The Return of Trudy Trickster

Greetings, foster mammies and daddies!

And welcome back to the Adventures of a Biological Foster Child in Ireland. I feel like we’re at a stage now where I don’t have to go through the whole rigmarole of hyperlinking the living daylights out of the opening paragraph, but JUST in case; I offer you one lovely hyperlink to the Homepage where you can find all the information you need about My Child and Fostering Ireland, including who we are, what we stand for, and how to subscribe. So without further ado, let’s get started!

I wanted to take a moment to reflect on some of the amazing and eye-opening topics we have explored so far, thanks to the curious suggestions of you, the readers. Since founding this website and blog last October, I have had the opportunity to dive into my experiences with some really unique topics within the fostering community. These have ranged all the way from simple introductions between our biological children and foster children, to navigating placements involving child sexual abuse and other (sometimes scary!) issues. The feedback from every post so far has been so encouraging and teeming with more questions about these topics, so I’ve decided it is time to start revisiting a few of them over the next couple of weeks. And first on the list we have:

Trudy Trickster and her Traumatic Tales

The return

Trudy Trickster, as some of you may already know, is a quirky little shadow character I came up with for one of my posts before Christmas, which you can read here to refresh your memory.

When a child entering the foster care system has experienced some form of trauma, I like to imagine this trauma as a shadow named Trudy. Foster children don’t always understand why Trudy is there, following them around, and so they don’t seem to notice when Trudy conjures up tricks and accidents disguised as behavioural issues. However, sometimes Trudy gets creative in her conjuring…

Senan arrived on Patty’s doorstep as a quiet and adorably shy two-year-old. Both of Senan’s parents were struggling at the time, and for a while Senan had to live with another family while his parents worked through their struggles together. My family just so happened to have room!

Unfortunately, for the first two years of Senan’s life his parents weren’t able to give him all of the attention that a young toddler needs, especially when it came to cuddles. Senan had to learn to self-soothe, and he did so with the help of Trudy, who arrived with him at our front door as a dark shadow waiting impatiently to get her hands on some cunning traps. When I asked Patty how she knew he had experienced trauma through neglect, she told me:

The first night Senan stayed with us, I checked on him every ten minutes in his cot. Every time, he was awake but silent with his hands over his eyes. I knew then that he had taught himself not to cry.

And when Patty looked closer she saw Trudy Trickster lying beside him. It seemed she had come up with the game of silence.

If your memory is still fresh from my last blog post about Trudy, you will remember that she often causes behavioural issues and accidents on her child’s behalf. This time, however, Trudy had different ideas. Whereas Hayley (the foster child featuring in my last post about Trudy) harboured trauma brought on by abuse inflicted on her, Senan’s trauma stemmed from a place of neglect. And where we have two opposite ends of the spectrum, we have two very different Trudy’s!

Senan’s parents were so caught up in the struggles they were wading through that they had been unable to nurture Senan in terms of food, talking and physical affection. Because of this, Trudy Trickster made it very difficult for Senan to learn how to accept these things. When the time came for a toddler to talk and learn conversation, Trudy set a trap so that every time an opportunity arose, Senan would be too scared to take it. Because of this, Senan remained non-verbal for longer than average children of his age. When I became old enough to speak and realised Senan wasn’t interested in talking with me, I noticed Trudy’s shadow lurking behind every attempt at conversation, and I was having none of it. As an outgoing toddler who was simply infatuated with the art of talking (ask Patty, she thought I would never stop. She might even argue that talking toddlers could be a legitimate form of torture), I was adamant to show Senan how much fun it could be. I would chant the name of my favourite toy, my favourite Bear in the Big Blue House character, my favourite food.

Now, food was another thing that Trudy Trickster seemed to have up her sleeve. Because of Senan’s trauma, Trudy often orchestrated a lot of his issues around trying new things. The upside to this was that Senan absolutely loved things he had tried, like mashed potatoes (or spuds, as we call ’em here in Ireland. Do I have any non-Irish readers out there?). Spuds and chicken goujons were two things that Senan could eat himself sick on. He loved them to the moon and back, and every time a plate of spuds and goujons was placed in front of him on the table he would let loose one of the biggest and rarest smiles we had ever seen. Spuds and goujons were the two foods that Trudy Trickster couldn’t get anywhere near, and my private investigator persona noticed this. So, for a very long time, every time a plate of goujons and spuds was placed down in front of Senan I would say:

SPUDS!

