CHRISTMAS GIZMO

We had a great holiday thanks, hope yours was okay too. Not everyone's was.

I've talked about this before; Christmas is a hard time for chaotic families, very hard for tens of thousands of children in chaotic homes.

Carlotta is a lovely child, okay some would say she takes a moment to stay in the conversation, but she has a good heart and deserves better than she gets.

Her father left about five years ago and because her mum remains sore about him leaving, is still sticking pins in an effigy of him. So Carlotta's dad is sidelined out of her life.

Carlotta's mum hooked up with a boyfriend about two years ago, which was tricky for Carlotta obviously and also tricky for Carlotta's dad who, although it was he who did the leaving, felt resentment in case the new stepdad usurped him with 'his' former three females.

It's not known how - or even if - Carlotta's real dad pressured Carlotta or her mum or her sister to diss the stepdad (he might even have levered the stepdad man-to-man). When you've been in fostering a while you get a good gut on this stuff.

So the stepdad left. Walked out. Said nothing to the children, simply left. On the very day Carlotta  broke up for Christmas. Nice gift there big man. I believe the acronym is FFS.

What happened next?

Carlotta's mum picks her up from school and says "Kev has bogged off. You know you keep going on about a puppy?"

Carlotta agreed. 

"Well we're off to buy one!" 

And they bought one. On their way home. Total caprice, spontaneity and all that. These are the knee-jerk bad decisions that people whose lives are descending into chaos sometimes make. 

A spaniel/poodle it is. A cockerdoodledoo or something. 

And Carlotta's life is now borderline authentic chaotic.

Except this; our eldest foster child is a friend of Carlotta, they are round each others houses a lot.

See, Carlotta is not in care or any danger of it yet. My child, the one who is the rock for the other, is the one in care.

My foster child said to me: "Jeez, other people's lives", like our foster child prefers being in fostering to the alternative. Oh blimey.

The job is to get the foster child set to go home. 

But if they have a happy relaxing time with us, get to enjoy a bit of peace, not constantly hearing arguments and harsh words, what are you supposed to do, stage some unhappiness so they want home? Do me a favour.

So, yep, Christmas was happy.

Not least because aforementioned eldest foster child won the Christmas afternoon game of Scrabble, putting down "Gizmo" on a triple word.

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WARNING; RUSTY SPANISH AHEAD

How about this comment from El Chorizo Ingles which went up a couple of days back in response to a blog I posted... four years ago.

El Chorizo InglesSaturday, December 21, 2019

We've been discussing fostering for a while now and have decided to start putting things into place. It means moving, improving the other halfs English, getting everyone on board(6 kids between 5 and 22 and a Granny and Grandad who are all in)and lots of reaserch. But whats really pushing our desire to do it is reading words like yours. Thank you.

I sometimes get wind of people who are reading all the Secret Foster Carer blog posts, which makes War and Peace look like a short story. I guess El Chorizo is maybe doing just that.

You guys! What an intriguing background to bring to fostering; El Chorizo is proof that it really does take all sorts to make fostering work.

Forgive me showing how scrappy my Spanish is (I worked a summer as a tour rep in Lloret de Mar donkeys years ago), but I want to speak directly to El Chorizo's other half:

Ola Senora(ita?) Chorizo, que tal?

Siento pero mi Espanol es pobre, mi vocabulario pequeno (es el Espanol de la playa, por ejemplo "Donde esta un bar?"... "Donde esta mi hotel…?".

Pero yo quero a hablar con unsted como importante es mas cosas en fostering tambien con a hablar Ingles.

Es mas importante a entender la familia, esto es numero uno y los Chorizos tienen esto mas grande!

A Blue Sky, gustamos mucho la familia grande, y todos las cosas de un familia grande; especialmente multi-generacions(?) (esto es un problema in Inglaterre; muchas familias no tienen "Granny y Grandad" cerca). 

Si usted tienen seis nino(a)s tambien ustedes tienen un grande amor(?), y esto es mas imprortane que habler Ingles.

Pero, Ingles es no dificil, puedo con un acente Espanol es muy bonita! Aprende por favor.

Bona fortuna. xxx

The point I tried to make to Mrs Chorizo is that although language is very important, and it helps with everything if you can communicate well, there are facets of life and family especially, that are more important. 

Anyone who can mange a family as large and complicated as theirs is well in on the big basics; so good luck to them from us at Blue Sky.

