After Maria’s mother moved out of the area again Maria seemed to become more settled at school, and both her behaviour and her work showed a marked improvement. In time, we heard that Christine was in a relationship with a new boyfriend, and eventually Babs told us that Christine was expecting another baby, a little girl.
‘Isn’t that good news!’ Maria said, a little unconvincingly.
I couldn’t work out if she was putting on an act or not, but something was off about her reaction.
‘It’s probably a shock,’ Jonathan reasoned. ‘I mean, what must Maria think about her mum having another daughter, when she hasn’t exactly raised Maria?’
I felt Jonathan was right. It’s a big deal for any sibling when a new baby is on the way, and it must have been difficult for Maria to grasp how her mother could raise another child while Maria herself was in care. I made a point of telling Maria she could talk to me about this or anything else that might be worrying her, but she told me flatly she was ‘over the moon’ about the new baby.
Maria’s visits to her grandparents had been reinstated by this time and one Sunday, when Babs had brought her home and we were sitting in the kitchen drinking a cup of tea, Maria said, ‘My mum says that as soon as she gets a new place, I can go and live with her and my baby sister, and then . . .’
‘Goodness, are you all right?’ I asked Babs, who was suddenly coughing loudly and seemed to be choking on the mouthful of tea she’d just swallowed.
‘Yes. Fine, thanks,’ she said, as soon as she was able to speak. ‘But, well, that’s not um . . . That’s not right, is it Maria? Your mum didn’t say that to you, did she? She wrote it in that letter she sent you.’
If I hadn’t already suspected that something was wrong, I certainly did now, looking at the anxious expression on Maria’s face as she hastily corrected herself.
‘That’s what I meant,’ she said, glancing at me sideways and then quickly looking away again. ‘Mum said it in . . . in a letter.’
It was clear to me then that Maria was having some form of unsupervised contact with her mum, either on the phone or in person. I was confident she wasn’t speaking to her from our home phone, as I monitored all the calls and phone bills, and I had no evidence she used the mobile phone to talk to Christine either. I suspected, from the way Babs behaved that day, that despite the fact Christine had moved away, she might still be sneaking round to Babs’s house when Maria was visiting. However, I had no proof of that either.
Jonathan and I talked about it later, when Maria had gone to bed, but there wasn’t really anything we could do except report the conversation to our social worker and try to encourage Maria to focus on her schoolwork, which, along with her behaviour, was suddenly beginning to go downhill again.
Another issue that was concerning us was Maria’s weight. She had always been fairly slight at primary school, but now she had started putting on quite a lot of weight. We knew she didn’t have the healthiest diet in the world as we still had to regulate the amount of crisps and Coke she consumed, and she also much preferred to eat a chocolate bar than a piece of fruit, which I understood but couldn’t let her get away with, except as a treat.
What we hadn’t realised, however, was that Maria had started to eat vast quantities of junk food, including multipacks of crisps and Coca-Cola by the litre, when she was round at Babs’s house. We found this out from Maria herself, but unfortunately not before she had already gained a lot of weight.
‘I can have what I want at Nan’s house,’ she began to tell me, crossly, whenever I wouldn’t let her have something unhealthy she wanted to eat or drink. I suspected that Babs gave Maria whatever she wanted partly because she was trying to make up for all the negative, hurtful things that had happened to her, and partly because it made for a more peaceful life if she and Stanley said yes rather than no. The problem was that although Maria was happy to eat the food, she was becoming very unhappy about the weight she was gaining, which only served to reduce her already low self-esteem.
We discovered much later that what was also contributing to Maria’s weight gain was that the dinner money we gave her every day to pay for her lunch at school was actually being spent on sweets. Apparently, she had been sneaking over to her grandparents’ house for a cooked lunch every day and spending her dinner money at a sweet shop she passed on the way. Although Maria wasn’t allowed to leave school at lunchtime, unbelievably it seemed her teachers weren’t aware that it was happening any more than we were. In hindsight, all of these bad habits helped to explain why Maria continued to gain weight despite the healthy food we gave her for her evening meal every night, and in spite of our best efforts to get her walking and doing other physical activities.
