In fostering, if you stick at it with your foster child you always get somewhere. It can be slow progress, sometimes it takes your Blue Sky social worker to help the foster parent understand that progress is happening.
Occasionally the foster parent doesn't need nudging. It jumps out and bites you.
What happened was this…
Hang on.
A quick bit of background to set the scene.
If you're new to fostering or maybe thinking about signing up it's worth me mentioning that when a child arrives they're a fish out of water. Think about it. New place to live, new home, new people, maybe new school…blimey…who could cope?
Well they do, (mostly). But it must be unimaginably hard. They've not only been abandoned of the familiar things in their lives, but the familiar people. Their mum and dad. Or stepmum or stepdad. Or mum's latest boyfriend and the older sister who does the actual caring (aged eleven). Nightmare stuff, but the nightmare is familiar to them, and nine times out of ten, they long to go back to it.
Instead, without them grasping it, the fact is that they're taken into care for their own safety.
What happened was this…
No, hang on, one extra bit of background. My other half and I have mock arguments for fun, one of which is about the dishwasher. I love the dishwasher, he doesn't. He prefers to wash up after a meal and get the things dried and put away. He says he doesn't like coming down in the morning and have to empty the dishwasher.
My retort is that when he does the washing up there's often smudges on the plates and cutlery.
He comes back that the dishwasher often bakes food bits onto things and they have to be re-washed by hand.
He says dishwashers are bad for the environment, I say they use less hot water.
We spar about it twice a week. For fun.
What happened was this…
Our latest "placement" ("placement" is fostering-speak for foster kids), have been with us about 8 weeks. A teenage mother and her baby. She's still shy, unsure of herself around a new household, and acts like she thinks she's the cuckoo in the nest.
She's heard our dishwasher 'argument' a good few times.
So. Last Sunday we cooked and ate a traditional Sunday roast, which finished with husband starting to wash up and me starting to load the dishwasher. I told him to sit down and take his turn filling out the spreadsheet for our accounts. (NB, foster parents get reasonable tax breaks on the allowances we recieve, but the Revenue folks still want to make sure we're not Mexican money launderers, so there's paperwork).
He started making ha-ha complaints about how difficult the spreadsheet was.
I called back that if he wanted I could show him how to do a spreadsheet.
He muttered under his breathe that if I wanted he could show me how to wash up.
It was typical banter.
But guess what?
The young mum, readying to take her baby upstairs for bath, heard his mutter and got it. And spluttered a fake suppressed laugh, and went upstairs giggling.
She was in on the family.
When she'd gone out of earshot I said to other half;
"Starting to feel at home isn't she?"
"Yep" he replied, then he went;
"I often wonder what that must feel like…"
Me: "ha ha"
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