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LOVING HAVING YOUR KIDS HOME

School holidays are a big thing in fostering. One of many joys is that for a week or several you don't have to battle to get children up and off to school.

Getting your child, any child - not just a foster child - to school is always an issue.

One afternoon just before one Christmas I was sat on a gym bench watching a primary school carol concert. The slightly out-of-date teacher who'd organised the show closed it by getting up on the stage and announcing;

"The staff are looking forward to three weeks of peace and quiet, and wish you parents good luck you're going to need it what with…"

I won't go on. The teacher's message, delivered in front of the children, was that they found the kids hard work and were relieved to be handing them back to the parents to have to deal with them.

A  number of parents in the audience chuckled along with the notion - that children are hard work and it's better if someone else is looking after them.

Oh dear.

We should love our children and always make them know that we enjoy them and love their company.

I had a foster child under my wings who had real problems with rejection. The child's father had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with his offspring. The mother felt likewise and spent as much time as possible away from them. The siblings were at each other's throats out of fear, confusion and anger - and the child who came to me, being the youngest, got the worst of it.

When the child's favourite teacher left teaching (couldn't hack the workload, the targets, the stress) the child felt even more rejected.

He became despairing, distressed, depressed.

It took us a long time to understand his reason why he hated going to school. 

Every child has their own set of reasons. Sometimes it's because they feel bullied. Sometimes they are sad that school seems to be showing them they are not very bright and therefore haven't much of a future.

This foster child's story was this;

The child felt that the reason we tried every morning to get him off to school was because WE DIDN'T WANT HIM IN THE HOUSE.

This discovery was a bombshell, and it had to be acted on. But how?

We went out on a limb. No parent should do what we did unless the chips are down - which they were. The child was doing okay academically, but was fraying at the edges, and the worry was the child would go off the edge.

When I say 'We" I mean my other half and myself. We took a decision that was awkward, and which would necessarily put us at loggerheads with the school, the local authority and maybe even Blue Sky (though it turned out not to be the case; they are great backer-uppers).

But the child was going downhill. Nobody loved or wanted this child, that is how he saw it.

So. 

After much thought we decided to try something radical. I don't recommend it but it happened.

The child came down in the morning, tearful, tremulous and sour. We'd talked about what we were going to do. So when the child said;

"I don't want to go to school." (Expressed more colourfully than that).

We said…

"We don't want you to go either."

Stunned silence, then;

"Seriously I don't want to go to school."

Me: "Seriously, we don't want you to go."

"What?"

"We like this house most when you're here."

There followed a discussion, heated at first, in which we tried to make clear that we…didn't want him to go to school. Actually, it was true. This child got so worked up and angry at school things were  so much better for the child every Saturday and Sunday, I began to wonder if it was so important they learn Pythagoras compared to finding some peace.

Child stayed home. For four schooldays. Eeek!

During that time child grew upwards and inwards more than ever before or since. Child experienced the feeling that people wanted him, liked him, loved him.

The following Monday morning the child CHOSE to go to school. Yes chose. I'm, not making this up or exaggerating a jot.

The child carried on testing us, like foster chidren do, to see if they can trust us. So the next day, the Tuesday, the child said he didn't want to go to school.

"Great!" we said, "we love it when you're HERE, at HOME, with US." Child stayed at home.

The child never missed a schoolday again, except for real illness. Moaned a bit, yeah, from time to time, but nothing anywhere near like before.

Our Blue Sky people were concerned with getting the details of this particular treatment (if that's the right term), but they backed it as a trial thing, then when it worked everyone nodded. The Local Authority got it too, as did the school once the new attendance figures started to come in.

I guess the point is that we must make sure our children know for sure that we want them.

As for the occasional teacher that appears not to, I think those teachers say things like that lady did by way of a joke. After all she'd been in teaching for several decades, surely you can't muster that if you aren't fond of kids.

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FOSTERING AND RESPECT

Fostering opens doors that aren't easy to kick down for normal parents.

I'm obviously not suggesting door kicking, it's just a term. 

Take for example doctor's appointments.

I called our surgery regarding my own needs and was told they had no doctor availability for nearly four weeks.

A few days later I called for an appointment for my foster child and got in THE SAME DAY.

And that's fair enough.

You also get better from the school if your child is in care. And from the police - who by the way are always fantastic about fostering.