As her weight increased we noticed that the trampoline Maria had loved when we first got it hadn’t been used by her for months and months. We had other children staying with us by now, filling the rooms vacated by Tom and Dillon, and they loved the trampoline, and often asked Maria to go out and jump on it with them, but she always refused. She avoided PE like the plague, to the point where we got a letter from the school saying that the next time she didn’t participate in PE she would be put in detention.
I can’t remember now how many letters we received about it, or how many detentions she was actually given, as there were so many of them. Nothing the school or we did to encourage her to do PE made a difference, unfortunately, and in the end the school simply gave up. So, from the age of about fourteen, Maria didn’t ever do PE again.
It was a vicious circle, I suppose, and probably a common one among adolescents: because Maria ate unhealthy food – far more than we realised – she put on weight; as she got heavier and less fit, she didn’t want to expose herself to teasing, or even bullying, at home by trampolining with other children or at school by doing PE; then when she stopped doing PE, she put on more weight and became even more reluctant to do any sporting activities.
It’s hard enough being a teenager with low self-esteem, but at that time it seemed as though all the models in the magazines aimed at teenage girls were Photoshopped, and the images portrayed by pop stars and the like were completely unattainable and ultimately demoralising to a girl like Maria. I think today we are far more aware of Photoshopping and so we can discuss this with teenagers, but back then it was more of a hidden practice, and people generally believed what they saw and felt inadequate by comparison. The catastrophic result was that insecure girls like Maria thought along the lines of, ‘I can never look like that, I’m fat and therefore I’m a failure.’
Jonathan and I tried everything we could think of to help improve Maria’s physical health, including buying her a fantastic new bicycle, which she rode to her grandparents’ house once and then we never saw again, despite their repeated assurances that next time they brought her home in the car, they’d bring it with them. Incidentally, I never understood why they ever drove Maria home, as it was easily close enough to walk to our house.
In the face of her grandmother’s apparent belief that ‘loving someone means never saying no’, we knew we were fighting a losing battle in our attempts to help Maria get fit for the sake of her physical and mental wellbeing. Babs was overweight herself but she did nothing about it, and I couldn’t help but notice that she always ate more biscuits or a bigger slice of cake than I did.
‘I won’t have another,’ I’d say sometimes, as I was always trying to lose a few pounds and hoping to drop a dress size by the next holiday or the next ‘do’ I was going to.
Babs would snort and look me up and down.
‘What are you, Angela? A size fourteen?’
‘Well, sometimes a fourteen, sometimes a twelve depending on the cut . . .’
‘I ask you,’ she’d say, ‘I don’t know why you’re denying yourself the odd treat. It won’t kill you. Life’s for living, Angela. You look great!’
That summed up her attitude to a tee: what was the point in saying no? The fact something wouldn’t kill you was her benchmark, and I wondered how many times Babs had lazily indulged Maria and justified it with that reckless attitude.
Despite being hindered by Babs’s influence over Maria, Jonathan and I didn’t give up and continued to encourage her to go on walks with us or take part in fun activities like ice-skating, albeit with ever-decreasing success. Sadly, Maria admitted, ‘I don’t care. I don’t want to be slimmer. What’s the point?’
As a younger child, Maria had often told us that she believed she didn’t deserve to be liked.
‘Gerry told me that,’ she had told us more than once. ‘I don’t deserve anything in his eyes.’
Of course we tried to repair the damage, but I was afraid that now it already looked like it was too late. Unfortunately, I think it was probably fair to say that Maria’s soaring weight was possibly another symptom of the mental abuse she’d suffered as a child, and I was starting to become as worried about Maria’s mental state as I was about her physical size.
‘It seems obvious to me that another aspect of her low self-esteem is that she doesn’t think she deserves to look nice,’ I mused to Jonathan one day. ‘She doesn’t deserve it, and she doesn’t care. It’s extremely worrying.’
‘How sad,’ he replied, and then in typical Jonathan style he added generously, ‘but the daft thing is she does look nice. I know she is overweight, but she has a lovely face and she could look really good if she tried. Imagine how much better she’d feel if she was happy with how she looked?’
It was incredibly frustrating. I agreed with Jonathan but he was talking from the point of view of a normal, ordinary person who hadn’t suffered the way Maria had and was lucky enough to have a balanced, optimistic outlook on life.
