Maria continued to have the weekly calls with her mum, or at least they were scheduled to take place – Christine wasn’t always available. When the calls did go ahead as planned Maria still seemed to be on high alert a lot of the time, choosing her words carefully and racking her brain to provide details of her daily life that hopefully wouldn’t bring any criticism. More than once I saw Maria visibly sigh and drop her shoulders in relief when the call ended.
One day Gerry phoned up, out of the blue. It was around the time of day when Christine was due to speak to Maria, and as I recognised the phone number on the digital display I told Maria she could answer the call. She had been in a really good mood, but the moment she lifted the receiver I saw her shoulders shoot up to her ears and the colour drained from her face.
‘Gerry!’ she said, sounding nervous and shocked.
When Christine called I always pressed the speaker button straight away, as Social Services asked me to do and Maria knew to do the same, but I had no instructions for dealing with Gerry. I didn’t want to antagonise him by taking the phone off Maria or have him hear me tampering with the phone by switching it to speaker mode, and so I decided to just stay close by and listen to Maria’s half of the conversation. That way I felt I was protecting her as best I could without potentially causing trouble.
‘Yes,’ Maria nodded. ‘No. No, I didn’t know that. I am not sure I believe in . . . what? How did you know?’
Maria was as white as a sheet, and I said loudly, ‘Are you all right, Maria?’
‘I’ve got to go!’ she said hastily. ‘Bye Gerry!’
Her little hand was trembling as she replaced the receiver back in its cradle.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked again.
‘Fine, all fine!’ she said breezily. ‘Gerry is fine! All good!’
‘It’s unusual for him to phone up, are you sure?’
‘Oh yes, he’s only looking after me, Angela! Are you jealous or something?’
I let this go. I had no idea what Gerry had been saying but all the signs were that he was playing with Maria’s young mind, and I wasn’t going to allow myself to be sucked into his games.
We were looking after another little girl that day, so that her foster carer could go to a funeral. Amelia was a couple of years younger than Maria, and they had seemed to be getting on quite well until the phone call from Gerry.
The girls had been playing a computer game together, and when Maria went back to it she suddenly started bossing Amelia around, telling her she wasn’t allowed to play the game because she was stupid and she’d break it. ‘You’re too thick to play it,’ Maria told Amelia, then started chanting, in a sing-song voice, ‘Amelia is useless. Amelia’s a fool.’
When Jonathan and I told Maria to stop calling Amelia names and leave her alone, she ignored us and continued to taunt and tease her, until eventually Amelia got so upset she screamed at her, ‘I am not stupid. Leave me alone. I do know how to play this game. We’ve got it at home.’
I touched Maria’s shoulder to attract her attention and told her again, ‘Please, Maria, leave Amelia alone.’
‘You’re all stupid,’ she shouted, spinning round on her heels and then storming out of the room and up the stairs. ‘Gerry is right! Stupid and jealous and he’s cleverer than you! He knows you talk about me behind my back!’
Had that been the purpose of Gerry’s call? To slyly try to turn Maria against us in her final few weeks? He would know all too well that Jonathan and I did talk about Maria between us. That was part of our job, to discuss the children in our care, support one another and hopefully share information that would make children’s lives better. I had no idea why he would use this fact to try to undermine us at this stage. Maria would be leaving us soon whatever the verdict of the court, so what was he worried about, and why was he meddling like this?
‘Some people are just plain nasty, I’m afraid,’ Jonathan said, when we talked about it later. ‘There is no reasonable explanation why anybody would want to fill Maria’s head with nonsense about us, or nonsense of any kind. But Gerry is not reasonable, is he? We know that, unfortunately.’
I discovered later that when Maria went upstairs she told Tom I’d hit her. I didn’t confront Maria about this but just made a note of it in my daily log. Maria’s social worker spoke to her about it the next day, and Maria admitted I hadn’t actually hit her and that she’d just said I had because she was in a bad mood after speaking to her stepfather.
I can remember my father telling me when I was a child that he was often told as a little boy that ‘children should be seen and not heard’. It was not something he agreed with, and his willingness to sit down and talk to me about anything that was troubling me is something I have always remembered, and it’s something I try to do with all the children we foster.
What was also very much a factor in raising children when my dad was young was the commonly held belief that children ‘need to be taught to behave’. I suppose that’s true to the extent that there are certain codes of behaviour that are acceptable in the society we live in, which children don’t have any innate knowledge or understanding of, and so have to learn about. But trying to teach children to behave when they have experienced the sort of emotional abuse that Maria had been subjected to, which was reflected in her frequent outbursts of anger, was not the answer. Maria’s behaviour was driven by her emotions, over which she had no control. So before she could be ‘taught to behave’, she had to learn how to deal with her feelings. That is why I didn’t confront her about telling Tom I’d hit her. Instead, I waited for the next opportunity to ask her how she was feeling and to make it clear to her that she could talk to me any time she liked.
I find the training Jonathan and I did on PACE – playfulness, acceptance, curiosity and empathy – very helpful in situations like Maria’s.
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.
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.