by Angela Hart
Of course, even under the extended interim care order, Christine had every right to say if she wasn’t happy about some aspect of her daughter’s care. The problem was that although she complained, she didn’t ever do anything herself to try to make things easier for Maria – or for us, although we didn’t expect her to care about that.
Finally, on a dull, wet day when Jonathan and I were going about our business as usual in the florist shop, we got the news we had been waiting for.
‘It’s Jess,’ the social worker said, and I could tell immediately that she was itching to pass something on. ‘Can you talk, Angela?’
The shop was empty of customers, and I said, ‘Yes, I can talk.’ With that I walked with the hands-free receiver to the storeroom at the back, just in case somebody came in.
Jonathan gave me a nod as I said, ‘What is it, Jess? Is it the court decision?’
‘Yes. The final judgement has been made.’
It had taken more than six months since the interim care order for this verdict to come through and I think I’d thought about it every single day, but now the moment had arrived I almost didn’t want to hear it.
‘And?’ I was holding my breath.
‘Maria is being placed under a full care order. We will be fixing up a long-term foster home for her as soon as we can,’ Jess said.
I exhaled. Feelings of relief seeped through me, but I also felt a grip on my heart. Poor Maria. This judgement meant that the state believed her mother and stepfather were not fit to look after her. Finally, Christine had lost her parental rights. I thought about what this really meant. The full care order effectively meant that the state had removed Maria from her mother, and all decisions about her care and wellbeing would be made by the local authority. In that moment I found this very sad, and very worrying, in terms of what evidence must have been presented to the court. I also thought about Maria’s birth father and wondered if he had been involved in the court’s decision process. I suspected not, seeing as from the little I knew there appeared to have been a dispute about who Maria’s biological father was. That upset me too; it was such a desperately sad situation.
I thanked Jess and relayed the news to Jonathan in a deadpan way, as I was still trying to absorb it.
‘It’s shocking, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘What a lot to take in. I wonder how Maria will take it.’
Fortunately, it was almost the end of the school day, so we didn’t have long to wait to find out.
I collected Maria at the gate and walked her home. She seemed to be in a fairly good mood, chatting about a lesson she’d had on Australia, and telling me how she had been the only one in the class to recognise the Australian flag.
‘What a clever girl!’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I would have known that when I was your age!’
Maria giggled. ‘I learned it from one of the jigsaw puzzles I did with your mum,’ she said proudly.
As soon as we were home I sat Maria down, as Jess had asked me to, and explained that the decision about her future had been made at long last.
‘What is it?’ she asked nervously.
‘A full care order,’ I said. ‘You know what that means, don’t you?’
By now Maria knew all the terms used by the local authority and Social Services, as her social worker had explained the system and process to her several times to make sure she understood exactly what was happening, and she’d heard plenty about the process from Babs and Christine too, not to mention Gerry.
‘Yes,’ she said, and then she allowed herself a little smile.
‘How do you feel about that, Maria?’
‘Happy,’ she whispered. ‘I’m safe now.’
Maria then took the smile off her face. Despite everything, she loved her mother and I think it felt to her like treachery to be so relieved when she knew she wouldn’t be going home again.
‘It’s all right, you are allowed to tell me how you feel,’ I said.
‘Thanks. He can’t hear, can he? He can’t see me?’
‘No, Maria. You are safe here.’
With that she asked me to cuddle her, and then she sobbed quietly in my arms for quite some time.
A phone call had been fixed up between Maria and her mum, and this was to be the first one since the news of the full care order had come through. It was obviously going to be a bit awkward, to say the least, but Maria told me she was ‘looking forward’ to talking to her mum.
‘I won’t tell her what I told you,’ she said.
I listened, knowing she meant the comment about being ‘safe’ now.
‘I think I’ll just tell her what I’ve been doing at school and things.’
‘I think that’s a good idea,’ I said. ‘She likes to hear all about the things you’ve been doing, doesn’t she?
‘Yes,’ she smiled. ‘And now she can’t tell me what to do!’
It was a bittersweet moment. I could tell that Maria felt an element of relief that her mum no longer had control over her life. It was as though a protective barrier had been put up, and she felt safe behind it. I was pleased about this, but at the same time I felt the sadness of the situation. Despite everything Christine had done to make life difficult for Maria, and for Jonathan and me, at the end of the day she was a mum who had just had her child taken off her. Of course, there were very good reasons for this, but I still felt Christine’s pain, or at least the pain I imagined she would be feeling.
Maria approached the call bravely, launching into a list of the activities she’d been doing at school and telling her mum about her being the only one in the class to recognise the Australian flag.
‘Australian flag? How did you know?’
‘From doing a jigsaw with—’
Maria stopped herself from saying ‘with Angela’s mum’.
‘A jigsaw?’ Christine snorted. ‘Aren’t you a bit old to be doing jigsaws? Jigsaws are for little kids!’
Maria let this go and started to tell her mum what she had for breakfast, how many days her class teacher had been off sick, how one of her friends’ mums was having another baby, and finally how we had some flowers in the hallway.