Despite Babs’s well-meant but frankly dangerous overindulgence, I still felt that in the circumstances Maria was very fortunate to have the love and support of her grandmother. Babs was supportive of us in many ways, too, and was always quick to offer to help if she could and the need arose. We had a good relationship with her and with Maria’s granddad Stanley in the main, which we were careful to maintain – sometimes by taking deep breaths and counting to ten, particularly when we discovered some new deception that had been thought up to enable Maria to have something she wanted.
I think Jonathan sometimes found it even more difficult than I did not to say anything on those occasions. What also frustrated him – although he was always civil and offered her a cup of tea – was Babs’s habit, every time she brought Maria back after a visit, of coming into the house and heading straight for the kitchen without waiting to be invited. She usually stayed for at least an hour, and I must admit that I did sometimes wonder whether, if I were to clutch my chest and then slump sideways on my chair, she would finish what she’d been saying before phoning for an ambulance.
I often called in to have a cup of tea with my mum on Sundays, and sometimes I didn’t get back until after Maria returned from visiting her grandmother. Even if Jonathan was there on his own, watching sport on TV, Babs would still come in, hear that the television was on and head straight for the living room. Then she would settle down on the sofa and talk to Jonathan about people he’d never met who had done things he didn’t really understand, while Maria disappeared upstairs to her room.
We were both sympathetic to the fact that Maria’s grandmother was a bit lonely. Stanley tended to keep himself to himself and was rather a curmudgeonly character. But in our house, peaceful moments are quite rare and don’t last for very long, so when you do get the chance to relax, you want to make the most of it. For Jonathan, that often meant watching sport.
There was one Sunday afternoon when he was just settling down to watch a football match he’d recorded the previous day when Babs came bustling into the living room saying, ‘Oh, that was a good game. Arsenal won that 2–1.’ On occasions like that, after having managed to avoid finding out what the score was all day, it was understandable that Jonathan felt as though his patience was being sorely tested.
Another Sunday soon after, I had arranged to pick Maria up from her grandparents’ house on my way home from my mum’s, but Babs must have forgotten what I’d said and she brought Maria back herself, before I was due. When they got to our house, Maria went straight up to her room to do her homework, while Jonathan took a deep breath and returned to the living room, where Babs was already sitting on the sofa.
Jonathan was very tired that day, and the whole point of my saying I’d pick Maria up was so that he could watch the match in peace. So, instead of offering her a cup of tea, as he would normally have done, he sat down and watched the match, while she sat there in silence for a few minutes and then left.
‘I do feel a bit bad about it,’ he told me later, after he’d explained what had happened. ‘It doesn’t take much effort to be polite to someone. But, to be honest, I’m having one of those days when it feels as though the tank is empty. It was a game I’d been looking forward to seeing. I suppose there was a silver lining to this particular clown though, because at least she didn’t know the score this time.’
I sympathised with him. ‘Really, Babs is the only one at fault here,’ I said. ‘She should know better than to behave the way she does, but unfortunately she doesn’t seem to tune into situations the way we’d like her to.’
‘You’re right,’ Jonathan lamented. ‘Frustrating, isn’t it? I feel like our good nature is being exploited, but I know it’s not deliberate. If it was anyone else I’d feel able to have a civilised chat about it and explain that I just wanted to have some relaxation time to myself in my own house. Anybody else would understand, but I know Babs would take offence.’
His guilt and irritation turned to indignation, however, when our support social worker rang a couple of days later to say that Christine had complained to Social Services that Jonathan had been rude to her mother. This was particularly galling as we hadn’t heard a peep from Christine for a long time. Thankfully, Jess smoothed this over by explaining the full story to Christine and making it clear that Jonathan did not intend to cause any offence. Christine apparently accepted this without any further fuss or complaint. She’d had the baby by now, but there had been no official talks with Social Services about arranging for Maria to meet her sister, despite whatever promises Christine had made to Maria in her clandestine conversations or meetings.
We had finally sussed out by now that Christine’s attitude towards us tended to be related more to what was going on in her own life than to anything we did or didn’t do in relation to Maria. And the numerous complaints she made about us to Social Services were usually an expression of a generalised resentment of ‘the establishment’, which of course, in her mind, included foster carers like us.
The complaints Christine made about us didn’t ever have any significant impact, apart from being a bit aggravating. What really mattered was how her behaviour affected Maria, whose progress at secondary school seemed to soar when her mother was off the scene and plummet whenever Christine re-entered Maria’s life.