And Senan would grin like crazy and dig in heartily. And I would dig in to whatever I was eating because I ate (and still eat) absolutely anything that was put in front of me, and every now and then I would repeat the single-worded chant to remind Senan of how amazing spuds were. Trudy would lurk in the background with her arms folded and a scowl on her face. Trudy didn’t like me, and I didn’t like Trudy! I knew I had the upper hand on her, when one day Senan saw his dinner and blurted:

SPUDS!

I will admit, I almost ruined the moment with the level of shock I experienced. Not one of us had ever heard Senan speak before, and I stupidly believed that meant he couldn’t speak at all. I forgot that he could listen, and so could speak more words than I previously estimated and would soon find out.

For a minute we looked at each other across the table, wide-eyed, a little terrified, but mostly beginning to bubble up with an uncontrollable excitement at this breakthrough. Patty was somewhere off to the side, crying with happiness no doubt (she’s a very weepy mammy no matter the mood), and I was getting onto my knees on my chair with a fork bundled into one fist. I raised the fork into the air, leaning over my dinner of spuds and goujons to proclaim this new verbal feast.

SPUUUDDSSS!

And then Senan shrieked the word again, and I responded with an even more vigorous one, and Patty jumped in from side-stage and joined the proclamation of spud-independence and the spuds were momentarily forgotten because Senan had spoken and Trudy Trickster, for a moment, was completely out of the picture.

I know I got a little carried away there, but I think the takeaway from this (should be spuds and goujons) should be that Trudy Trickster can go both ways; she can cause outward behavioural issues, but she can also cause ones that are quite hard to see, and maybe a little harder to understand. Just because a child you foster doesn’t scream and bash things up and have wonderful and colorful tantrums, doesn’t necessarily mean they are happy on the inside. I think, especially when your own children are young and full of love and happiness, it is important to let them conduct whatever little secret missions they are conducting (as long as they aren’t harmful!). Patty certainly questioned why I shouted the word spuds every time Senan and I were eating spuds, but she saw a method behind the madness, and in the end it led to something amazing.

Thanks so much for reading this week’s blog post, folks! I’m glad we got to revisit Trudy Trickster to give another insight into how she can appear in children who have suffered trauma. I like putting positive spins on these stories, too, because it is so important to give as much attention to the good memories as we do to the bad ones.

If you enjoyed this week’s post, but maybe you have a specific question that hasn’t been answered, don’t be afraid to drop in via the question portal. If I address your questions you will be completely anonymised! You can also like this post and subscribe through the homepage to get each new blog sent directly to your inbox.

‘Til next time,

Naoise

Discussions at the Round Table

Greetings, foster mammies and daddies!

And welcome back to the Adventures of a Biological Foster Child. If you’re new here, please do check out the homepage and some previous blog posts to get a feel for what this blog is about, and what topics I like to discuss. You can also like or comment on each blog post, and you can subscribe to us through the homepage so that each new blog post is delivered directly to your inbox! Now that the housekeeping is done, let’s get going with this week’s topic: discussing possible placements with your biological children, and why it is important to touch base before bringing anybody new into your home.

Alas, many years ago now, on my eleventh name day, my birth-giver and blood sister thus integrated me into what they called the ‘discussions at the round table’. At this I was rather confused, as our counsel did not convene at a round table, but at the rectangular one adorning the center of our kitchen. Up until this day I was simply introduced to new foster children as they arrived, and encouraged to act accordingly with and around them in order to create harmony in our humble environment. Life mosied along with the essence of surprise, and yet I never complained. I liked surprises.

Hence, one can imagine my surprise when this secret counsel involving my mother and sister revealed itself to me and demanded I become a member.

But why wasn’t Dad on the counsel?

Father, as our family’s esteemed winner of bread, had been given the opportunity to join the counsel many moons before, but his heart lay with winning bread. He said, “Patricia, fostering is your vocation. I trust your judgement.” And he was off, galloping toward the bread mountains on his noble steed with bread knife in hand and a wheaten sack to collect his winnings within.