‘Angela brings them from the shop when she can’t sell them any more,’ she explained. ‘There are some pink ones, yellow ones and white ones and they are in a blue vase with a picture of a bird on the side. They smell nice and they look pretty, but I prefer the kind of flowers Nanny has. Nanny’s are much better!’
Babs had vases of artificial flowers dotted all around her home and Maria had confided in me once that she didn’t like them because they ‘smelled of dust’. I thought what a shame it was that Maria had to work so hard during these conversations. It must have felt like walking a tightrope. I was just listening in, not taking part in the conversation, but even I felt anxious that Maria might make one false move that could lead to a big fall.
I did not expect what happened next, and clearly nor did Maria.
‘I’m going to put Gerry on, and Frank and Casey,’ Christine said.
Before Maria could reply all three had come on the line to mutter hello. I was perplexed about why Christine had put them on the phone, as they didn’t have anything to say, and seemed to be going through the motions of talking to Maria just because Christine asked them to. Frank and Casey had never spoken to Maria on the phone while she was staying with us, so it all seemed very odd. Maria looked wary, and my guard was up too, as this felt wrong.
Then Christine came back on the phone.
‘Did you wonder why they all wanted to talk to you?’ she asked, somewhat triumphantly.
‘Yes, Mum. Why?’
‘Well, it’s because I thought it might be nice for you to speak to them for the last time. And it’s the last time you’ll speak to me too, because we’re cutting you out of our family. Bye.’
It was honestly that short, and that brutal. The line went dead and Maria stood rooted to the spot, still holding the phone receiver in her hand.
I stepped gently up to her.
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‘Shall I take the phone off you?’
She handed it to me, slowly, clearly in shock.
‘Can I take your hand? Come on, let’s get you a drink. Come here and sit at the kitchen table . . .’
Maria let me take her hand and I guided her like you would a blind person.
She sat down and stared into space as I tried to talk to her. ‘Maria, I’m sorry that just happened. Can I get you a drink? We can talk about it, if you like?’
Maria couldn’t speak.
Eventually I asked, ‘Shall I call Nanny? Would you like that? I’m sure she’d love to see you.’
Maria managed a nod and I called Babs and told her what had happened.
‘What in the name of God?’ she exclaimed. ‘I swear my daughter isn’t right in the head sometimes. What did she say that for?’
‘I have absolutely no idea, Babs.’
Babs came rushing round. Maria was still rooted to the spot at the kitchen table, and now she was chewing her nails and biting her lips, looking as though she was trying hard to hold back the tears.
‘Mummy doesn’t mean it,’ Babs said. ‘She’s just upset about the care order, because it means she can’t make decisions about the things that affect you any more. She’ll change her mind, though. You’ve still me and Granddad, and Colin, Angela and Jonathan too. Everything will be all right. I promise.’
Maria did calm down eventually and even managed a smile at bedtime when one of the boys told a funny story about something that had happened at school. She was still very quiet though, and said she just wanted to read a book and be on her own.
The next day, Christine apparently told Maria’s grandmother, ‘If Social Services don’t think I’m fit to be a mother, then why should I bother to try?’
26
‘Gerry used to play this game’
‘If I was naughty,’ Maria told me one evening, ‘Mum made me eat chilli sauce.’
I was changing the sheets on her bed, while she sat on the floor twiddling the knobs of an Etch A Sketch, and for a moment I paused and glanced towards her, then quickly turned away again and started folding the pillowcases I’d just removed. I didn’t want to make eye contact or stop what I was doing, in case this put Maria off saying anything else. It was only a few days after that awful phone call with her mum, and I wanted to tread extra carefully.
‘Your mum made you eat chilli sauce when you were naughty,’ I repeated, unfolding the pillowcase and then folding it up again.
‘Yes.’ She paused for moment. ‘Chilli sauce is really hot. It makes you cry when you eat a whole spoonful of it. Not cry like when you’re sad, though. It makes your eyes water and your mouth feels like it’s burning. And then you cry because it hurts.’
‘It must taste horrible,’ I said, sitting down on the chair beside Maria’s bed and looking at the pillow I was holding on my lap. ‘I think I would have been sad too, if it had happened to me.’
‘And sometimes . . .’ Maria shook the Etch A Sketch and erased the picture she’d been drawing. ‘Sometimes Gerry put honey in my hair and made me sleep in the cupboard where he said ants and spiders would come in the night to eat it. I don’t think they did though, because the honey was still always there in the morning, and my hair was all hard and sticky.’
‘Maria,’ I started, but she ignored me and carried on talking, which I was glad about. ‘Gerry said that if I didn’t behave myself he would make me sleep in the rabbit hutch. I told him I didn’t care because at least I would be out the house, but he told me he would come outside and scare the living nightlights out of me, and that he’d be able to see if I tried to escape.’
‘The living daylights.’
‘Yes, that’s it. “I’ll scare the living daylights out of you, Maria, do you hear?”’ She said this in a deep, gruff voice.
Then, before I could say anything, she did what she often did in those situations and changed the subject without even pausing for breath. ‘Can I have crisps for my lunch tomorrow?’ she asked.
