You know, when I set out to write this, I thought it was going to be fairly straightforward. But then it dawned on me, I don’t really have any straightforward days!
Groomed
A ‘typical’ day for any foster carer might be typical for any mother. Such as wearing out your lungs trying to get a child to finally roll out of bed on a morning. Then holding up various cereal boxes and trying to decipher a variety of expressions so you can work out what is the latest food of the moment. Then there’s the shipping off to school, a whizz around with the hoover, either work or other commitments, before making tea, sorting out uniforms, running baths, more wearing out of the lungs to sort out any arguments over computers or games etc and then finally, a satisfied sigh when it’s ‘lights out’.
That’s what a typical day looks like. But as a foster carer you can throw a few other things into the pot. The child you are getting out of bed isn’t yours. Other people’s children can be unpredictable - we don’t know them like our own, how could we? This morning it took me 45 minutes of pleading, then shouting, then negotiating, before I finally started taking things from the room one item at a time. First thing to go was the TV set, but I think it was the Little Mix poster that was the catalyst. I was just peeling it away from the wall when our little angel leapt out of bed and yelled, ‘fine! I’m getting up! You happy?’ I was J
I will have read all there is to read on a child, but those files only contain a limited amount of information. They don’t reflect what goes on inside a child’s head, and how certain situations can bring up buried memories too. Only last weekend, we took our current young man on a contact visit with his parents. On the surface, everything was great, child and parents had a catch up, we shared ice creams and took happy photographs.
The rest of the evening however, was as far from typical as you could get! I had bought the boy a new outfit to go see his mum and dad, and when we got back he declared he was going straight to his room to read a book. Ten minutes later we heard thuds and bangs coming from upstairs and Mike and I rushed up to see what was happening. His new clothes were ripped to shreds, strewn on the floor which we could barely see because of all the torn up photographs of his parents and family. He was crying and really angry and was bashing his head off the wall. It took a long time to calm things down and it was after midnight before he finally collapsed into bed.
So you see, we don’t have a typical day. Some are sad days, like last weekend, some are mundane days, and some are very happy days; days that make us feel elated to be lucky enough to be doing the job we do. And that’s the nature of it. While we still feel able to make a tiny difference, we will continue to love our atypical days and our atypical lives.
Groomed by Casey Watson is published by Harper Element, £7.99