The Girl and the Ghosts

by Angela Hart

  Jonathan was good at the playfulness part, and could usually raise a smile from Maria when she was sulking by ‘acting the goat’ and singing the silly song he made up about a girl called Maria, which had become her signature tune ever since the first time Jonathan sang it when she stayed with us when she was seven. Maria would blush and tell him to ‘stop it’, but it was obvious that she enjoyed the attention, which was kind and positive and in stark contrast to the unkind, negative attention she was used to getting at home.

  We always accepted what Maria told us about her past, which she often did by mentioning some incident in an apparently nonchalant tone of voice while we were busy doing something else, so that she didn’t need to make eye contact with anyone. And whenever she did tell us something, we responded in a similarly matter-of-fact tone, were never judgemental and always told her, ‘It was not your fault’.

  We would be curious by asking her, ‘I wonder why your stepdad did that,’ when she told us about the nasty ‘games’ he played on her. Then we would empathise by telling her, ‘I think you are very brave, Maria, the way you are learning to deal with all the things that have happened to you.’

  ‘I like it when you listen to me,’ she told me one day, not long after this incident with Amelia, and Maria telling Tom I’d hit her. ‘I tried to tell him once that I was feeling sad about something, but he said,’ she mimicked a man’s deep, angry voice, ‘“I don’t want to hear about your feelings. What are you trying to do? Bore me to death? Don’t come whingeing and whining to me. Just deal with it. Go on, sod off, crybaby!”’

  It was understandable that, having never been allowed to express her feelings before, it was some time before Maria began to realise and accept the fact that she wasn’t alone any more, that we cared about her and that it was OK to feel whatever she felt. By explaining to her, either explicitly or by example, that although she would be held responsible for her behaviour, she wasn’t responsible for the emotions that elicited it, we gradually helped her to start learning to deal with, communicate and accept her own feelings in a way she had never previously been able, or allowed, to do.

  Maria could be quite a clingy child, sitting very close beside me on the sofa when we were watching television, for example, and often trying to get my attention whenever I was talking to someone else. One of her complaints when she was in a sulk was that, ‘No one cares about me.’ It didn’t matter how many times we told her, ‘We care about you, Maria,’ she still didn’t believe it. Part of the problem was that the message she’d been receiving until then was that she didn’t deserve anyone’s care and affection. We knew it was going to take a very long time to persuade her otherwise.

  One day, when she was in a temper, she locked herself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out for ages. We tried coaxing her. Then we sat in silence for a while, hoping that her protest would lose its dramatic appeal if she thought we’d left her to it and that there was no one there to witness it. I don’t remember what triggered that particular tantrum – it could have been something, or nothing. But when she did eventually come out of the bathroom, she was still sulking, ‘Because nobody cares about me.’ I gave her a cuddle, and we talked about how she felt until she cheered up again.

  We’ve fostered many children whose reactions, at times, seemed to be out of all proportion to the events that precipitated them. I was interested to read recently about some research that’s been done which indicates that, for a child who has always had to be alert to the signs of trouble kicking off, an incident that might appear to be insignificant to anyone else can trigger a response in a part of the brain that’s constantly on red alert. The brain then responds as it would to the threat of being attacked – hence the out-of-proportion reactions we sometimes witnessed.

  There were certain triggers that made Maria behave as if she were being attacked, including one that she was particularly sensitive to, which was the word ‘bad’, I think because her stepfather always told her she was a bad person. One example of the effect it had occurred when she was at her grandparents’ house one day, playing with a cousin who was about the same age as she was. The two children were squabbling mildly as they played and eventually Maria’s aunt – the little boy’s mother – said, not angrily at all apparently, ‘I don’t know, Maria, you and your cousin are as bad as each other.’

  ‘It was as if a switch had been flicked inside Maria’s head,’ Babs told me later. ‘She’d just been grumbling and sulking a bit before then. But she suddenly flew at the poor little lad and started hitting him.’

  It had taken the combined efforts of her aunt and grandmother to pull Maria off her cousin. When everything had calmed down again, she told her grandmother, ‘It’s true what Mummy says about you, you’re not really a nice person. You just pretend to be.’

  It was always a big issue to Maria, the dilemma about whether she could trust people. She seemed to suspect that people who seemed to be nice were just pretending and were really as ‘bad’ as she believed she was. I think that believing she was ‘bad’ was also one of the reasons why her tantrums could sometimes be prompted by something as simple as someone being nice to her: the trauma and hurt she’d experienced as a young child had taught her to be defensive as a means of self-protection, and her instinct when anyone threatened her defence was to react with anger.

  I discovered that, at the school she had gone to when the family moved out of the area, Maria had been due to see a child psychologist because of the way she behaved, but had left before an appointment could be arranged for her. This was a shame, as it’s very difficult to get access to mental health support for any children, not only those in foster care, and the opportunity didn’t arise again.

  Unfortunately, there just aren’t the staff available to deal with even a fraction of the number of children who would benefit from psychological intervention. In our experience, they usually have to be in crisis before they can get an appointment.

