Another Forgotten Child (12 page)

Saturday afternoon passed reasonably amicably with only a few minor scenes, as a result of my refusal to allow Aimee to watch television all afternoon and not give in to her constant demand for biscuits. She had two chocolate biscuits after her lunch but she was used to eating the whole packet in one go (for lunch), so two were not enough to satisfy her craving for sugar. I explained again to Aimee why too many sweet things were bad for us but her response was: ‘Don’t care!’ or ‘I’ll tell me mum.’ She appeared to be addicted to sugar and this was something else I would be mentioning to the paediatrician when Aimee had a medical.

Instead of letting her watch television for hours I provided Aimee with a steady selection of games and puzzles. I played some board games with her but I encouraged her to do the very simple puzzles for herself. She wasn’t familiar with any of the games or puzzles that one would expect a child of her age to be, so I showed her what to do, and I was pleased when she understood relatively quickly.

‘Did you have any games or toys at home?’ I eventually asked her as she stared blankly at the boxed game of Snakes and Ladders I was just opening.

‘Dolls,’ Aimee said. ‘But I broke them when I got angry, and Mum said she wouldn’t get me any more.’

‘So what did you do all day?’ I asked. ‘You didn’t go to school much.’

‘I watched television,’ Aimee said, confirming what her social worker had previously told me. ‘I like …’ and she reeled off a list of adult television programmes, some of which she’d mentioned before, and all of which were unsuitable for children. ‘I’ve told me mum you won’t let me watch them here,’ Aimee threatened, as though this would force me to change my mind and allow her to watch inappropriate programmes. I ignored the threat and concentrated on the game, praising Aimee as we played.

After a while of playing simple board games and helping Aimee with the puzzles I suggested she might like to do some colouring and she agreed she would. I fetched the crayons and crayoning books and spread them on the table in the kitchen. Aimee grabbed a crayon enthusiastically and held it in her fist as a toddler would, and then made a very uncoordinated attempt to colour in a large picture of a dog. The coloured lines she made strayed all over the page instead of staying inside the outline of the dog. It was incredible (but not unheard of) that a child could reach her age and not have learned how to colour in. Most children of this age are holding a pencil and writing sentences, but Aimee, as a result of a lack of school and no encouragement at home, couldn’t even hold a crayon properly.

‘Try holding the crayon like this,’ I said, picking up another crayon and showing her how to hold it like a pencil.

‘No,’ Aimee said adamantly. ‘I do it my way.’ She turned the page and began scribbling over the next picture.

‘You’ll find it is easier to draw if you hold the crayon like this,’ I said, and began colouring in the picture on the adjacent page. ‘It gives you better control.’

‘I’ll do it how I want!’ Aimee said. But a minute later I saw her change the position of her crayon and hold it as I’d suggested, which as I’d thought proved easier for her and therefore she produced a neater picture. I wanted to help Aimee, but at present she wore a protective cloak designed to keep me out, which meant that her immediate reaction to anything I suggested was to reject it and me.

Paula and Lucy had been out for most of the afternoon and returned for dinner, which we ate at six o’clock. Aimee pulled a face when I set the plate of fish, chips and peas in front of her and predictably demanded biscuits. Then she said she’d just eat the chips as long as she could have tomato ketchup.

‘You can have some tomato ketchup,’ I said, and passed her the squeezy bottle.

We all began eating, Aimee’s chips swimming in tomato sauce. But throughout the meal I was acutely aware that once dinner was over I’d have to phone Susan for Aimee’s supervised telephone contact. I wasn’t looking forward to it. Although Susan would be safely at the end of a phone and not in person, I was pretty certain she wouldn’t let the phone call pass without having a go at me, as she’d been so angry the previous evening at contact, especially in respect of my reporting Aimee’s bruises to the social worker. Susan wouldn’t know that Aimee had since told me it was Craig who’d assaulted her and that she (Susan) hadn’t protected her. It wasn’t for me to tell Susan, but I wondered if Aimee would, and what Susan’s reaction would be. Aimee hadn’t mentioned Craig again during the day and it was probably better she didn’t say anything to her mother, but if she did I couldn’t stop her: my role was to monitor the telephone contact, not direct the content.

Aimee ate all her chips, laden with tomato ketchup, very quickly and then put down her knife and fork.

‘Eat your fish and peas,’ I encouraged. ‘They’re good for you and will help your body grow and stay healthy.’