I wished I could say, ‘Yes, Maria, you can have anything you want!’ but I had to be consistent, so I said that no, she couldn’t have crisps for lunch, but she could have some tomorrow evening, after her meal, if she was still hungry.
‘OK,’ she shrugged, even though she usually threw a little tantrum whenever we returned to this same argument.
‘He used to lock me in my room,’ Maria then said. ‘I wasn’t allowed out, even to go to the bathroom. So I used to pee my pants and he’d be really angry and shout at me like this.’ She held her hand a couple of inches away from her face and shouted into it loudly, ‘“You’re dirty! You’re a crybaby!”’
‘Then he’d get this slipper and hit me on the bottom, really hard. He said it was to teach me not to be a baby, because only babies wet their pants. But I didn’t do it because I was being a baby. It was because he locked the door.’
The more Maria told me, the more I understood why she had so much anger and resentment bubbling away inside her, and why it sometimes seemed as though the smallest, most insignificant incident could trigger a full-scale meltdown. She clearly felt safe now, and as she made disclosure after disclosure I could sense the tension escaping from her body.
‘I’m glad I can talk to you, Angela,’ she smiled. ‘It feels good to talk. You believe me, don’t you?’
A look of worry suddenly shot across her face.
‘Maria, of course I believe you.’
She sighed deeply and smiled again. ‘Good. I hope my next foster carer is as nice as you, but I’d rather stay here. Can I stay here?’
I was very heartened to hear Maria say she’d like to stay with us, but of course the plan was for her to move to a long-time foster carer, freeing Jonathan and me up to take in another teenager who we might be able to help using our specialist knowledge.
I explained to Maria that we would love to have her stay with us for longer, but that it was not our decision, as it was up to Social Services to make the arrangements. It was difficult, as I had no idea how quickly Maria would be moved. She’d had so much uncertainty in her young life, and it wasn’t over yet.
‘Gerry used to play this game,’ she told me the next day, as we were walking to school. ‘He put a big hankie over my eyes and tied it behind my head, really tight, so it hurt and I couldn’t wriggle my face to push it up and see underneath it.’
She scuffed the toe of her shoe on the path and sent a pebble skittering along it in a cloud of dust.
‘Your stepdad made you wear a blindfold,’ I repeated.
‘Yes,’ Maria said. ‘Then Frank and Casey and Gerry used to play this game where I had to walk from the back door in the kitchen to the far end of the living room. If I bumped into anything, I had to go back to the kitchen and start again. But Frank and Casey used to stand in front of me, or jump out and scare me, and they put things on the floor so that I’d fall over them. Then they’d laugh at me and say I was stupid.’
‘That doesn’t sound like a game at all,’ I told her.
‘He used to play lots of horrible games,’ she said. ‘Now that they’ve got this full care order, does that mean I can get my hair cut without having to ask Mum first?’
‘I’ll check with the social worker,’ I answered, following Maria’s lead in changing the subject. ‘But I’m sure the answer will be yes.’
Maria was now almost ten but her morning ritual still included trying to tame her tangled hair. Though she didn’t call out in the night any more, she often told me that she had bad dreams, woke up several times in the night and was scared of the dark.
‘I couldn’t stop turning and tossing,’ she said.
‘Tossing and turning? Oh, that must be why your hair is in such a terrible tangle again! Come here, let’s get the spray out and see what we can do with this haystack.’
‘I thought you said it was a bird’s nest?’
‘It used to be, but I think it’s grown!’
Maria had asked me several tim
es if she could have her hair cut to a more manageable length and style, but to date her mother had always refused to give her permission. Now, though, it was up to the local authority to make that sort of decision, although as a courtesy they would always approach the mother first. A few days later, Maria emerged from the local hair salon with her hair cut into a neat, shoulder-length bob, and ‘tackling the bird’s nest’ became a thing of the past.
‘That’s a set of weights off my shoulder,’ she said, as she walked down the street.
‘I can imagine it is,’ I said, smiling at how she’d not quite got the phrase right once again, but also thinking what a symbolic statement it was.
It takes a long time for an abused, anxious child to learn to trust anyone again. Coming to terms with childhood trauma is a subject I’ve studied over the years, as scientists have learned more and more about the workings of the brain. Several recent studies have discovered that traumatic experiences in early childhood actually cause areas of the brain to develop in ways that it can take years to reconfigure, if it’s possible to do so at all. There still hasn’t been any conclusion to the nature–nurture debate – about whether our personalities are dictated primarily by our DNA or by our early experiences. What is known, however, is that the nature part of the equation, which involves the DNA, is set in stone and can’t be altered, but that there are parts of our genetic make-up that can change as a result of the experiences we have as babies, or even while we’re still in the womb.
When babies and young children are exposed to stress-inducing events, their bodies produce excess amounts of the stress hormone cortisol, which has a damaging effect on the development of the brain. There seems to be some indication that the ‘magic age’ in terms of brain development is three, because although high levels of cortisol do more damage before the age of three, any damage that is done can also be more easily reversed before that age. However, it is thought that as children get older it takes much more time and effort to reconfigure the ‘abnormal’ neural pathways.