TLDR; Family emergency meant I missed a monthly meeting and didn’t provide notice about missing it. When I sent a message apologising to my boss, she reacted negatively and told me this was recurring behaviour. I don’t think this is true, and would like insight on how to navigate this.
I work a very casual, extremely part-time tutoring job from home that I’ve had throughout uni. Once a month, there is an unpaid, remote supervision session with myself, my boss and my colleagues where we just give updates on progress and ask any questions. Today, I experienced an emergency at home where my mum had passed out, and I wasn’t able to communicate this until after the meeting had ended.
When I could, I sent a message to my boss apologising for missing the meeting, explaining I was navigating a family emergency, and offered a brief overview of what I would have discussed and offered to elaborate further later. She responded suggesting that I often miss these meetings for a variety of reasons, emphasised that this responsibility was part of my workload, and said that this was not ok. I felt incredibly bad, and I didn’t want to be defensive, so I sent a brief reply saying I appreciated the time carved out for this meeting, I don’t intend to be inconsistent and apologise if I am falling short, and said I would take my previous updates, develop them and bring them to our next supervision session. I didn’t receive a further reply.
It then occurred to me that I couldn’t remember the last time I missed a supervision session. These used to be once a fortnight, but within the last half of 2023 had become monthly. I looked back through the group chat where we confirm the meeting, and found: last month’s meeting was shot down by everyone as no one had any updates to give following on from an empty holiday period, in December I gave notice that I would have to leave the meeting early to attend an appointment, and the month before I warned that I was experiencing wifi troubles that ended up causing no issue other than causing the meeting to cut out a few minutes before it ended, long after I had given my updates. There was a large gap last year where my boss cancelled many months of meetings for both medical and miscellaneous reasons. She is almost always around 5-10 minutes late to our meetings.
The only messages where I explicitly said I couldn’t attend the meeting were in the end of 2022, where it clashed with dissertation meeting. This was a common occurrence among my colleagues at this time. At the start of 2023, we were trying to pencil in a time that worked for all of our class schedules, and the only time that worked was a time slot right before a class of mine, so we all agreed on the time knowing in advance that I would have to leave the meeting early because it was the only one that suited.
This feels like a no win situation where I probably made the right move by being brief and not trying to be defensive, but I feel pretty upset knowing I have a reputation for being flaky that I don’t think is representative of my record. Is there anything I could do or say that could make this better? Should I defend myself more if given the chance?