‘Don’t want my body to grow and stay healthy,’ Aimee grumbled. ‘Can I have biscuits now?’

‘Not until you’ve eaten your dinner.’

‘Hate you,’ she said.

‘Mum only wants what’s best for you,’ Paula said.

I smiled at Paula, grateful for her support, while Aimee folded her arms across her chest and sat back in her chair, scowling.

‘Come on, finish your dinner,’ I encouraged. ‘Then we can phone your mother.’

With a huff and sigh Aimee leant forward and, picking up her knife and fork, began eating the fish. ‘Won’t have to eat this stuff when I go home,’ she said.

I knew from Kristen that the chances of Amy being returned home were slim to non-existent, but it wasn’t the right time to start explaining this to Aimee. When Aimee had been with me for longer and was used to being in care and away from her mother I would, as I had with other children I’d fostered, gently introduce the possibility that the judge might decide she would be better off being looked after in care rather than living with her mother. It’s always a difficult conversation to have with a child, and strictly speaking the child’s social worker is supposed to discuss this with the child, but more often it is left to the foster carer, who often has a better relationship with the child than the social worker does. Children in foster care have so much to cope with and their lives aren’t made any easier by the care system, which often seems to follow the ‘letter of the law’ while disregarding the realistic and compassionate.

Aimee squirted another liberal helping of tomato ketchup on to her plate, which allowed her to eat the rest of her fish and peas. Once we’d finished eating, I left Paula and Lucy to clear the table while I took Aimee into the sitting room to phone her mother.

‘Have you ever used a telephone before?’ I asked, reaching for the phone and setting it between us on the sofa.

Aimee nodded. ‘Me mum’s mobile,’ she said.

‘This phone is a little different and it has a loudspeaker. You won’t have to put it to your ear when you talk to your mother. I press this button and we will both be able to hear what your mother is saying, and she’ll be able to hear us.’ I gave a demonstration of the phone on speaker by pressing the ‘hands-free’ button. We could hear the dialling tone. ‘I’ll key in the numbers and tell your mother who it is, and then you’ll speak to her,’ I said. Aimee nodded.

Opening my fostering folder, I found the form with Susan’s mobile number and keyed in the digits. We heard her phone ringing and then after about six rings Susan’s voice answered.

‘Hello,’ she said, sounding very tired. I wondered if she’d been asleep.

‘Hello, Susan,’ I said. ‘It’s Cathy, Aimee’s carer. I have Aimee beside me, ready to speak to you.’

Susan didn’t say anything and Aimee didn’t either.

‘Say hello to your mum,’ I encouraged Aimee.

‘Hi, Mum,’ Aimee said in a similar small voice to her mother’s.

‘Hi, love. How are you?’ Susan asked.

Aimee didn’t reply.

‘Tell your mother you’re OK and what you’ve been doing today,’ I suggested.

‘Nothing,’ Aimee said. ‘I ain’t been doing nothing.’

‘Haven’t you?’ Susan exclaimed, her voice rising as she latched on to her daughter’s complaint.

‘Tell your mum we went shopping,’ I said quietly to Aimee. ‘Then we played games all afternoon.’

‘I haven’t been doing anything all day,’ Aimee said again. ‘I’m so bored.’

I didn’t want Susan thinking her daughter had been left all day doing nothing. Apart from it not being true it could have been upsetting for Susan to hear.

‘We went shopping this morning,’ I said. ‘And then Aimee has been doing puzzles and playing games all afternoon.’

‘No I haven’t,’ Aimee said defiantly.

‘Who asked you?’ Susan demanded of me. ‘This is my phone contact, with my daughter, so keep your bleeding nose out.’

Aimee grinned. ‘That’s right, Mum. You tell her!’

I could have quite happily cut the phone call there and then but as a foster carer I knew I couldn’t do that. The judge had ruled that Aimee should speak to her mother on the phone and I should facilitate this. Aimee telling her mother lies about me or her mother swearing at me didn’t justify ending the phone contact.

‘Talk to your mother, then,’ I said evenly to Aimee as she fell silent and Susan was silent too. ‘Tell her what you’ve been doing.’

‘I want to come home,’ Aimee said. ‘I’m unhappy.’

‘I knew you were unhappy,’ Susan said, seizing on another possible complaint. ‘What’s that woman been doing to you?’

‘I can’t watch television all day,’ Aimee lamented.

‘That ain’t fair,’ Susan sympathized.