What just happened is this; I was parked up waiting for my foster child to come out of school. His estranged real father is believed to be trying to make contact with him and the thinking is that it's best he doesn't. He's been asked not to. The father's not in any way a challenging individual - there are no physical dangers - but the child would be upset and it's considered best if he seeks contact via the proper channels. All I have to do is keep an eye; if it happens it happens and I report it to my Blue Sky Social Worker and they'll alert the local authority who'll decide what to do.

So I was parked up outside the school in a slightly dodgy spot, I was a bit too close to a corner, shouldn't really have been there, but it was borderline.

I wanted to be able to keep the school gates in view in case dad popped up.

Just before the kids came out a police car cruised up. Locals had complained about school-run traffic outside their homes (common thing) so a car was sent to make sure we were all behaving ourselves. They pulled up next to me and an officer lowered her window and said;

"That's not a very good place to park is it madam?"

Mortified, I replied;

"I know, but I'm a foster carer and my child is…"

I didn't get to finish. The officer held up a hand and said;

"Okay then. Just take care. Keep up the good work…"

And they drove off.

Now, I'm not suggesting that claiming Foster Carer status will get you off a bank heist or blag you grandstand seats at Wimbledon.

But every so often you feel the public's respect for what we do.

And we'd do what we do even if the public didn't give a hoot, but it's nice that they do.

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FOSTERING AND FRIENDS

I've got me yet another new best friend, her name is Veronica.

In fostering you find yourself meeting so many new people with whom you have lots in common - namely fostering.

It's not unique to fostering, most people are drawn to like-minded people. But fostering brings out a very special camaraderie, and it's a good camaraderie too. It's a 'we're all in this together' thing, spiced up with a dash of 'no-one outside fostering has a clue what fostering is like'.

I found myself sitting next to Veronica at a Blue Sky coffee and catch-up session (they call them 'Support Meetings', I prefer 'coffee and catch-up').

Veronica is that rare and beautiful thing; a foster child-turned Foster Carer. Despite my antenna being 20/20 and always up and twitching, I would never have guessed ANY of her story.

One of six children by different men, she never found out who her dad was. She came home from school one day to find her mother dead in a bedroom. She told me what the scene looked like, but I won't pass it on. 

The children all went into care, but not all made it. One of her brothers hanged himself, one of her sisters took her own life in the same way their mother did.

Veronica spent time with three different families where her despair and anger proved too much, but eventually found herself in the care of an elderly woman. And that's how Veronica discovered what every grandchild knows (or at least should know), namely that if you stick a whole generation in between human beings the chemistry is superb. 

Veronica was unable to transfer any of the anger she felt towards her real mother onto her foster mother because of the age difference. Therefore Veronica was spared the shame she experienced whenever she felt angry about her mum. More than that, Veronica's elderly foster mum had that child-like carefreeness that comes back to us in our later years, and Veronica found herself learning how to be a child, by mirroring an elderly person.

Veronica became determined not only to avoid the life and death of her mother, but to help others avoid such a fate. She married and has two children. The marriage is secure despite upheavals - they decided to take a big risk six years ago and moved hundreds of miles away in search of a secure future for their children.

She is currently caring for a three-year-old whose story is tragic. One can only hope that with Veronica's help, and that of Blue Sky and the local authority, the child ends up more like Veronica than Veronica's mum.

I'm not Veronica's only new best friend by the way. She's single handed turned our coffee and catch-ups into coffee CAKE and catch-ups. She bakes one specially every time, from recipes taught to her by her old foster mum.

Last time it was a Drozdzowka (hope I spelled it right), a delicious plum cake.

Veronica's Polish, I forgot to mention. 

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MEETING THE PARENTS

In fostering you sometimes meet the parents of your foster child.

Before I came into fostering I had no idea I would, but you do. Not always but often.

There's a law that says that children in care must have contact with their 'significant others', usually once a week on average. And it often falls to us - the Carers - to transport the children to these contacts. It might be at a Contact Centre or sometimes at McDonalds. We get to see, sometimes greet and even have conversations with our foster children's real parents.

Awkward isn't the word. But it usually works out.

It is never - in my experience - unpleasant (the real parents are aware they are under scrutiny so even if they feel any resentment I have only ever found it to be controlled and mild).

From time to time I put myself in their shoes. How must they feel?

The parents of children who come into fostering have, in the eyes of authority, got parenting wrong.

We all get things wrong and it hurts to admit it. Better to blame someone else. When I get a parking ticket it's because the signs weren't clear or the machine was out of order.

If my children were taken away from me - and I can hardly imagine anything much worse - I would be unlikely to accept it was because I got my parenting wrong.

