the perils of foster caring, part 3
However, nothing like that came close to happening, until the last week he spent in my care. That was a trip to Victor Harbour, of infamous memory.
This six-day trip, entirely paid for by myself I might add in injured tones, was initially intended for a group of adults as well as the boy and Sarah’s fourteen-year-old grandson Michael. The cottage was booked, I’d made the promise to the boy and to Michael, but our friends John and Deborah had to pull out due to work commitments, and then Sarah also pulled out due to a crisis involving her two-year-old granddaughter Courtney (now in her permanent care, with my assistance).
I heard the alarm bells. Six days alone with Michael (himself quite a handful) and this sometimes hyper-active, often impulsively transgressive kid, wasn’t my idea of a holiday. I tried to arrange for Sarah to come down for at least a couple of the days, but it was all too difficult.
Mostly it went well. I blew up at the boy once early on, when I caught him trying to set fire to Michael’s hair from behind, but even he seemed to accept that my anger was justified. By the last day or two, though, my nerves were getting pretty frayed.
The night before we returned, I took them for a meal at the Victor hotel. Afterwards we strolled along the bridge to Granite Island. The two of them had brought, or so I thought, bottles of soft drink with them. Halfway across the bridge the boy threw, or pretended to throw, his empty bottle into the drink, crowing something like ‘I’ll just get rid of this.’ I grabbed at him, and told him fiercely that that was unacceptable behaviour. ‘Ow’, he said, ‘Hey, I was only kidding, I didn’t have anything in my hand, you know I would never do a thing like that.’
Later, when he told police I’d punched him on the back of the head, he admitted that he had thrown the bottle. Perhaps this is irrelevant, except insofar as it illustrates his shaky relationship with the truth. In any case, I apologised immediately, and I thought that was the end of that. Later during that same walk, though, I had another go at him for slagging in public, which he often did. He’d argued with me – or at least he’d produced a defence of sorts. Slagging was cool. I probably went on too long with the lecture, and he looked very put upon. Later, a friend suggested I might’ve used a different reasoning, pushed the point home in a more light-hearted way: ‘Hey, you don’t think spitting’s disgusting, fine, so why not go further? How about shitting in public? Next time you feel the twinge, how about dropping your daks [is that word recognised by teens today?] and pooing on the pavement? I know it doesn’t sound too cool but you could start a new trend…’
The fact remained that I became a little overbearing, and it was during this walk along the Granite Island causeway that he started to harp on how keen he was to get back home to Mum for the weekend.
I blew up at him again when we were packing to leave. I was trying to get the pair to vacuum the lounge, where they’d made a great mess dragging in logs and twigs to start evening fires, but finally I gave up and did it myself. Then I asked the boy to empty the vacuum cleaner. He did so, dumping its contents on the stoop. I gave him such a blast for this that tears came into his eyes. This really was my mistake – he was just a wet clueless kid, who’d never emptied a vacuum cleaner before. It didn’t come ‘naturally’ to him to see that dumping something outside his own immediate area was just going to cause headaches for others. After all, whole national governments had trouble recognising this. So I tried to make light of it, and we drove home without incident, though the boy often spoke, with a growing excitement, of the prospect of seeing his Mum. And I did feel a trace of jealousy, in a general way about fatherhood, not at all about not being father to this particularly draining kid.
I knew I’d made mistakes. My own impulse control had proved problematic. I’d reacted without due thought. Still, I’d recovered quickly, apologised when necessary, and tried to get back on amicable terms as soon as possible. On the whole, I felt that no great damage had been done.
Not long after our return, the boy was picked up as usual by his mother for the weekend. In front of her, he’d put his arm around me and assured me it had been a great fun trip. I never saw him again.