‘She won’t let me watch the programmes I want,’ Aimee continued. ‘You know, the ones I used to watch with you.’

‘I’ll report her,’ Susan said, ignoring the fact that I could hear her. ‘She’s not stopping you watching television, it’s inhuman.’

‘And I have to eat yucky food,’ Aimee persisted, winding up her mother even more. ‘And she won’t give me biscuits until I’ve eaten it.’

‘That’s cruel,’ Susan responded. ‘She ain’t feeding you proper.’

‘No, she ain’t,’ Aimee agreed. ‘You report her, then I can come home.’ Despite my already explaining to Aimee that complaining about me wouldn’t return her home she persisted in this belief.

Aimee’s complaints were so ridiculous that they could have been laughable, expect of course it wasn’t funny. I was quietly seething and upset.

‘Of course I’m feeding Aimee,’ I said to Susan, unable to sit there any longer and just accept it. ‘She’s had three good meals today, and pudding and some biscuits. She’s also had some fruit.’

‘Who asked you?’ Susan snapped down the phone at me.

Aimee smirked.

And so the conversation continued, with Aimee making untrue allegations about my care of her and Susan fuelling the situation by reacting to them. I didn’t interrupt to protest my innocence again or correct all the lies Aimee was telling her mother; there was no point. Susan wanted to believe what her daughter was saying and my interrupting would just make her angrier. I was therefore forced to sit by for another twenty minutes and listen to Aimee and her mother criticizing me, my home, my care of Aimee, my daughters, the food I cooked, and the routine and boundaries I’d put in place for Aimee’s good. Aimee avoided saying anything positive, including the fact that I’d bought her a wardrobeful of new clothes that morning and I’d spent all afternoon playing with her. I knew why she was saying these things – the psychology that lay behind it; I’d seen it before in other children I’d fostered. In Aimee’s eyes as well as possibly getting her moved (although not home) if she criticized me it lessened the significance of the inadequate care her mother had given her. No child wants to believe that their parents have failed and that a stranger is now looking after them better than their parents did. Criticizing me, in Aimee’s eyes, raised her mother’s status. But while I understood the psychology behind Aimee’s denigration of me, it didn’t make hearing it any better. Foster carers invest a lot in the children they look after and take criticism of the care they give the child personally.

Eventually Aimee ran out of derogatory comments and complaints, which gave Susan a chance to tell her that their dog, Hatchet, which I knew to be a Rottweiler, had bitten another dog in the park that morning and the owner had called the police. Mother and daughter seemed to find this very amusing.

‘I won’t be going to that park for a while,’ Susan said, laughing.

‘No,’ Aimee chuckled. ‘You might get caught.’

Finally Susan said she had to go and I breathed a sigh of relief. The length of phone contact is sometimes stipulated in the care plan but it hadn’t been in Aimee’s case, so that I had to let their conversation run its course. They’d been on the phone for about thirty minutes.

‘You have to phone tomorrow,’ Susan told Aimee before they said goodbye. ‘It’s Sunday and you have to phone me.’

‘Do you hear that?’ Aimee demanded rudely of me.

‘She’ll phone at about the same time,’ I confirmed to Susan.

‘Right. And make sure you give her the biscuits she wants and stop starving her. I don’t want her losing weight.’ Aimee needed to lose some weight but I wasn’t going to say that to Susan. Mother and daughter said goodbye and I was finally able to press ‘hands-free’ to end the call.

I stayed where I was on the sofa, with Aimee beside me. She’d fallen silent now and was looking at me a little sheepishly. I guessed she was wondering what my reaction would be now her mother had gone.

‘You can’t hit me,’ she said. ‘You’re not allowed to.’

‘Of course I’m not going to hit you,’ I said. ‘I never hit anyone, let alone a child. But why did you tell your mother all those things that weren’t true?’

Aimee shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I do and it won’t help. I know you love your mum and want to be with her but the judge has decided you should be looked after by me for the time being. We don’t know how long that will be but making up lies won’t help.’

‘Yes it will,’ Aimee said defiantly. ‘I’m not listening to you any more.’ She pressed her hands over her ears and screwed up her eyes so that she couldn’t hear or see me.

I returned the phone to the corner table and, standing, left the room. I went into the kitchen, where Lucy and Paula were leaning against the worktops talking quietly. As I entered they both looked at me, concerned, so I guessed they’d overheard some of what Aimee had said to her mother.