And so the counsel had thrived as a two-person collective, until I turned eleven and became old enough to make important decisions about fostering new children with my elder biologicals.

Patricia said to me yesterday, “Naoise, do you really think you’ll foster?”

I was taken aback by the genuine wonder in her expression; after growing up around the world of foster care and becoming the young woman I am in light of it, I couldn’t quite believe that my mother considered that a viable question.

See, Patty has retired from taking on new placements this year (new year’s resolution and all that!), and of course retirement from any line of work comes with a time for reflection on the many years spent dedicating such a big portion of time and energy to that work. We find ourselves reflecting on the amazing golden memories that work has given us, but we also think about the downfalls and how harmful they could be – how long it could take to heal after a particularly hard blow. So when Patty asked me this question I knew she’d been reflecting on the bad times, and that she felt like she had subjected my sister and I to placements that were harmful to our development. But she had forgotten about the round table!

What is this round table?

The round table was a little process that involved Patty, Sophie and I sitting down the day before (or the day of) a possible new placement and simply chatting openly about the pros and cons. It wasn’t organised, and there weren’t lists of anything to be checked off. It went something along the lines of:

Patty: “Girls, I’ve had a call from my link worker. She says there’s a wee boy that’s been picked up over the weekend, and he’s going to need somewhere to stay until things settle down.”

Sophie: “What happened? Spill the tea!”

P: “Absolutely not. Now, he is eight years old and he’s going to need his own room because he can get very angry sometimes and he’ll need his own space.”

S: “But that means I’ll have to share with Naoise again!”

Naoise: “Oh my God really? I love my big sister so much Mam please can I share a room with her?!”

P: “Sophie, you’re right. You and Naoise will be sharing again for a while, sure there’s bunk beds there that Dad can put together. We can make it work.”

S + N: “Okay then.”

N: “What’s his name? Where’s he from?”

P: “His name is Tiernan, and he’s from Drogheda. So he’ll be changing schools and he won’t know anyone down here. I’m counting on the two of you to make friends with him and make sure he isn’t lonely.”

N: “I can do that, he’s closer to my age than Sophie’s.”

P: “Thanks, pet. Apparently he likes Playstation, too, so will you show him how to play Guitar Hero?”

N: “I will, but he won’t ever be better than me.”

P: “That’s obvious, pet.”

S: “And you said he gets angry a lot?”

P: “Well he has some behavioural issues and ADHD, so he can be very hyperactive and bold sometimes.”

S: “Okay, but you know sometimes bold foster kids can be scary for me. So if he hits me or you or Naoise I don’t want him to live with us.”

P: “That’s perfectly fine, Sophie. We’ll see how it goes.”

And, scene.

The bottom line here is to run any new placements by your kids before you take them on, of course waiting until your kids are old enough to know what fostering is and to give a concrete opinion that isn’t based on bribery!

If Patty hadn’t been so careful to know how my sister and I felt about each new placement as they came to us, I think my opinion on fostering would be very different. Being included from a young age made me feel closer to my mother and my sister, and it reminded me that I actually had a say in the whole process. So, now that Patty is retiring and reflecting on her time as a full-time foster carer, she can do so with a clear conscience that she never subjected her children to a harmful placement. And although some placements did break down with emotional consequences, my sister and I had known (at least to a certain extent) what was coming.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s blog post! If you enjoyed it, but maybe you didn’t quite get a detailed enough answer for a specific question you have relating to this topic, please feel free to submit a question to me through the question portal. I can answer your enquiry through another blog post on the topic, and of course you’ll be completely anonymised! You don’t have to know anything about fostering to have a question: all questions are valid and no question is a silly one.

Don’t forget to like and subscribe guys, and thank you so much for reading!

‘Til next time,

Naoise

All I Want for Christmas

Greetings, foster mammies and daddies!

And welcome back to the Adventures of a Biological Foster Child in Ireland! After a short hiatus thanks to COVID (boooooo), I am so happy to be back and full of energy for the new year. If this is your first time here with us, do feel free to check out the homepage to learn more about My Child and Fostering Ireland, and how this blog can help you on your fostering journey. It might also be worth your while to check out the welcome blog to get a feel for what kind of themes I’ve been following thus far! So without further ado, let’s get started.

