Greetings, foster mammies and daddies!
And welcome back to the Adventures of a Biological Foster Child in Ireland. If this is your first time here, thank you so much for joining us. If you haven’t had a chance yet, please do have a read of the Welcome Blog and check out the Homepage to get the low-down on My Child and Fostering Ireland, and how this site can be of benefit to you on your fostering journey.
Touching on last week’s introductory blog, I will be exploring the topic I have chosen for us as our first séjour: Introducing Temporary Guests to Permanent Ones. Again, it’s all in the title! The temporary guests we will meet throughout this week’s blog are foster children that my mother has fostered in the past, and who I will be anonymising in order to protect their privacy rights. I may also tweak the stories slightly, however the main objective of the anecdotes will still shine brilliantly through. Of course, the permanent guests are referring to myself and my sister! I would like to offer as much information and experience surrounding this topic as possible, thus I will be covering common ground such as age, emotion, conflict, and arrival scenarios. You will find a section at the bottom of the page where you can submit your comments and questions, and we can have a chat about specific curiosities surrounding this topic. So, without further ado, let’s get started!
The Earliest Arrival
As I mentioned in the Welcome Blog, my mother began fostering when I was two years old. Since then, regulations have changed, and our biological children must now be at least three years of age before we can foster. Alas, I was just two when Patty opened her doors for the first time to a little boy of three, and so there isn’t a memory in my head of how that went. I was still running around in nappies and couldn’t quite remember how not to poop on myself, and so my little toddler brain was in no way capable of holding onto a sliver of normal information for more than ten seconds. But I am determined to start at the beginning, so I drove three hours home from Cork on my days off and ambushed my mother in her kitchen in Dundalk while she was in the middle of getting her roots done. Sophie, my older sister, had been the hairdresser on hand and so has managed to snag herself a cameo in this blog as well. I put my phone down on the table between us, hit record, and started firing. Poor Patty nearly had to get the diary out.
Thankfully she remembers her first foster as clear as day, as you all have and will. On that day she had the same fears as ye have now – how would this affect her children? How would the introduction go? I was an extrovert and my sister the opposite, and so there was no way of predicting how we would react in harmony to the arrival of a stranger. Furthermore, the young fella on his way over didn’t speak a lick of English, and so a verbal introduction was off the table. It would all boil down to that first meet and greet where temporary guest meets permanent guests – three kittens from two different mothers thrown into a pen together in the throes of their social development. Would there be hissing? Would the claws come out? Would someone go belly up? Patty had chewed her nails down to the quick as she and my father watched my sister and I play with our Tiny Tears dolls on the living room floor. They had tried to tell us there would be someone coming to stay for a while, but us being two and four had no interest whatsoever. We’d believe it when we saw it. Money upfront or no business.
The doorbell rang and our heads shot up. One Tiny Tears doll turned to the other and whispered, “Damn, they really brought the money upfront. We’re gonna have to follow through on this whole guest thing.” We rose to our feet, tuxedos on and shades down over our eyes. It was go time.
Patty went up to open the front door, the light in the hallway coming on to illuminate the guests’ faces in the beryl dusk that had fallen outside. It was late enough, and over the cheerful greetings between the adults there was an air of incertitude. I stood slightly behind and in between my fathers wrist and my sister’s shoulder, trying to sneak a peek into the hallway where someone was emerging from behind my mother, his dark brown eyes leaking confusion and a touch of fear. By then Sophie and Arwin had moved out of the way to allow the social worker and our new guest come into the living room, and I had realised with a burst of unstoppable excitement that a new playmate had entered from stage left. My eyes widened, a toothy grin sliding on to my face as little Oscar stopped in front of me, one set of fingers pulling at his lower lip and the other gripping the hand of the social worker behind him. He was looking at me and I was looking at him, and the adults were saying things like, “This is Oscar” and “This is Naoise” and “You’re going to be hanging out with each other for a while”, and I almost combusted with joy and pried his little fingers out of the social worker’s hand and pulled him onto the carpet where I shoved a Tiny Tears doll into his hands. When Sophie saw that business had been done and we could now return to playing with our dolls, she plopped down on the carpet beside us and introduced herself vicariously through her doll.
Patty stood back, a wave of relief washing through her as she realised the meet and greet had been successful. No claws had come out, no one had hissed at anyone, and everyone was getting along. Oscar had travelled all the way from Senegal, and I was enthralled by how different the texture of his hair was to mine, and how different the colour of our skin was. His curls were tight to his head in tiny, magnificent coils, and mine were loose and frizzy. We held our arms up against each other’s and poked each other’s curls, and when Patty went to change Oscar’s nappy I said, “Oh gosh, look, Sophie, his bum is brown too!”
At the end of the day, we were two little toddlers. I was outgoing, social and loved to play, and that in itself was a factor that played into how well introductions went at that age. Chloe was always quite shy at first, standing back to observe as I took the lead. She was more wary, but just as happy about our new playmates; she simply liked to ease into it rather than dive head-first in, like myself. If your own child is three, or around that age, you will know best whether they are a little Naoise or a little Sophie. If they are a Naoise, happy days. You’re laughing! And if they are a Sophie, also happy days! I suggest in this case that you become the Naoise, take the lead and show your child that your new guest is simply here to play and be a toddler, just like them.
The Dreaded Teens
Ah, puberty. Thank the merciful God above that those days are far behind me. Let’s jump from age three to thirteen – how did introductions go when I was in the beginnings of my snotty teenager years?
