Endings

Our thanks to foster carer Jane for her guest blog this month – ‘Keeping it real’ with the ending of an attachment.

I was sitting at the edge of the hall watching the toddlers playing when it happened. A small child ran up to my boy, grabbed the car he was playing with and gave him a hefty shove that left him sprawled on the floor. As he let out a long wail and his eyes searched for me among the ranks of adults at the edge of the room I had an overwhelming urge to retaliate and make the other child suffer and feel as badly as my wee one did at that point. However being a rational woman in my early forties with all my inhibitions intact I contented myself with giving the offending child a filthy look as I scooped up my wee one and sat him on my knee to comfort him and his wounded pride. Less than a minute passed before he wriggled off my knee and headed back into the fray while I was aware that my heart was still racing and I needed to calm the mother tiger that was raging inside. Anyone who has ever spent any amount of time with groups of toddlers will know they are a tough unforgiving bunch where survival of the fittest is the name of the game and the adults are merely there to act as referees and mop the tears but even so I was surprised by the strength of my reaction and the level of distress I had just experienced.

❝…by then the damage had been done and our family was completely smitten with him.❞

All of this is a very normal reaction for a securely attached mother and child but I was not Andrew’s mum and he was never going to be my son. Although I had first brought him home from the hospital as a tiny, scrawny week old baby, I had always known he was not my own and I was going to be sharing the parenting with his biological parents until they reached a point where they could have him home for good. However by the day of the toddler group incident he had lived with our family for nearly 18 months and despite having contact with his parents at least 3 times every week we weren’t anywhere closer to him going home. On the other hand, he had spent a busy 18 months making himself very much at home in our family, our lives and our hearts.

It would be a full year later before his future would be decided and he would move to live with his new adoptive family but by then the damage had been done and our family was, to the last gran, completely smitten with him.

I have four birth children and the youngest was just 4 years old and still at nursery when we were approved as foster carers and Andrew made his noisy appearance in our lives. My older children were used to having younger ones around and Robbie, my youngest was more than happy not to be the baby of the family any longer as he was now a big boy who would be going to school after the summer. The kids were happy that I was now working from home and could pick them and whatever friends were available to play after school. I loved looking after him and my own brood without the pressures of work and deadlines and the morning commute. It was a win win for all of us.

But two and a half years in I really wasn’t sure we were doing the right thing. By then Andrew had not seen his birth parents for nearly a year and it had been our family who had been there for the birthdays, the Christmases, and the holidays. We had been the ones who had cheered the first steps and it was us who had sat at his cot side through long, scary nights in hospital with a respiratory infection. He called me ‘mum’ and my husband ‘dad’, not because we used those terms with him, but because the others in the house did and he was one of the group. Given all this, you won’t be surprised to know that we were all dreading the day when we would say goodbye and he would start his new life with his new family. The week of introduction went really well and everyone hit it off from the beginning. Andrew seemed to accept what was happening and all the preparatory talk about meeting mummy and daddy and the cat all seemed to be paying off and he coped really well with all the changes of that week. It is fair to say that he coped better than I did but I hid my tears until after the kids were in bed and tried to keep the tone positive. The adoptive couple were great and could see how much we loved him and how much we would miss him and there was plenty of talk about meeting up after the summer holidays and continuing to play a peripheral but significant part in his life. It was exactly what we needed to hear and we clung to those words in the days and weeks after he left.

❝we all experienced grief, but without any of the space or understanding that normally accompanies a significant loss.❞

Sadly, as often happens we did not meet up after the summer and when I met his new mum for a prearranged coffee she told me that he never talked about us and that she was sure that he had forgotten us. This was hard to hear and would have been more devastating if I had not spoken to a social worker who had visited Andrew in his new house the week before and been told that he had been using our names when playing with some of his new toys. That was a difficult summer for us as a family, we all experienced grief but without any of the space or understanding that normally accompanies a significant loss. For my children it was the first time they had experienced a loss on this scale and they all grieved in their own ways but suffice to say it took a huge toll on us. I’ve often wondered how both Andrew and his adoptive parents were feeling over this time, and how he was making sense of what had happened to him.

The most frustrating part of the business however was the lack of understanding from the new supervising social worker who had been assigned to us that summer. She couldn’t understand why we were still talking about Andrew weeks after he had left, she told us to move on it, was our role as foster carers to hand children on. This might be true but I have talked to many foster carers who have prepared children for adoption and all have struggled to say goodbye. I know one foster carer who has seen over 30 wee ones leave her care and she describes it as as painful now as it always has been. Foster carers are taught about the importance of attachment, they work hard to help children and young people form positive warmly attached relationships but sadly no one tells us how to turn off those feelings at the end of a placement.

The system spends a lot of time and effort keeping children in touch with family who have let them down. My question is why do we put so little energy into keeping them in touch with those who have picked them up and helped them back onto their feet? Children who been brought up in a loving and caring families are then told that they are no longer allowed contact with everyone they know as it is will upset them or destabilise the new placement. We no longer keep children in hospital with very limited visits from their parents and I cannot imagine that the government would arrange to evacuate children to the country to live with strangers in these more enlightened times as was done during World War II. Wouldn’t it be more helpful if we acknowledged the grief and loss experienced by everyone when it comes to moving children to their new families?

Jane Wright