The boy was late returning on the Sunday evening, so I rang his Mum. She told me he wouldn’t be coming back, and that I should check my answering machine. She was clearly very emotional. I asked what this was about, and she said something about my having attacked and hit the boy. I assured her - and I was quite calm, if bewildered - that I had done no such thing. She didn’t wish to discuss the matter and again referred me to the answering machine. There I found a message from a police officer, telling me that certain allegations had been made, though not of any serious nature. I rang the number, and the officer explained that the boy had made a couple of minor claims about me. First, that I’d clapped him round the ears on the bridge, and second that I might have done ‘something sexual’, though this seemed to be a simple misunderstanding. The officer was, I must say, very sympathetic to my situation, and confided that the boy’s story was ‘pretty incoherent and contradictory’. ‘Does he want to go and live with his Mum, does he?’ he asked shrewdly.
The ‘sexual’ claim referred to an incident I’d put out of my mind immediately after it occurred. The three of us were trying to negotiate a maze in an adventure playground on the outskirts of Victor Harbour. The boy, impatient and bamboozled by the labyrinth, opted to take a short cut out of it by climbing one of the tall, thin timber fences. I’d worked out the maze enough to know that mounting that particular fence would not move him forward one iota, beside the fact that it wasn’t in the spirit of the game and might damage the barrier. I called him down, but he wouldn’t listen, so instead of trying to grapple with him, I tugged playfully at his trousers. It worked, though he looked askance at me, and it just crossed my mind that I’d made another mistake, this time one of ‘over-familiarity’. However, I soon put it out of mind, perhaps for profound psychological reasons.
This was the possible sexual advance the boy was accusing me of. Feeling a little dizzy at the enormity of it, I hadn’t the presence of mind to point out that this had taken place in the middle of the day, during the school holidays, before a flock of passing parents and their kids. I mumbled something about it being totally innocent, and found to my relief that the officer seemed already to have come to that conclusion. He preferred to focus on the bridge incident. I told him that young Michael was my witness to the incident, and gave him Michael’s number. ‘I’m not sure if we’ll talk to him at this stage,’ the officer said. ‘We realise that you were punishing him for throwing a bottle into the water, and we don’t see that your action lies beyond the bounds of normal chastisement,’ he said. ‘Okay, that’s fine,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t hit him.’
Later, the policeman rang again to tell me that Michael had confirmed the boy’s story that I’d hit him. On reflection I realised that this wasn’t so surprising – the bridge was very dark, Michael had walked on ahead, and the boy had shouted ‘Ow’ when I rounded on him. Once again I denied the claim. ‘Okay,’ the officer said affably, ‘we’ll record that you deny the claim, and it won’t be taken any further, I mean it’s reasonable chastisement as far as I’m concerned, but we have to issue a warning, and that’ll be the end of it, the boy’s mother’s happy with that. I’m sorry about all this, I can see the lad would’ve been quite a handful.’
I wasn’t too happy to let it go at that, but I didn’t want to stand too much on my dignity in what must’ve seemed to the police such a trivial matter. And so the boy remained in the care of his mother, but the Anglicare team expressed their full confidence in me, assigning another lad to my care almost immediately. I myself felt badly shaken, but I’d learned a number of valuable lessons. I wasn’t about to let this setback spell the end of my foster-caring career.
So another six months rolled by. I looked after another lad briefly until another carer could be found for him (the boy was based in the south and didn’t want to be disentangled from his network there), and then in December my ‘current’ boy moved in, and was whisked away at the end of April when this new accusation was made. I’ve found out indirectly that my accuser is this same boy who’s given me such trouble before. It’s a more serious accusation than the last one, it seems, and this time I can’t even guess what it’s about. The placement was monitored on a weekly basis, and no complaints ever arose. Is this an elaboration of the previous accusations, or is it something entirely new? Did the boy’s mother make the accusation? Did she make it to CYFS or did she go directly to the police, as she did last time? Is it right that I should remain completely in the dark for getting on for five weeks now? Is there any redress for those who are subjected to false accusations? I’ve written to the police complaints authority, to try to get things resolved more quickly. There’s not much more I can do, but wait for the next instalment…
This six-day trip, entirely paid for by myself I might add in injured tones, was initially intended for a group of adults as well as the boy and Sarah’s fourteen-year-old grandson Michael. The cottage was booked, I’d made the promise to the boy and to Michael, but our friends John and Deborah had to pull out due to work commitments, and then Sarah also pulled out due to a crisis involving her two-year-old granddaughter Courtney (now in her permanent care, with my assistance).