For starters, there was quite a bit more pre-introduction briefing involved. This much, I remember. I would come home from school one day and Mam would be hanging up the phone at the cooker, and she would turn to me and say, “there’s someone new coming, Neesh”, and I would know right off the bat that she was talking about a placement. Even now, though I am twenty-two and living on my own, I still get a little jolt of excitement at the mention of Mam having accepted a placement. When I was thirteen, however, I had entered into a phase of wariness and need-to-know. Was it a boy or a girl? What school do they go to? Who are their friends? Where are they sleeping? Are they gonna touch my stuff? Patty had a rule while we were teenagers never to foster a teenage boy, and so these questions were often directed at the teenage girl we would be welcoming into our home. Moreover, and I’m not sure if this was chance or another secret rule my mother had, but we never fostered anyone who attended the same school as my sister and me.
The pre-briefing would be business – tuxedo on, shades down – but the day of arrival was always a shadow of how I reacted when I was younger. I had grown from a welcoming toddler into a welcoming teen. My social skills were a little better, I wasn’t pooping on myself, and I was used to sharing my life with people from every kind of background. I took pride in becoming the house’s designated tour guide, and so when a fellow teen arrived I would wait in the kitchen and have a smile on my face and say, “Do you wanna see the bedroom?”. They always did want to, because the kitchen could be quite overpowering at times with family and social workers, and sometimes gardaí greeting each other and talking about the child and talking to the child, and it could all become too much too fast. So I would make a little motion with my hand – “Come on, I’ll show you where you’re sleeping. We’re gonna be sharing” – and we would disappear upstairs for a while and let the adults talk about the legal stuff that I had no interest in and that my temporary sibling didn’t want to hear. In my own experience, I have never met someone around my age who didn’t want to see their room and chill out for a while as soon as they arrived, and I’ve never met anyone who was hostile towards me when we were alone. I’ll be saying this an awful lot throughout this blog, so get used to it! It all depends on the context of the situation at hand.
There were occasions when the kids arriving were very upset, having been separated from their parents just a couple of hours prior, late into the evening without time to grab clothes or things they held dear. These arrivals played out quite differently than the ones I have described. These kids had already confronted their confusion and had all kinds of misconceptions about what was happening to them. They were scared, angry, and had no control over what was going on. There was no use me standing at the front door and trying to make it all better by showing them where they would be sleeping – they wanted to sleep at home! These were feelings that my thirteen-year-old self was not yet equipped to handle, and so Patty would step in and say, “Girls, go on upstairs for a while and make yourselves busy so you’re not annoying them.” And we never had a problem with it. We would trot on up to our room and do our homework or play Guitar Hero, or chat away about the situation at hand. Patty would do her thing downstairs, wait until things had calmed down and bellies had been filled, and maybe a smile had found its way on to a face, and then she would tell them that her two daughters were upstairs, they were very nice, and their names were Sophie and Naoise. They’ll be really kind to you, and they’ll help you with anything you need.
I think what helped in those days was that Patty always tried to foster someone who was slightly younger than myself. We did foster teens who were aged in between myself and my sister, and sometimes older, but always the same gender. I don’t remember there ever being any major problems. Once or twice, when someone had settled in completely and were comfortable enough to let their teenager attitude shine through – which is very normal and expected of teenagers – Sophie and I would hear them storm away from an altercation with Patty downstairs, their feet thumping against the stairs as they came to join us in our shared room. “Your mam is so mean!” They would snap, and this is where my sister and I’s polar opposite personalities would rear their heads.
“I know, right?!” I would clap my hands. Someone to vent with! (I love my mother to the moon and back, this phase only lasted a year or so when I was a particularly angry teen. Love you Patty if you’re reading!)
Sophie, on the other hand, would take things more personally. I remember once, when a teen told Sophie she thought Patty was a b*tch, and Sophie responded, “You do realise she’s my mother, right?”. I realised then that Sophie’s shyness didn’t come from a place of fear, it came from a place of protectiveness over our family. I think this is an amazing quality to have, and I’m glad my sister had it in times when I lacked it, as it kept that stable balance within our own relationship to our mother. With this in mind, I wouldn’t worry if you have an only child and fear their relationship to you might be warped by foster care. I always knew deep down, even when I was agreeing with kids that my mother was this and that and the other, that I didn’t mean it.
The only time Patty had to worry about what we were talking about behind her back as teens was when we were listening to some of the stories our foster siblings told. Sophie and I were quite sheltered with regard to our upbringing, and a lot of the children coming in weren’t. During our teens, especially, some of the teenage girls would talk about things like sex and smoking and other things we were too young to hear, and I would be hanging on every word! Patty would be on her way out the front door to put something in the bin and she would hear a word she wasn’t supposed to hear. “Girls!” She would shout. “Downstairs, now!”. We would get a stern talking to, and a promise that if that kind of talk didn’t stop we would have more to worry about than boys and kissing.
The Takeaway
So, now that we’ve covered the grounds of introducing your foster child to your biological child, how might we summarise the overall experience? I would suggest the Patty way: some prep, some mindfulness of context, and some trust in your child that they will be fine. It is also worth pointing out that it is OK to turn down placements because of how you think it might affect your child. Out of the fifty-two children Patty has fostered over the years, she herself has turned down at least fifteen placements based on the risk she would be taking with Sophie and I. There is a shortage of foster carers, so there will always be another phone call if you’re on the list.
Thank you so much for reading this week’s blog! I hope you enjoyed the topic, and please do hit me with all the questions you might have. If you would like to suggest a topic for our next blog, you can do so through the Question Portal. For now, I hope you’re feeling confident and encouraged, and I look forward to your feedback.
‘Til next time,
Naoise
Naoise McGuinness 