phone call that might affect where your child lives is that being yourself suddenly feels like an enormous responsibility.

I started rehearsing. That's the only word for it. I'd be in the car on the school run, and I'd catch myself saying things out loud. "Well, the main concern is..." or "I want to make it clear that I do support contact, I just..." I'd hear myself and feel ridiculous. Then I'd carry on rehearsing anyway.

I spent one bleary evening reading everything I could find online about what happens after you submit a C100 form, which both helped and didn't. Helped, because at least I understood the shape of it. Didn't, because knowing the shape of a thing and being inside it are very different.

The week before the call, I spoke to the mediator I'd been seeing on and off since the spring. We hadn't reached an agreement, which was why I'd ended up filing in the first place, but she had been kind, and she knew the situation. I asked her, embarrassed, whether it was alright to call her even though we weren't technically in mediation anymore. She said of course it was. She mentioned that some people book a proper CAFCASS prep meeting before the call, to talk through what to expect and steady the nerves a bit, and that it can make a real difference. I didn't end up doing that, but just knowing it existed made me feel less like I was standing alone at the edge of something.

She talked me through what the call would probably be like. She said the person on the other end of the phone wasn't there to catch me out. They were there to understand. They would ask about Sophie, about her routine, about her relationship with both of us, about any concerns. They might ask questions that felt strange or out of order. That was fine. I could take my time. I could say I didn't know if I didn't know.

She told me something that helped more than anything else. She said, "Don't try to win it. Just answer honestly. They've spoken to thousands of parents. They can tell when someone is performing."

I wrote that down. I actually wrote it down on a Post-it and stuck it next to the kettle.

The night before the call I barely slept. Sophie had come into my bed around midnight because she'd had a bad dream about a fox, of all things, and I lay there listening to her breathe and thinking about all the things I wanted to say properly. About how she used to wake up excited on Saturdays because that was her dad's morning, and how that had changed. About the time she'd asked me, completely out of nowhere while I was buttering toast, whether grown-ups were allowed to be scared of each other. I hadn't known what to say to her then, and I wasn't sure I'd know what to say tomorrow either.

The call came at twenty past ten. I had a notebook open in front of me with bullet points I'd written and then crossed out and then rewritten. I didn't look at it once.

The woman on the phone was lovely, actually. Calm voice. Slightly Yorkshire. She introduced herself, told me roughly how long we'd be on the phone, said I could ask her to repeat anything. And then she just asked me about my daughter. What she was like. What she enjoyed. How she was getting on at school. I cried a bit when I described her, which was mortifying, but the woman just waited and said, "Take your time."

We talked for nearly an hour. She asked me about my concerns. She asked what I thought a good outcome would look like. She asked whether I supported Sophie having a relationship with her dad, and I said yes, immediately and completely, because that was the truth. I just wanted it to be safe. I wanted the handovers to stop being the worst part of Sophie's week. I wanted someone other than me to be holding the shape of what was happening.

When we finished, she thanked me. She said someone would be in touch about next steps. And I sat at the kitchen table for a long time afterwards, looking at the garden, feeling something I hadn't expected to feel. Relief.

Not because anything had been decided. Nothing had. There were still hearings to come, and reports, and conversations, and a long road of small adjustments. But I had said the things I needed to say, to someone whose job it was to listen carefully, and it had not been the catastrophe I'd been building it up to be.

Sophie came home that afternoon and asked if we could have pasta. I said yes. We had pasta. And I went to bed that night and slept properly for the first time in weeks.

This story is based on real mediation experiences, with details changed to protect confidentiality.