I heard the alarm bells. Six days alone with Michael (himself quite a handful) and this sometimes hyper-active, often impulsively transgressive kid, wasn’t my idea of a holiday. I tried to arrange for Sarah to come down for at least a couple of the days, but it was all too difficult.
Mostly it went well. I blew up at the boy once early on, when I caught him trying to set fire to Michael’s hair from behind, but even he seemed to accept that my anger was justified. By the last day or two, though, my nerves were getting pretty frayed.
The night before we returned, I took them for a meal at the Victor hotel. Afterwards we strolled along the bridge to Granite Island. The two of them had brought, or so I thought, bottles of soft drink with them. Halfway across the bridge the boy threw, or pretended to throw, his empty bottle into the drink, crowing something like ‘I’ll just get rid of this.’ I grabbed at him, and told him fiercely that that was unacceptable behaviour. ‘Ow’, he said, ‘Hey, I was only kidding, I didn’t have anything in my hand, you know I would never do a thing like that.’
Later, when he told police I’d punched him on the back of the head, he admitted that he had thrown the bottle. Perhaps this is irrelevant, except insofar as it illustrates his shaky relationship with the truth. In any case, I apologised immediately, and I thought that was the end of that. Later during that same walk, though, I had another go at him for slagging in public, which he often did. He’d argued with me – or at least he’d produced a defence of sorts. Slagging was cool. I probably went on too long with the lecture, and he looked very put upon. Later, a friend suggested I might’ve used a different reasoning, pushed the point home in a more light-hearted way: ‘Hey, you don’t think spitting’s disgusting, fine, so why not go further? How about shitting in public? Next time you feel the twinge, how about dropping your daks [is that word recognised by teens today?] and pooing on the pavement? I know it doesn’t sound too cool but you could start a new trend…’
The fact remained that I became a little overbearing, and it was during this walk along the Granite Island causeway that he started to harp on how keen he was to get back home to Mum for the weekend.
I blew up at him again when we were packing to leave. I was trying to get the pair to vacuum the lounge, where they’d made a great mess dragging in logs and twigs to start evening fires, but finally I gave up and did it myself. Then I asked the boy to empty the vacuum cleaner. He did so, dumping its contents on the stoop. I gave him such a blast for this that tears came into his eyes. This really was my mistake – he was just a wet clueless kid, who’d never emptied a vacuum cleaner before. It didn’t come ‘naturally’ to him to see that dumping something outside his own immediate area was just going to cause headaches for others. After all, whole national governments had trouble recognising this. So I tried to make light of it, and we drove home without incident, though the boy often spoke, with a growing excitement, of the prospect of seeing his Mum. And I did feel a trace of jealousy, in a general way about fatherhood, not at all about not being father to this particularly draining kid.
I knew I’d made mistakes. My own impulse control had proved problematic. I’d reacted without due thought. Still, I’d recovered quickly, apologised when necessary, and tried to get back on amicable terms as soon as possible. On the whole, I felt that no great damage had been done.
Not long after our return, the boy was picked up as usual by his mother for the weekend. In front of her, he’d put his arm around me and assured me it had been a great fun trip. I never saw him again.
