NO FIXED ABODE

 Meeting the birth parents of children who come into our care is always valuable. We fostering folk learn a great deal about the job in hand; it helps us make better day-to-day decisions about our care of the youngster.

Yesterday was a revelation.

I  met for the first time the father of our middle foster child. The child has been with us for several months, but this was his first Contact with his dad. In fact his first Contact of any kind as his mother is apparently not on any radar known to man.

I took the child to a Contact centre in an adjacent town, it was a converted detached house, probably one that had seen servants and maids. The child had come straight from school and was taken to a separate room to change from his school uniform into everyday clothes.

The father and I stood together, alone in the corridor.

He slumped down onto his haunches, back against the wall and began talking:

"I'm sleeping out tonight but I'll be on my feet this time next week, they've found me a one bed flat and ordered a washing machine so I'll have to find out about what tablets it needs and I'm doing alright raising the sixty pounds I need to prove I can manage but the problem is I'm doing so well in the roundabout underpass that other homeless come and hang around me because they know I'm on Facebook and sometimes have enough to spend the night in the Travel Lodge which is good for me because the roundabout's got the fire station on it and they can go off blaring through the night. The woman who leaves her matress next to me all day long is a right pain, she was standing up swearing at me yeseterday so I stood up and I'm six foot three but she wasn't bothered and she's in court today on three charges and I'm sorry but I hope they send her to jail. I'm a qualified painter and decorator and a trained chef, my wife's sectioned under the Mental Health Act. I'm from Yorkshire originally, Huddersfield although I've supported Leeds United all my life, the Howard Wilkinson Leeds, which didn't make me popular as a boy…"

The gentleman said all that in one breath without pausing or having the slightest awareness of the stream of consciousness that was falling from his lips.

So what did I learn?

For one, that my foster child isn't going back to his father (or else they'd have found him a two bedroomed flat). 

For two I learned why the child's mum isn't on the scene, or to be precise I was given a scenario by a possibly unreliable source.

For three I learned that the child's father carries a condition which, Dr Google tells me, is called 'logorrea', which is characterised by "An elated or irritable mood, social or financial recklessness, pressured speech, flight of ideas rapidly jumping between tenuously related topics and auditory hallucinations indicative of an acute manic episode."

Instead of wondering how many politicians have logorrea, I found myself forming a clearer picture of what the child in my care had been through before being placed with us. 

That, plus I was left wondering what happened between father and son in the 50- minute-hour that was the Contact. I didn't ask on the way home, sometimes I do, mostly I don't. Contact can be so stressful for the child they need to move on afterwards and I often find a change of topic helps them. I've mentioned before how my go-to tactic is to tell the child to keep their eyes peeled for a petrol station so we can buy a poundsworth of sweets.

And yes, if you were wondering, we drove around the roundabout which has a big underpass, possibly the current address of his dad.

They say that loneliness and tedium are growing problems in the developed world, but believe me, fostering folk are in danger of neither.