With just 339 days until Santa comes to visit, I thought it only fair that I grace you all with a heartwarming Christmas special. This time of year can be quite a confusing time for both foster parents and foster children alike; the list of reasons why could go on and on, long past the dawn of Boxing Day when Santa has done his bit and headed back to the North Pole to prepare for another year of gift-giving and bags-of-coal-giving. One of the most common questions that has been burning away in the back of my mind in the days leading up to this Christmas has been this:

My child still believes in Santa, but my foster child doesn’t! What do I do?

One of the most common mistakes a lot of foster parents make in this scenario is quite a simple one, and is a mistake made through no fault of their own. When we think about this situation hypothetically, it is far too easy to imagine ourselves on one side of a river with a fox and a chicken and a bag of corn and a boat. We are the poor farmer, our biological child is the greedy chicken (go on, deny it, I dare you) and our foster child is the malicious fox, and the bag of corn is Santa. We’re all sitting on one side of this river, and the boat to success is bobbing up and down on the water in front of us. We look out of the corner of our eye and give the bag of corn a boot (secretly it is Santa dressed up as a bag of corn), to remind the culprit inside that our child’s happiness depends on them remaining hidden. The foster child (the fox!) is eyeing up our chicken-footed biological child, the words “Santa isn’t real!” simply raring to escape as soon as we load the bag of corn into the boat. We can’t leave the chicken and the corn alone together, and we can’t leave the fox and the chicken alone together, and the bag of corn is so damn fat and heavy from an immortal lifetime of cookie and milk consumption that it is impossible to transport it in tandem with anything else. So we all sit on one side of the river with big ‘ol solemn expressions on our faces, staring over at the Christmas party taking place in full swing on the other side of the river bank.

The mistake here, is that we are viewing our foster child as a fox, when we really should be viewing them as a trustworthy livestock guardian; perhaps a big fluffy collie, or a St. Bernard.

When I was ten years old my mother fostered a girl just a couple of years older than myself. I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but Lauren had known of the secret behind Santa’s existence for quite a long time. When I cornered Patty this morning and asked her how she managed to govern Santa-related conversations between her own children and the children she fostered, she immediately chastised me for assuming the foster children were so eager to ruin the childhood beliefs of my sister and I. She told me about Lauren, and I realised I had been thinking about it all wrong.

When Patty first sat Lauren down and asked her if she could keep Santa’s secret for my sister and I, Lauren was excited. She had just been offered a mission that only she and her foster carer knew about, which meant she had an in with Patty that Sophie and I didn’t! It was a chance to bond and feel like a grown-up in a way she never had before. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Lauren and Patty would steal away on weekends to meet Santa and discuss what presents he would be giving to Sophie and I on Christmas day. Lauren had become one of Santa’s trusted elves, and in return she was even able to choose her own presents that year! But most importantly, she was able to build a connection with Patty and learn about what Sophie and I liked. She was able to watch us open our presents on Christmas day and feel a sense of pride at the joy that blossomed on our faces at the sight of what Santa had brought for us, and then she could wink at Patty and take solace in knowing she had helped nurture the idea of magic in two young and impressionable girls.

Lauren was the opposite of a fox. She was infatuated with the idea of Christmas and loved sneaking out with Patty on the weekends. And the surprise wasn’t ruined for her, for on Christmas day she could still go and see her parents who had their own gifts for her, on behalf of Santa.

I guess my advice on Christmas is not to play governor over the children you care for, but to work as a team. If you find yourself looking after a young one who simply doesn’t believe, don’t panic! This is an unmissable opportunity for you to team up with them, to make them feel special and like they have a connection with you that no one else has in your household. Christmas is quite literally giving you the easy route to integrating a foster child into your home. And while there still may be some anxiety there that the truth may slip, it is important to remember that when your biological child is as young as I was, their mind can easily be (re)convinced of magic with a little creative planning on your behalf. Ever heard of Elf on the Shelf?

I hope you enjoyed this week’s topic, and I hope you are all immensely enjoyed the Christmas holidays! As a Christmas baby, I had the pleasure of celebrating my 23rd birthday with the biggest roast turkey and ham dinner I could possibly dish out for myself in my grandmother’s house. I can confirm that I have gained at least a stone.

