A few days after Connor had left us, John Fulshaw popped round, as he does, for a coffee, and explained that, as I’d presumed, he had indeed opened and read my late-night email, and, to use his words, ‘could read between the lines and see a disaster in the making, clear as day’.
And, of course, he’d been right. There was no way we could hang on to Connor, because we had to make a choice and our choice had to be Tyler. Sometimes you have to accept that you really can’t be all things to all people – all children. So I was very grateful for John sweeping in like a one-man SWAT team that Monday morning and taking that difficult decision out of my hands. As I’ve always said, sometimes my agency link worker knows me better than I know myself.
When I think about Connor – when I think about fostering generally – I am oddly reminded about a really sad poem I learned as a child. It’s by Edgar Guest and called ‘A Child of Mine (to All Parents)’, and it spoke about the fact that children are only on loan to us for a while. Although this poem has been used over the decades in the most unfortunate of circumstances – often at funerals and memorial services – when children come and go in and out of our doors and our family, the sentiments in it always come back to me.
Mike and I both realise that the children who come and live with us are ‘borrowed’ children. Their stay may only be brief, but however fleeting it turns out to be, we have a duty to try to have some positive impact on their young lives. I can’t lie to you and say that this is always easy, and I can’t swear that we can instantly fall in love with every child. We can’t. What I can tell you honestly is that we try our best, in whatever time we have, to make their life a little more bearable, and to ensure that they have somewhere warm, safe and loving to hole up until it’s time for them to move on.
That’s why it hurts if a child – in this case, a child called Connor – has to leave us and we feel we haven’t done quite enough. Even when we know we’ve tried, if we have to hold our hands up and admit that we are stumped and can do no more, we feel inadequate. I suspect that’s human nature. It’s also difficult because it’s like someone has torn the final chapter from a favourite book before we’ve finished it, before we’ve had a chance to find out how the story ends.
Happily, for Mike and me, these occasions have been rare, and even on the odd time it has happened, we’ve been lucky enough to have John on the case and to eventually find out what happened next. Connor’s story is still being written, of course, and with it out of our hands all we can hope for is that the next place he stayed managed to do good things with him and that one day soon he will be placed in a family unit. Who knows? It might be happening as I speak.
As for us, well, I’m still beating myself up about Connor. Irrational, I know – that’s what Mike tells me, anyway. Because I’m not superwoman. Never was. But writing about Connor has been cathartic and helpful. And if it helps anyone understand the complex world of what we do even a little better, then it’s been worth it.
Here’s to a much brighter future in prospect for that little boy with such a terrible past.
Casey Watson
May 2015