Maria had finally had her ears pierced, for her eleventh birthday, which was something Social Services ran past Christine, as a courtesy. Thankfully she agreed without a fuss – unfortunately she still tried to criticise Jonathan and me and cause trouble sometimes, despite the fact she no longer had the final say on any decisions relating to Maria’s care.
Maria was delighted to have pierced ears and Jonathan and I were pleased too, as we felt that, at eleven, she was now old enough to look after them and cope with having pierced ears. However, Maria then decided she wanted to have a second piercing in each ear. She had started secondary school by now and had made a new set of friends, which I was very pleased to see. However, she claimed that ‘everybody’ in her group of friends had two lots of piercings, and she asked me about this one morning over breakfast.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I think you’re too young for that.’
‘But that’s not fair!’
‘Maria, I am not changing my mind.’
She was furious, and she then asked Jonathan the same question. To Maria’s fury he gave exactly the same response, which set her off on a rant she had had in the past, about how we were ‘telepathic’ as we both knew what the other was saying.
‘It’s not fair!’ she repeated over and over again.
‘We’re not changing our minds,’ we chorused, which irritated her even more.
‘I hate you!’ she said. Then, out of the blue she shouted, ‘My mum says you got paid by Social Services to take me on holiday and that you didn’t pay for it yourself. So you should be giving me more money! Then I can pay for my own piercings!’
I was very taken aback by the accusation, particularly after we’d had such a lovely holiday, but I was incensed by it too, and there was no way I was going to let it pass unchallenged.
‘Hang on a minute,’ I said. ‘Social Services did not pay for your holiday. We paid for it ourselves, because we wanted to take you with us, so that you’d have a nice time.’
‘Oh yes they did!’ she snapped, standing in front of me with her hands on her hips and fixing me with a defiant glare.
‘OK, I’ll prove it to you.’ Sidestepping Maria, I unlocked the drawer of the desk where I kept her file, handed her a letter and said, ‘Read that.’
It was the letter from the social worker stating that Social Services would not be able to pay for the holiday and unfortunately had no recollection or record of ever promising to do so.
‘We did ask, because they had already offered, but when they refused we were perfectly happy to pay for you ourselves. See?’
‘Oh,’ Maria said, very quietly, after she’d read it. ‘Well, Mum said . . .’
The next time Christine called Maria took the phone cautiously, and looked deep in concentration as she listened to what her mother was telling her. Christine told Maria she had split up with Gerry and also said, ‘Did you know, Maria, Angela and Jonathan have lied about paying for your holiday.’
Maria gave a little shrug, went very quiet and looked sad. She had seen the proof about the holiday with her own eyes, and on this occasion Christine’s lies had been well and truly exposed.
‘Do you want a cuddle?’ I asked when the phone conversation was over.
She nodded, and we stood in the hallway for a few minutes together silently, having a hug. There was no need for words. I could see that Maria felt hurt and I felt very sorry for her. It was completely beyond me how a mother could lie so cruelly and unnecessarily to her own daughter, but it was all part of the on-off injections of antagonism that we had come to expect from Christine.
‘So she split up with Gerry? I said eventually.
‘Yes. Good ribbons to him.’
I smiled sadly. ‘Good riddance.’
‘Whatever, that’s what I meant. I’m glad he’s gone, psycho!’
Unfortunately, even though Maria knew that her mother’s claim about us lying over the holiday money wasn’t true, she started to become fixated by the idea that we were getting more money for looking after her than we were spending on her. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Jonathan and I looked after children for the love of the work we did, and because we wanted to help them grow into happy adults who could function well in society and lead a full and meaningful life.
Although foster carers are paid, it is a not a huge amount, and Jonathan and I manage financially because we also run a flower shop. Without that, there would be no holidays or any of the variety of other ‘extras’ every child needs. It’s one of the paradoxes of fostering: if it was well paid, it would probably attract people who are more concerned about money than they are about the wellbeing of the children in their care; but as it isn’t well paid, some aspects of the welfare of these children is reliant on the altruism of their foster carers.
Sadly, Jonathan and I could see that it was very easy for Christine to make Maria feel insecure about our motives for fostering. Even though she’d come on in leaps and bounds since she first moved in with us, Maria still had low self-esteem, which was regularly stoked by things her mother told her.
Incidentally, Christine never did give any reasonable explanation or apology for telling Maria she was being cut out of the family. She simply invited herself back into her daughter’s life when it suited her, prompting Jonathan to once again compare her to a ghoulish, shadowy figure. ‘What did I say?’ he said one time, when he was feeling particularly riled. ‘She’s like a ghost, I swear. Boo! Now you see her, now you don’t.’
He tried to say it in a jokey way, but once again the reference gave me the creeps, as it was a bit too close to the truth.