As usual I would like to extend a huge thank you to Kerry Hession over at Orchard Fostering for helping this blog find its feet, and if you have any enquiries about becoming a foster carer, you can find Orchard’s details on the homepage. If you foster mammies and daddies have any burning questions about Christmas time and today’s topic, please feel free to submit them all to me through the question portal. Finally, if you’re new to this blog you can always like and subscribe through the homepage to receive each week’s post directly to your inbox. Thanks so much for reading, and happy New Year!

‘Til next time,

Naoise

Watch and (don’t) Learn!

Trigger Warning: Strong Language!

Comic Context!

“Move your arse!” Said Grandma. “It’s time to go to school”.

Ódhran huffed and pulled on his boots, and started out the door to school. Mammy watched Eastenders on the telly in the living room.

“Why doesn’t Mammy have to go to school?” Asked Ódhran.

“Because she’s a grown-up.” Grandma said, “And grown-ups don’t go to school. They stay home to look after kids like you.”

“I want to be a grown-up.” Said Ódhran.

“You will be someday, but not anytime soon!”

~

“Move your arse!” Said Grandpa. “It’s time to go to mass.”

Ódhran huffed and pulled on his Sunday coat, and started out the door to mass. Daddy scrolled on Twitter over breakfast at the kitchen table.

“Why doesn’t Daddy have to go to mass?” Asked Ódhran.

“Because he’s a grown-up.” Grandpa said. “And grown-ups don’t have to go to mass. Not if they don’t want to.”

“I want to be a grown-up.” Said Ódhran.

“You will be someday, but not anytime soon!”

~

“Move your arse!” Said Mammy. “It’s time to do the shopping.”

Ódhran huffed and pulled the shopping bags out of the press, and started out the door to help Mammy do the shopping. Grandma played bridge at the table with Great Aunt Mary and shouted “Sh*t!” when she realised she’d lost.

“What does sh*t mean?” Ódhran asked.

“It’s the grown-up word for poo.”

“I want to be a grown-up.” Said Ódhran.

“You will be someday, but not anytime soon!”

~

“Move your arse!” Said Daddy. “It’s time to go to your swimming lesson.”

Ódhran grinned and grabbed his togs, and started out the door to his swimming lesson. Grandpa ate his three-in-one on top of his big belly on the sofa.

“Why doesn’t Grandpa have to go to swimming lessons?” Ódhran asked. “His arse has been getting rather big lately.”

“Because he’s a grown up.” Daddy chuckled. “And grown-ups don’t have to go to swimming lessons. Not if they don’t want to.”

Ódhran noticed how Daddy did not scold him for saying the grown-up word for bum. Maybe he was a grown-up now.

~

“Move your arse!” Said Ódhran. “It’s time to do my morning sh*t.”

Grandpa shrieked and farted, and dropped the toilet roll, and pulled his pants up round his knees.

“Where’d you learn that language?!” Grandpa asked.

“Mammy and Daddy and Grandma…and you!”

“But that’s grown-up talk! And you’re not a grown-up!”

Ódhran frowned and slumped his shoulders, but then his stomach bubbled, and he remembered the runny curry Mammy had ordered for dinner the night before.

“Move your arse!” He shrieked. “I’m going to f*cking sh*t myself!”

Grandpa huffed and wiped his arse, and moved it like Ódhran had asked. Ódhran dropped his pants and fell onto the toilet seat, sighing in relief.

“Move your arse!” Shrieked Mammy. “I’m going to be sick!”

But Ódhran was already pooping, and so Mammy got sick in the bathroom sink.

“Move your arse!” Bellowed Daddy, elbowing Grandpa out of the way. “What’s wrong, love?”

“I’m pregnant.” Mammy said, and Ódhran and Grandpa farted, and blinked.

“F*cking sh*t arse!” Daddy cried.

“F*cking sh*t arse!” Ódhran repeated gleefully, swinging his legs back and forth on the toilet seat.

“Watch your language!” Grandpa said, and pointed a finger. Ódhran huffed and slumped his shoulders, and stopped swinging his feet.

“I wish I was a grown-up.”

Greetings, foster mammies and daddies!