  Sometimes, when Maria got upset about something and ran away, and Jonathan had to sprint after her and bring her back, I would try to encourage her to talk about what was wrong. But her usual response was either a sullen, ‘No one cares about me,’ or ‘You wouldn’t understand if I told you.’ The truth was, of course, that she didn’t understand it herself.

  When she was angry with us for some reason that we couldn’t put our finger on, we would say something like, ‘You sound angry and upset. Are you?’ Or sometimes I’d say, ‘Look at me, Maria. Now, take a deep breath and count to ten.’ I always found that useful when I was growing up, and I still occasionally do it now, and I would tell Maria this.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Maria would say. ‘I don’t believe you.’ Or she’d respond by saying something to us that wasn’t very nice, and we’d tell her, calmly, ‘Try saying that again, but this time in a nicer way.’ Then later, when she had calmed down, she would sometimes say, ‘I don’t know how you can be so calm with me. I know I wouldn’t be able to do it if I was you.’

  ‘We can all say things in the heat of the moment that we later regret,’ we’d tell her.

  In fact, though, Jonathan and I have learned over the years not to speak our minds, however sorely we’re tempted to do so in some situations. Your thought processes are always clearer when you’ve had a chance to step away, mull over what’s happened or been said, and maybe have a good night’s sleep too. It’s never a good idea to let off steam and respond in the heat of the moment, whereas positive comments made after some thought can actually be useful.

  Sometimes, your automatic response to a situation has less to do with what’s happening at that particular moment and more to do with other things that are going on in your life – how much sleep you’ve had; what’s happening within your own family. But it’s not so much what you feel as how you handle your feelings that matters in a potentially confrontational situation. So, if you do speak without thinking, particularly when you’re angry or upset, you might end up saying something that makes everything worse.<
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  We have supervision with our support social worker every six weeks, which is very useful in that respect, because it enables us to talk about things that have happened, which is something foster carers can’t do with anyone else, not even their family or close friends. Jonathan and I have also learned that when things are not running smoothly, which they don’t always do in any fostering household, you have to take care of yourself without feeling guilty about doing so. That’s why we like to go out together occasionally for an evening and spoil ourselves, which we can do thanks to my mum’s willingness to babysit.

  Eventually, more by accident than design, I did find one way of helping to defuse some of Maria’s angry outbursts. A girl we’d fostered a few years earlier was into all kinds of art, and after she gave me a set of glitter tattoo pens as a Christmas present, I got quite good at face painting – for the children we fostered, I hasten to add, not for myself! When Maria told me one day that she wanted to get a tattoo as soon as she was old enough, it gave me an idea. The next time she was angry, I offered to do a tattoo on her arm, in glittery, washable pen.

  The combination of her focusing on watching what I was drawing and having one-to-one time with me seemed to help her to self-regulate and deal with her feelings. And, after that first time, she often asked me to do a tattoo for her when she was angry or upset.

  ‘If only they’d taught us that at foster training years ago,’ Jonathan mused one day.

  ‘I thought the same myself,’ I laughed. ‘But having said that, I’m not sure it would work on every child. I can’t really see Tom and Dillon parading around with glitter tattoos, can you?’

  Jonathan laughed too. It was moments like that that often rescued the day and helped me stay positive when the going got tough.

  25

  ‘I wonder how Maria will take it’

  As the legal process dragged on, Christine not only continued to make numerous complaints about things she thought Jonathan and I should or shouldn’t have done, but she also started being blatantly obstructive and refusing to talk to us, or even look at us, during the couple of meetings she came to at the Social Services offices in town. Then she stopped coming at all.

  We would always wait for a while, in case she was held up, before carrying on without her. When she didn’t show up she would always be informed afterwards of everything that was said and decided at the meetings. Copies of the notes taken would be sent to her and there was usually something that required her consent. But Christine rarely answered the letters she was sent by Social Services either. When she did, it was usually just to complain about something else. For example, once she criticised us for telling Maria she couldn’t have her ears pierced. In fact, we’d told Maria this was not a decision we were able to take, and that she would have to talk to her social worker and Christine herself. Had we allowed Maria to have her ears pierced without Christine’s consent, I’m sure she would have had a lot more to complain about, and quite rightly so.

  When Christine was challenged by Social Services about why she didn’t attend the meetings she said, ‘I’d prefer to go to the house,’ meaning our house.

  Jonathan and I have to gauge on an individual basis whether it’s appropriate for a particular parent to come to our house. And although Maria’s mother had been a few times before the interim care order came into effect, and her grandmother came often to see Maria and have a cup of tea, we never hosted the organised meetings at our house, and in fact we had reached the point where we did not want Christine in our home.

  When a foster child comes to live with us, our house is their new home, for however long they stay, which might be for just a few days or, in some cases, for years. For some children, our house might be the only place they’ve ever lived where no one shouts or is unkind or cruel to them. Once they begin to feel safe there, we need to make sure nothing happens to change that. We learned this lesson the hard way, when a very vindictive mother flew into a rage one day and said some terrible things that left her child in tears. We realised after the experience that meetings at which sensitive issues might be discussed are best held elsewhere.