So let me tell you how it seems to me for most parents of children who are taken away from them and  put into care. It's this; they don't know how innocent they really are.

When you bump into them, often in a car park for example, they are usually at pains to be model parents. Sometimes you believe you can see where they might be going wrong; they might berate their children for being 'naughty' - as in running across the car park towards them.

One thing I've noticed a lot is the real parent's demanding their children are 'polite' - which seems to be little more than the extensive use of the words 'please' and 'thank you', which is nice but a bit superficial.

Here's my thing; I often ask social workers what they can tell me about the parents. The problem here is data protection and privacy rights and fair enough to  all that, but that's balanced by our need, as Foster Carers, to know everything we can know to HELP our foster children.

The information that helps us sometimes comes from the foster children themselves who might tell us, unprompted, background they've learned about what happened to their own parents when they were younger.

You might wonder 'such as?'

Okay, here's an example.

A child who stayed with a Foster Carer who is a friend of mine had experienced a terrible time at home, her mother had mental health problems and the child had begun to become her mother's carer.

Her father, who had been absent for years but turned up every so often, spent much of his time in Lincolnshire. The child had heard him repeatedly telling her mother that his father - who he had never met - was believed to be working in Lincolnshire. She heard her father shout as she listened from upstairs to the arguments, that he wanted to find his father and have it out with him.

The child's mother had, at age 17, conceived her second baby. The child, from an early age, knew that her mother's father had been abusive to her mother but was still too young to understand what that meant.

The child's mother and father had themselves had an awful childhood. Yet they somehow thought they knew enough to get it right when it was their turn. Or did they give it any thought at all?

In fostering we are often aghast at the awful parenting that results in children being taken into care.

But meeting those parents often helps us understand how they came to be awful parents. 

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COULD THE ROYALS FOSTER?

Fostering; it's just real life.

People who are thinking of becoming Foster Carers often seem worried that they have a cluttered past and lack the magic ingredient, whatever that is.

To tackle the first worry; everyone has a cluttered past. I always say 'Look at the Royal Family'. Whatever you think of them as an institution or as individuals, they are probably the most cluttered family any of us could name, and they keep going.

The fascinating question is; would they get approval as Foster Carers?

If the answer is 'No' it's surely because any child placed with them would be shoved into a fierce spotlight.

But if you take the' Royal' out of them, and they are just another family, then like all families there are those of them who couldn't because they wouldn't, but what would Blue Sky say to those of the Royals who might wish to be Carers? 

LIZ AND PHIL

Probably older than anyone else in fostering. Cluttered up to the nines for sure but Liz  could mind mice at a crossroads. They've probably rubbed each other up the wrong way plenty of times but like most of their generation they kept it to themselves and  just got on with being married. They'd need their placement children to be not too engergetic. So -in theory - YES.

CHAZ AND CAMMY

He didn't do a bad job bringing up two boys, seems a bit eccentric but in a lovable way surely. So what if he talks to his plants? She seems like a sensible rock. Clutter; they had an affair behind his first wife's back -  so what? That was years ago, and their ship seems to have righted. They're solid now. YES

ANNE AND TIMBO

She's a good stick eh? Head screwed on. Divorced, yes, but who isn't these days. YES


ED AND FAMILY

Young family, if you foster while your children are young you just have to remember your own children even more than before. YES

BILL AND CATH

Lovely couple. He has every right to be a bit skew-whiff, his mother was all over the place and came to a tragic early death. But she clearly loved him and he understands parental love. Again, young family.  BIG YES.

HAZZA AND MEG

Mr and Mrs Clutter. He's been round the block, tough as old boots, but sensitive too. She's seen it all before too, what's more theirs is a home where diversity is appreciated. If I was Blue Sky and these two offered I'd bite their hand off. MONSTER YES

Yeah yeah, I know they've never had to hold down a job or pay a mortgage. I'm looking past that stuff and looking at them as potential Foster Carers - as people who can offer good parenting to other people's children.

You NEED to have been round the block a couple of times because the children who will be coming to you have been round the block a few times too, and it'll help you understand what's going on for them if you've experienced things going on for you.

The Royal Family's clutter would not be a drawback, it would be a credential.

A person or a couple could easily put themselves off applying to foster by worrying that their past is less than perfect. Please, DON'T be. Call someone who will give you a bit of wisdom on it; Blue Sky is as good a place to call as any.

As to the second worry; that there's some magic ingredient you need in fostering; if there is I guess you'd call it by its old-fashioned name.

Love.

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