I hope you enjoyed the excerpt I’ve thrown in for you from a comic I’m working on! I found it related really well to what I wanted to talk about this week. Welcome back to Adventures of a Biological Foster Child in Ireland! If you’ve been here before, you may be starting to get the gist of things, and if you haven’t, don’t worry about it! To learn more about My Child and Fostering Ireland, check out the homepage and the welcome blog. As this blog is still brand new and finding its feet, it might also be worth your while checking out the pilot blog, too, to get a feel for what kind of topics are explored, and what kind of themes will be followed. I would like to take a moment to remind you of the trigger warning listed just under the title. This week I will be discussing learned behaviour. The anecdote I am drawing from for this topic has been largely fictionalised, and the personal details of the child in question have been changed in order to protect their identity and integrity to the fullest extent. So, without further ado, let’s get started.

Leading on from last week, I wanted to introduce the topic of learned behaviour. As parents (I’m not a parent, but I can assume), we are constantly conscious of how our behaviour might affect our children. We try our best not to do things like curse around them (maybe by introducing a curse jar to the kitchen) and when we are fostering kiddies from multiple different social backgrounds it can be hard to monitor things like language, certain topics such as sex, and behaviour.

Reflecting on myself as a person, I can say with certainty that I have learned many different behaviours from my mother, my father, and all of the children we have fostered over the years. For example, I learned what sex was from a teenage girl who had fallen pregnant and ended up in care with us. I learned how to say fuck when I was about eight years old from another child my age (and swiftly received a perforated ear drum from Patty, who shrieked so loud when she heard me repeat it I thought we were in the process of being burgled). I learned how to put my fake tan on for teen discos from a seventeen-year-old sweetheart who wore it as a badge of honour, and I learned to fight back in almost every way from every person with whom I shared temporary siblingship.

But how do we monitor what our children learn? And how do we make sure they aren’t learning what we don’t want them to, especially when they’re trudging through their formative years where peers can sometimes have more influence than us?

Well, we can start structurally. This may be common sense, but separate rooms for separate genders is certainly a promising place to begin. When I was thirteen we fostered a girl one year older than myself named Karina. She had unprotected sex with her boyfriend quite regularly and I was absolutely hooked on her every word when she would come home and relay the details to me. I was so curious at the time, and I became fascinated by the idea of sex and what it might be like. Karina had her own room in our house, but that didn’t stop her from skipping into my shared room with my sister to tell us of her risqué outings. She had learned this behaviour from me; I had a skewed concept of boundaries at the time, and I was so infatuated with this cool girl who has out having sex and doing grown up things that I just couldn’t help myself from barging into her room and demanding gossip on the daily. Serious conversations were had with both of us regularly about our gossip topics, but at the end of the day there wasn’t much my mother could do to regulate our vocal feed! Talking to her about it now, Patty said to me, “My God, Naoise, I was biting my nails waiting for the day I would hear you come home and go up to Karina to tell her you were doing the things she was doing. You seemed so happy to listen, and I was sure it was only a matter of time before you jumped on the bandwagon, no matter how much I tried to shelter you.”

Patty was right to be worried. She had been trying everything in her power to shelter Karina from her own destructive behaviour, but that girl had ways! Mitching school, sneaking out – all the tricks an unfortunate teenager knows when it comes to escaping an environment they don’t want to be in.

Alas, I learned my lesson all on my own. I was learning all these new things from Karina, but to me sex and everything that comes with it was one big illusion – a Twilight movie come to life before me, rated Eighteen and OVER. I didn’t actually know anything about the details of it all, I was simply fascinated by the idea, and my lack of respect for boundaries taught me the lesson that sex isn’t everything it is made out to be at such a young age.

One frosty and foreboding night in October I awoke in the night to a bang and a yelp coming from Karina’s room, and in a fit of worry I jumped from my top bunk and bounded across the upstairs hallway to her room, barging right in. I was promptly greeted with a face-on view of a strange boy’s arse, the milky white cheeks clenched in shock as he scrambled to cover himself up. Karina had fallen off the bed in the throes of their activities and was flat on her back with her knees over her head, knickers hanging on by a thread. This was sex. I was frozen in horror, confronted with the reality of it all. Girls were supposed to fall out of the bed? Boys actually had to get their bums out? What do you mean we couldn’t just kiss and run away from each other at warp speed? There was VULNERABILITY involved? I realised with substantial disappointment that Karina had lied to me. She didn’t know everything about sex.