  Another reason, of course, is that if there are other children living in the house at the time, their opinion of a particular child might be coloured by the fact that he or she has a mother or father who they’ve heard swearing and shouting. It can make things very difficult for a child in that situation if the other children think the mum or dad is ‘horrible’, because however badly they’ve been treated by their parents, most children still love them, and it’s very hurtful to them if other people are critical. That’s why, whatever Jonathan and I know about a child’s background and the sometimes unspeakable experiences they’ve been subjected to – which might include sexual and physical abuse – we have to work with their parents, and we are always nice to them. So we continued to be civil to Maria’s mother, however infuriated we were by some of her complaints and actions, but we did not agree to any meetings with her in our home.

  Another of the complaints Christine made to Social Services was about something that had been said by Dillon. Normally, Dillon and Maria got on very well, but one day, after he’d seen her chatting with a boy on the playing fields behind our house, he teased her about it and asked if it was her boyfriend. It was just a bit of fun, but her reactions could be unpredictable, and on that occasion she flew into a rage. Then the next time she spoke to her mother, she told her what Dillon had said, and Christine complained to Social Services.

  You couldn’t be a very effective foster carer if you weren’t able to bite your tongue when something like that happens. What was irritating in this particular case, however, was that Maria’s mother had complained about some harmless teasing by a lad who had been nicer to her child than almost anyone in her own family had ever been.

  ‘My stepdad said that if Dillon does it again, I should deck him,’ Maria told us later.

  ‘Did he now?’ Jonathan’s tone was ironic. ‘Well, as I expect you realise, there are quite a few reasons why that wouldn’t be a good idea. I’m not sure whether top of the list would be because hitting someone is never the solution to any problem or because Dillon is a strapping lad, and you’re . . . well, you’re not!’

  ‘My stepdad says I’m so feeble that anyone would know I wasn’t his kid,’ Maria said quietly.

  ‘You’re not feeble at all,’ Jonathan retorted hastily. ‘That wasn’t what I meant. But Dillon is a big teenage boy . . .’

  ‘My stepdad used to tell Frank and Casey to punch me,’ Maria interrupted. ‘Then he’d tell me to hit them back. He always got really angry with me because I didn’t do it. But they’re much bigger than me, and I was scared that if I did try to hit them, they’d really hurt me. And I knew he wouldn’t have done anything if they had.’

  ‘What your stepfather did was not nice and should never have happened, Maria,’ I told her. ‘As Jonathan said, it’s always wrong to hit someone. You did the right thing and we are very proud of you for not hitting back.’ I was unafraid of speaking so bluntly about Gerry because I believed what Maria was telling me and I wanted to get the message across to her that physical abuse, and inciting physical abuse, is never acceptable.

  Fortunately, Maria had only told her mother that Dillon had teased her because it was something to say, so she wasn’t influenced by the fact that her mother had complained about him to Social Services. It would have been a shame if it had affected her relationship with Dillon, because they generally got on very well and she looked up to him, and to Tom.

  I think the relationship between children fostered in the same home has quite a special and unique dimension, because they are in the same boat and understand what life is like for one another. I suppose it’s similar to us talking to other foster carers: only someone who has had the same sort of experiences as we’ve had can really know how we feel.

  When we were introduced to the first child we ever fostered, I can remember looking at the photographs we’d been sent
of her and thinking, ‘She’s going to be our child.’ It was a very special feeling, particularly because Jonathan and I hadn’t had any children of our own. But, of course, the children who came to stay with us weren’t, and wouldn’t ever be, our children. They already had parents and other family members, and most of them wanted to be with their own families, who, unfortunately, couldn’t, wouldn’t or weren’t allowed to look after them at that time.

  It was a few years after we fostered that first girl that we discovered we couldn’t have children of our own, and since then a friend who is a member of a local church has told us many times that it was God’s will for us to look after ‘damaged’ children – ‘Because you’re so good at it,’ she says.

  What Jonathan and I have both realised since then is that although we care for the children we foster to the very best of our ability, and we care about them too, our role in their lives will only ever be peripheral and temporary. Becoming emotionally attached to the children you look after is a risky business for a foster carer. We would do anything we could to support them, both during and after the time when they’re actually living with us. But we try not to allow ourselves to become too deeply attached, because however long children may live with us, if we allow ourselves to forget that we are not their parents we could very easily get hurt. We put our heart and souls into fostering, but trying not to be entirely wholehearted as a foster carer is really just a case of self-preservation.

  That said, we certainly care about them very deeply, and however much we want to protect ourselves from being hurt, ultimately the truth is that we can’t help but love the children.

  Yet another complaint from Christine was that Maria had started referring to her stepfather by his name, Gerry, instead of calling him Dad, as Christine told her to. I think she did still say ‘Dad’ when she was speaking directly to his face, but Babs had apparently told Christine that she didn’t do it when he wasn’t actually there. Christine complained to Social Services, although I’m not sure what she thought they could, or would, do about it.