CHRISTMAS AND FOSTERING

I've been fostering long enough to know that I'll never know what my head makes of Christmas and fostering. 

But my heart loves it.

A lot depends on the specifics of who you have staying with you and their story.

We had a lad who had 14 stepdads. Incredibly, his mother had 15 children by 15 different men so he had a real dad and 14 stepdads.

And he was cool about this because somehow the whole lot were in touch and he got a dozen or so massive guilt presents from a dozen blokes. The boy was one of those foster children who was on top of his situation. Such foster children aren't always the rule but they are out there.

Another child we had, a teenage girl, was very up for Christmas, wanted a shed-load of;
"make-up, an' smellies an' fings fer goin' aht in". 

I hesitated about making her sound like that, but that is how she talked and it was her way of talking, as good as any other, and translating it into Queen's English deprives her of her wonderful character. 

She was asking about stepping up into the world of being a woman (as in what she'd been brought up to regard as womanhood).

So I took the plunge and bought her perfume, eye stuff, nail stuff, oh you know... that stuff.

The poor dear girl was due to go back to her real home on Christmas Eve, we were down to drive her, so we presented her with a bag of gifts with the car engine running. But she said for us to wait, she wanted to open her presents with us!

It was as lovely a half hour as I've spent in fostering.

The girl milked every present, opened them full of childlike speculation and melted with every discovery.

Then off we took her to goodness knows what sort of Christmas morning, but it was what she wanted; foster children almost always want to go home, for almost all of them it's everything.

And goodness, I could go on for pages about the younger ones.

Okay. Just one;

Calvin was six years old. He didn't know if the woman from whose house he had been taken was his mother; he was a passed-around prop for benefit payments. He didn't know if the man of the house he lived in mostly was his father, but the gist he'd picked up was that he might be.

Calvin came to us one November and stayed through a Christmas. 

We found out that although Calvin didn't have much faith in hope, the rumours he'd heard about Father Christmas hadn't been trashed by science. He believed.

Foster carers are ever mindful that the need to avoid giving foster children a Christmas which will spoil future Christmases is balanced by the fact that they are deprived of their real families and deserve our best efforts if only to make up for everything.

We attended his school's Nativity where he was third King,  he knocked out a decent performance. But he was the only child on stage who wasn't searching with their eyes for family and loved ones in the audience.

That did it for me.

We had to bring our car round to the door of the High Street toyshop, we did our brains on pressies for him. Each gift was thought-out and meaningful. It meant we had to up the ante for our own children, so it was an expensive Christmas.

Worth every penny. The highlight of the morning was when he unwrapped his main present which was a massive fortress, the major prop in some sort of game he admired. He looked dazed, didn't know how to deal with his fortune, didn't know how to feel about it. Then he muttered;

"This isn't real. I don't deserve this." He actually said, out loud, that it was more than he deserved!

For an awful moment I feared we'd overdone it. He was feeling the misplaced guilt many foster children experience; they actually believe that the breakdown of their real home was their fault.

I had a card up my sleeve;

"Well, Santa thinks you do, and he's been keeping an eye out for you all year. He thinks you've been good, and deserve nice presents."

Bingo. He was back in the right spirit, maybe even a tad ahead; Santa had pronounced that the family break-up wasn't his fault.

They're always telling us in training that the truth is very important when talking to foster children.

But we're allowed Santa. 

And when I got to thinking that Calvin had actually been somewhat and justly compensated for his hardship, and we'd been rewarded with a happy camper, who's to say there isn't a Santa who looks out for children.

And maybe foster parents too...