All in all, my ‘unit’ had fast become the victim of its own success. The school community is like any other – if something’s happening, good or bad, word quickly spreads. And, in this case, it was a regular topic of conversation in the staff room, with all the teachers agreeing how much more pleasant life had become since this disruptive child or that disruptive child was regularly removed from their lessons. As a consequence, new teachers were regularly accosting me and, me being a softie, I could never say no.
It became increasingly difficult, therefore, to help any of the kids in the way I really wanted to help them, and little by little it began to become obvious to me that helping lots of children, just a little, here and there, wasn’t the best use of my time or experience. Wouldn’t it be better to concentrate on making a real difference by helping one child at a time, but in a big way?
And it wasn’t just this that had led Mike and I to fostering. We had already had hands-on experience of the realities of challenging parenting because Kieron had a mild form of Asperger’s syndrome, which meant he was just a little different from other kids.
Kieron was gorgeous on the outside (a slim six-foot blond Adonis – and he knew it!) but, more importantly, he was gorgeous on the inside as well. He really didn’t seem to have a bad bone in his body, and had never had an enemy in his life. It may have been a part of his condition – we both felt so – but Kieron really didn’t understand unpleasantness or malice, and could only see the good in every single person he ever met. He also had a great love for animals.
But his condition also meant he had to live life a certain way. He had to have a plan worked out for everything – still does – and really hated it if anything was changed at the eleventh hour. If we were going to do something, or had planned some sort of outing, woe betide us if we tried to change things at the last minute because sudden change really upset him and made him anxious. As a young child, this distress was very obvious to witness. He’d grow jumpy and panicky and be obviously unhappy. He’d also chew away all the skin around his fingers, leaving his hands really painful and raw. As a teenager, and still now, as a young adult, if he was upset he would simply stop speaking and begin to withdraw. Even now, though, if things got really on top of him, he’d still exhibit obvious signs of discomfort and distress, which, being his mum, I was always tuned into.
He was also, like many kids with Asperger’s syndrome, a passionate cataloguer and collector. His bedroom was always a sight to behold as he had collections of anything and everything. Football figurines and programmes, photographs of celebrities, classic cars, autographs, personal memorabilia … All the birthday cards he’d ever been given in his life, for instance, were all catalogued in a neat and perfect order. His DVDs were all ordered by favourite actors, and so on, his cars by colour, his music CDs by artist. And, naturally, you messed with any of it at your peril.
It was Kieron, more than anything, that gave us pause for thought when we seriously started thinking about training for fostering. At 19 he was an adult, but still a vulnerable adult, and as he lived at home we both had to think really hard about the impact our plans might have on him because our plans were not just to foster children. While researching ‘working with difficult children’ on the internet, as I’d started doing when I’d become restless about the growing problems of my job, I followed a link through to this new and quite specific kind of fostering, which had been successful in trials in America, where it had first been developed. It used a behaviour-modification model, based on accruing points for good behaviour, in which we’d both be fully trained, and which was specifically geared to help the most difficult children, the ones unsuited to mainstream foster placements. These were the sort of children for whom life was pretty bleak – the sort of children I was well used to dealing with in school, and whom I knew I was in a position to best help. This was the type of fostering that really excited me, and once I’d found out all about it, I was hooked.
I lay in bed that night, my ears straining for signs of activity in Justin’s bedroom, feeling sleepless and weighed down by worry. For all the training we’d received – six intense months of it, and so much preparation and expectation – I don’t think either Mike or I had really been prepared for the massive impact of having this child enter our lives. He wasn’t only hostile, he was also a completely unknown quantity, and here he was, feet away, sleeping under our roof, having turned my whole family upside down in less than twenty-four hours. Only one thing felt certain as I finally drifted off. We were now committed. There was no going back.
Chapter 3
I’m mad about Christmas – always have been and always will be – and usually start my Christmas planning way ahead. By December, of course, it’s generally all falling into place – so since at least two weeks before Justin’s arrival in the family, I’d already started my usual Run Up To The Big Day.
We lived in a comfy four-bed semi, with a large back garden, in a small village on the outskirts of a big town. It was the sort of tight-knit community where everyone knew everyone else and it’s probably fair to say that the Watson household was something of a landmark at this time of year. I was never much of a one for gardening – bar a few pots of flowers I kept clustered around my back door – but come Christmas I was like a woman possessed. I loved this time of year and I didn’t care who knew it. My Christmas tree was already up and twinkling gaily – Riley had wittily remarked that it looked like a fairy had thrown up on it (she’s such a wag, my daughter) – and I had festooned fairy lights and decorations pretty much everywhere else. Outside, I’d continued to indulge my obsession by putting up an inflatable Santa, another tree with flashing lights, plus a neon reindeer complete with a present-laden sleigh. I’d also found some more fairy lights to drape over the front hedge, and the net result was that, entirely as usual, my house looked the tackiest on the street.
What Justin thought of all this, I didn’t know. It was naive of me, perhaps, given the wealth of my experience with troubled kids, but I think I just got carried away with making everything super special for him – to try and show him how family life could be. One of the things that was uppermost in my mind was that on Boxing Day Justin had an important visit to make. Mike was to drive him for a few hours to where his mother and young brothers now lived. It was to be an overnight visit – his first, we’d been told, since around three months before we’d met him; around the time she’d apparently got herself a new boyfriend.
We knew so little about it all, but what we did know was that such visits were sporadic, at best, and appeared to always coincide with new boyfriends. She tended to want to see him whenever she hooked up with a new one, only to drop him again as soon as he’d served his purpose; to show her as being sufficiently ‘motherly’. It was heartbreaking stuff, even in the telling. How could she do that to her own child? How could any mother treat her flesh and blood in that way? I knew the pressure of it must have been hanging over Justin. After my small outburst on the night of his arrival, I had got my head back together and was beginning to feel more positive about Justin again. Though schools were now closed for the holidays, I’d been able to get in touch with the local education authority and had secured a place for him in our local secondary, so he could start straight away in the new year. It was handy that I’d previously worked there, of course, as I already had a good relationship with the head and the support staff; something I had an inkling might come in very useful now we were fostering the kind of children that would probably need them. Also, because the papers showed that his educational level had fallen so far behind the norm, he’d been given an ELAC (Education for Looked After Children) worker, who was called Helen King, and who seemed really nice. She’d also allocated a school budget for an extra learning support worker for him so he could get the help he needed to catch up – something I could have done with back in my unit, for sure.
So it was all shaping up well, and though Justin’s food anxieties needed addressing in the short term (I’d now, at his request, put up a chart in the kitchen, detailing exactly what food we were having each day, and at what time) he seemed to be slowly settling in. Though he seemed to oscillate between being over-excited about Christmas one minute and negative and scowling about