The boy was late returning on the Sunday evening, so I rang his Mum. She told me he wouldn’t be coming back, and that I should check my answering machine. She was clearly very emotional. I asked what this was about, and she said something about my having attacked and hit the boy. I assured her - and I was quite calm, if bewildered - that I had done no such thing. She didn’t wish to discuss the matter and again referred me to the answering machine. There I found a message from a police officer, telling me that certain allegations had been made, though not of any serious nature. I rang the number, and the officer explained that the boy had made a couple of minor claims about me. First, that I’d clapped him round the ears on the bridge, and second that I might have done ‘something sexual’, though this seemed to be a simple misunderstanding. The officer was, I must say, very sympathetic to my situation, and confided that the boy’s story was ‘pretty incoherent and contradictory’. ‘Does he want to go and live with his Mum, does he?’ he asked shrewdly.
The ‘sexual’ claim referred to an incident I’d put out of my mind immediately after it occurred. The three of us were trying to negotiate a maze in an adventure playground on the outskirts of Victor Harbour. The boy, impatient and bamboozled by the labyrinth, opted to take a short cut out of it by climbing one of the tall, thin timber fences. I’d worked out the maze enough to know that mounting that particular fence would not move him forward one iota, beside the fact that it wasn’t in the spirit of the game and might damage the barrier. I called him down, but he wouldn’t listen, so instead of trying to grapple with him, I tugged playfully at his trousers. It worked, though he looked askance at me, and it just crossed my mind that I’d made another mistake, this time one of ‘over-familiarity’. However, I soon put it out of mind, perhaps for profound psychological reasons.
This was the possible sexual advance the boy was accusing me of. Feeling a little dizzy at the enormity of it, I hadn’t the presence of mind to point out that this had taken place in the middle of the day, during the school holidays, before a flock of passing parents and their kids. I mumbled something about it being totally innocent, and found to my relief that the officer seemed already to have come to that conclusion. He preferred to focus on the bridge incident. I told him that young Michael was my witness to the incident, and gave him Michael’s number. ‘I’m not sure if we’ll talk to him at this stage,’ the officer said. ‘We realise that you were punishing him for throwing a bottle into the water, and we don’t see that your action lies beyond the bounds of normal chastisement,’ he said. ‘Okay, that’s fine,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t hit him.’
Later, the policeman rang again to tell me that Michael had confirmed the boy’s story that I’d hit him. On reflection I realised that this wasn’t so surprising – the bridge was very dark, Michael had walked on ahead, and the boy had shouted ‘Ow’ when I rounded on him. Once again I denied the claim. ‘Okay,’ the officer said affably, ‘we’ll record that you deny the claim, and it won’t be taken any further, I mean it’s reasonable chastisement as far as I’m concerned, but we have to issue a warning, and that’ll be the end of it, the boy’s mother’s happy with that. I’m sorry about all this, I can see the lad would’ve been quite a handful.’
I wasn’t too happy to let it go at that, but I didn’t want to stand too much on my dignity in what must’ve seemed to the police such a trivial matter. And so the boy remained in the care of his mother, but the Anglicare team expressed their full confidence in me, assigning another lad to my care almost immediately. I myself felt badly shaken, but I’d learned a number of valuable lessons. I wasn’t about to let this setback spell the end of my foster-caring career.
So another six months rolled by. I looked after another lad briefly until another carer could be found for him (the boy was based in the south and didn’t want to be disentangled from his network there), and then in December my ‘current’ boy moved in, and was whisked away at the end of April when this new accusation was made. I’ve found out indirectly that my accuser is this same boy who’s given me such trouble before. It’s a more serious accusation than the last one, it seems, and this time I can’t even guess what it’s about. The placement was monitored on a weekly basis, and no complaints ever arose. Is this an elaboration of the previous accusations, or is it something entirely new? Did the boy’s mother make the accusation? Did she make it to CYFS or did she go directly to the police, as she did last time? Is it right that I should remain completely in the dark for getting on for five weeks now? Is there any redress for those who are subjected to false accusations? I’ve written to the police complaints authority, to try to get things resolved more quickly. There’s not much more I can do, but wait for the next instalment…
posted by Stewart at 3:37 pm
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