Christine’s constant complaints began to prompt aggressive behaviour from Maria. For instance, she threw a shoe down the hallway one day when I asked her to hurry up and be on her way to school. She went on her own now that she was at secondary school and was always leaving at the last minute, which made me feel anxious as I was trying to teach her the importance of punctuality.
‘What does it matter to you? I’m not your kid! What do you care?’ The shoe knocked over a vase of flowers, and water splattered all over the floor.
On another occasion, she kicked the hubcap on Jonathan’s car because he’d told her he wasn’t going to be able to give her a lift to her friend’s house, as he had work to do.
‘You don’t care about me! I’ll walk then. I’ll probably get murdered but you wouldn’t care, would you?’
After that particularly upsetting comment we asked if someone from Social Services could have a quiet word with Christine. Fortunately, whatever was said to her seemed to have the desired effect for a short while, although it wasn’t long before she found something else to complain about.
One of her gripes was that we didn’t spend enough on Maria’s Christmas presents that year, which was extremely rich seeing as the previous year, when Gerry was still on the scene, Maria wasn’t supposed to have had any Christmas presents at all!
It may simply have been sour grapes on Christine’s part, because Maria had been so obviously pleased with what we’d bought for her, while her mother had given her something someone had given to her and she didn’t want. In fact, though, Maria’s mother rarely gave Maria any presents at all, for Christmas or birthdays, even after Gerry left and Maria was no longer expected to follow his religion.
Jess, who was still our support social worker, was livid when she heard that Maria’s mother had complained about the presents. Maria was very upset about it too, and it was heartbreaking to see that her pleasure had been tainted by anxiety when she told us, ‘I didn’t complain about the presents you gave me. Honestly I didn’t. I was really happy with what I got. Then I showed them to my mum and she went on the internet and worked out what everything had cost. But I think she made a mistake because . . .’
‘It’s all right, Maria,’ I said. ‘We didn’t think you complained to your mum about your presents. And the only thing that really matters is that you like them.’
‘I really do,’ she said. ‘They’re the best presents anyone has ever given me.’
Christine and Gerry got back together for a short time, then split up again. They were obviously leading a very tumultuous life, always falling out, having horrendous rows, then making up only to break up again.
‘I’m so depressed I’m going to have to go into a mental hospital, Maria,’ Christine told her daughter one night.
At this point I was no longer required to listen to Christine’s side of phone conversations – I think because Maria was now a little older, and also because Christine had complained bitterly about this being a breach of her ‘human rights’ – but Maria had developed a habit of relaying all the key pieces of news she heard from her mum. I didn’t mind, as it helped Maria unload, which she very nearly always had to do these days.
Although we were cautious about what we said to Maria, as we didn’t want to criticise her mother, Jonathan and I found it very uncomfortable when Christine passed on details about her relationship bust-ups and mental health. Sometimes I felt it was right to pass on certain information to Social Services, and when I heard about the depression and the mental hospital I did mention this to my support social worker. It was a relief when I subsequently learned that it was a complete lie that Christine was having to go into a mental hospital, but I was angry nonetheless.
‘It was a despicable thing to say to Maria,’ I vented privately to Jonathan, feeling very protective of Maria. ‘Imagine what that does to a child’s brain – first the anxiety because she thinks her mother’s ill, then the confusion when she inevitably finds out it was just some story she had made up?’
Jonathan and I also became increasingly frustrated with Christine’s inability to move on from Gerry. It felt as though she was gradually abandoning all attempts to sort her life out. She allowed herself to be sucked back into all the rows, drama and aggressive behaviour that revolved around, and were encouraged by, Gerry.
‘There must be reasons why Gerry turned into an angry bully of a man,’ I said to Jonathan one day, when Gerry and Christine had got back together yet again. Maria had recounted a story about a bad argument they had, which her mother had given a blow-by-blow account of.
‘Yes, but I’m not sure what they are,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you get a sense with people that their aggression is a learned response or that they hide behind it when they’re feeling out of their depth. But Gerry just seems to be a really angry man, all of the time. What makes someone like that? I find it really worrying.’
It was clear there had to have been something seriously wrong in Gerry’s life to cause him to behave the way he did. Part of me wanted desperately to find out more about the man, and part of me was afraid of what secrets he held.
‘What on earth causes a person to be so cruel and nasty all the time?’ I said.
As I spoke, Jonathan and I exchanged glances. Of course, our years of fostering had taught us that a person could experience all kinds of unspeakable, unthinkable horrors in their life that can affect their behaviour. Time and again it had been reiterated to us in the regular training sessions we attend that it is not the person who is bad, but the behaviour, and that the behaviour is typically a reaction to life events the person has been exposed to.
The social workers had never given away any private details of Gerry’s life over and above the bare minimum they had to pass on to us when we took Maria in. Babs had never given any meaningful insight into the man’s character either, so all we could do was listen to our gut feelings and hope that we never had to deal with Gerry again. More importantly, we hoped that Maria could be protected from his negative influences on her life as much as possible.