CHANGE

 One of the biggest changes in family life over the last few years has given all families something to think about, especially families who foster.

It's got to do with how families hunker down in the evening.

When I was a child there was no central heating so the entire family huddled together around in the one heated room in the colder months. Only one source of heat; some type of fire.

And there was only one source of entertainment, the telly.

So, out of necessity, families were all together every evening 'til bedtime.

Very different now.

Family members want their own space, their own privacy to surf the net, message friends, watch YouTube.

As foster parents we're quite rightly encouraged to gel the family members together. Eat at the same time and same table. Then share the rest of the evening together.

My goodness the second bit is a hard negotiation sometimes!

You could argue that on the whole their independence can be a good thing; better they are interacting with friends and playing games which call for quick thinking. My generation ended up with square eyes watching a box and doing  nothing with our hands. Or our minds.

TV is essentially sedentary, the internet is inter-active.

You could even say it makes the job of the foster parents easier, because building every evening out of the TV schedule or a game of scrabble calls for party skills the like of which we haven't seen since they downgraded Butlins Redcoats.

The biggest success I ever had with a houseful of family and foster children was the X Factor, which we watched en masse, passing round a box of Quality Street. It was truly joyful, and you could feel the comfort and security that everyone, especially the foster children, felt at this sharing of an hour's company.

When they take themselves off into private corners, or go to their room and shut the door saying;

"I need to concentrate on something for 5 minutes" but never come down again…

That's when foster parents are faced with a bunch of dilemmas.

What are they doing up there? Should we know about it? How can we ask? What will be the effect on our relationship if we order them back down, or ban bedrooms between the evening meal and bedtime?

The older ones think that we don't know that when they say...

"Oh dear, I have so much homework tonight"

…we foster parents know it's a good bet they hop straight onto Instagram.

I'm tempted to believe that the change in the way families are arranged during social hours is of benefit to the kids who are going in the right direction, but potentially a negative for those who are struggling.

I guess what I have to own up to is that I don't know the answer, but, as the only thing we can rely on never changing…

…is that everything changes. 

You have to make the best of it.

And if I'm in any doubts, thank goodness for our social worker.

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THE HUGGER'S DILEMMA

 A fellow foster parent added a comment to the piece "Slipping through my fingers".

It almost brought a tear to my eye.

The person spoke of not being able to forget a child who slipped through their fingers years and years ago.

Aren't some people truly wonderful.

There's a lot of love in that home of theirs!

Let's think for a moment about how much care goes into how a foster parent expresses the different types of love.

See, it's a tricky concept. 

What am I talking about? It's not "tricky"… it's a blinkin' minefield!

Try this one; every morning when our own children set off for school, or in the case of our eldest, for work, we always say something like;

"See you later! Take care…"

Then we finish with;'

"Love you!"

If you leave out the "I", as in "I love you" it lightens the sentence enough for it not to be a dramatic statement of something huge.

But, here's the thing; you can't start saying "Love you!" to foster kids as they go out the door, especially if they've only been with you a few days. I find myself dropping the "Love you" from my goodbyes with my own brood in case a new foster child notices that they're being left out and feel some kind of bad.

Am I being too meticulous? No. The harder you try to get everything right in fostering (impossible obviously but you can still try) the better your fostering.

Hugs are another thing.

Our transitioning foster child came home from a gathering late on Saturday night. He's transing from female to male, and so much more at peace with the world now he's well into his journey. At the gathering was a girl he likes and they had a slow dance. He stood in the kitchen and told me how wonderful it made him feel.

He is, like many kids in care, guarded about his thoughts and feelings. But he opened up, and I felt he wanted a connection.

I wanted to give him a hug but he used to shrug me off if I so much as gave him a friendly pat on the back.

But I felt that the moment was right so I stepped forward into his space. He didn't step back. I placed both hands on either of his elbows as his arms hung down, so I wasn't touching his body and gave them a fleeting squeeze. Lasted two seconds, but he let me.

I whispered "I'm so proud of you".

And off he tripped upstairs to bed. He'd have been whistling if he knew how.

I'm old enough to know how to whistle  but I didn't try -  my lips don't pucker like they used to.

But I wanted to, because a) he was in a good place and b) I'd done my darndest to make the moment appropriate.

 

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SLIPPING THROUGH MY FINGERS

 Harrowing.

It's always uplifting and upsetting when Blue Sky's Placement Team telephone you and ask if you'd "Consider taking a child who…"

Then they give you a thumbnail of the child's backstory, over the phone. They use the most immediate way of getting to you and getting a bead on whether you might be up for it, and that remains the spoken word. I guess some organisations might do it differently, but it's the way that suits me best. I have the team's number on my phone. I remember getting a call from them one time when I was driving. I didn't know it was them because I've always been careful not to even glance at my phone when driving, but I had a hunch. I pulled over, parked up and called them back. 5 minutes later I had said "Yes" and was heading home to get the details emailed to me.

I can't explain easily the eagerness I feel when I open the documents detailing the child's story. It a mixture of some kind of excitement at the prospect of helping another child, a mixture of a heavy heart that a child should have to go through such anguish. A mixture of curiosity if I'm honest. But mostly it's a feeling that I have to prepare straight away in case the child is handed to me.

The preparation at stage one is mostly emotional. I kind of put myself in the child's shoes. Every scrap of information is vital, starting with the child's age. There's a world of difference between a toddler and a teenager. I try to work out their emotional age too, which is difficult but by getting a bead on how the child is doing at school, whether the child has a friendship group, plus the all-important experiences the child has endured, you can begin to get a picture.

Then you sit and wait. Often the call comes to say that the child has been placed elsewhere, but "Thank you for making yourself available.."

When the child goes elsewhere you get more mixed feelings, ranging from disappointment that you can't do your best for a youngster that you've tried to get to know and care about, to a fleeting feeling of being a bit miffed. The miffed-ness doesn't last long, but it's a natural human reaction. Whenever our Blue Sky Social Worker visits they'll talk us through the event and make sure we're on track.

Example;

The call from the placement team came in the morning, around 11.00am. Would I consider taking a child called Rachel who had been living rough for nearly a year.

Aged 8.

Rachel had been thrown out of the family home for wetting the bed. The family didn't do laundry so the place started to smell. They didn't do pyjames either so Rachel had to walk the house in wet clothes until they dried out. The parent tried some 'strategies' to stop Rachel's bed wetting, but they were all crude and bullying; making her sleep in wet sheets, putting her out in the rain to rinse her stained clothes.

In the end they made a space in the shed, bought a junk camp bed and moved her in.

Rachel lived in the shed for several months. The bed got soaked as did the army surplus blankets they chucked in for her. How she didn't die of cold I'll never fathom. That she cried herself to sleep every night is surely a given.

As with every potential new foster child I was desperate to get her to our house, to have her feel cared for and wanted.

I began plans to help with the bed-wetting. We already had the protective sheets to keep the matress dry, no problem there. The big challenge would be tackling the anxiety that is often behind bed-wetting. That takes time, because being taken into care frequently adds to a neglected child's anxiety.

I got the dread call the same day saying that Rachel and I were to be ships that passed in the night. Her Local Authority Social Workers found a better match than me. I was told that geography was the key; Rachel's parent lived just a half-hour's drive from our house and had a short fuse, especially since the parent learned that a prosecution was being considered.

I couldn't stop thinking about her for days. Always the way for me when a child slips through your fingers.

But then phone rings again.

"Would you consider taking a child who…"

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