The commotion caused that night hadn’t taken me as its only victim – the great Patty had awoken as well. The young boyfriend who had climbed through the window was dragged out of the house by the ear with his shoelaces still untied, and the following day Karina was carted off to the clinic for STD and pregnancy testing, after which she provided me with those details, too. This part, I was not too intrigued to hear.

You are not alone in monitoring the behaviours of the children running around your house. Patty could rely on Karina’s social worker to organise help straight away, and they were armed with advice for her on how to help Karina, to begin teaching her that the path she was on would not lend her a kind future. As for me, I had learned an entirely new behaviour – that of minding my own business and staying away from boys! As far as thirteen-year-old me was concerned, I never wanted to see a guy’s arse again. Karina had undergone an unfair amount of humiliation because of the ordeal, too, and so her detailed gossip chats came to a swift end.

If I were to give my own personal (and possibly inaccurate) opinion of learned behaviours in the home, I would be of the belief that it could actually be preferrable to navigate these behaviours within the confines of your own four walls. This way you can monitor, regulate, teach and love the young hearts that you care for. You are one person within a community of people in this country who have bravely stepped forward to help children in need, who haven’t had the best upbringing so far in life, and who just need a little guidance from a courageous adult. And as I constantly say, it will always boil down to the context at hand!

I hope you enjoyed this week’s topic – I understand it may seem like quite a broad perspective, and maybe you feel like you didn’t get as detailed an answer as you felt you needed. And that’s OK! The question portal is there for you to vent your innermost worries about how fostering might affect your biological child, and I will always anonymise the people who submit their questions! If you’re doubtful about whether I might have experienced something similar to what you’re needing advice on, don’t be. I’ve seen everything.

On that note, please do share this week’s post (or the entire site!) with other people you feel could benefit from my knowledge. You can subscribe through the homepage, too, to get exclusive updates delivered to your email every other week when a new post goes up! I don’t do email marketing, so new posts will be the only notification you get from me.

Thank you so much for reading guys, and I look forward to your feedback about learned behaviour!

‘Til next time, Naoise

Trudy Trickster and her Traumatic Tales

TRIGGER WARNING

Child sexual abuse

Greetings, foster mammies and daddies!

And welcome back to Adventures of a Biological Foster Child in Ireland. If you’ve been here before, you may be starting to get the gist of things, and if you haven’t, don’t worry about it! To learn more about My Child and Fostering Ireland, check out the homepage and the welcome blog. As this blog is still brand new and finding its feet, it might also be worth your while checking out the pilot blog, too, to get a feel for what kind of topics are explored, and what kind of themes will be followed. I would like to take a moment to remind you of the trigger warning listed just under the title. This week I will be discussing trauma, and childhood victims of sexual abuse. The anecdote I am drawing from for this topic has been largely fictionalised, and the personal details of the child in question have been changed drastically in order to protect their identity and integrity to the fullest extent. So, without further ado, let’s get started.

I’ll admit, I’ve been tiptoeing around the hard stuff these last few weeks; I’ve been trying to ease you into it slowly, to break the ice as one would do over a pint in the local pub. After one you’re talking politely, getting to know the surface that covers what lies beneath. After three pints, well, you start to dig a little deeper. This week, seeing as we are officially broaching topic (pint) number three, I’ve decided that it’s time to dig.

Trauma. What is it? How do we navigate it? How do we bring a child into our home who has experienced a form of trauma while sheltering our own children?

Let’s give trauma a name. Trudy. Trudy is the ten-year-old twin and Peter-Pan-like shadow of foster child Haley, who Patty has accepted as a placement for two weeks. When Haley trudges through the door at eight o’clock in the evening Trudy is hot on her heels.

“Who is this?” Patty asks, unaware that she had accepted a placement for two children, rather than one. The social worker can see Trudy, too.

“This is Haley’s trauma, Trudy.” The social worker says. “You must not show her to your children. I’ve already chatted to her about it, and she said she’ll try her best not to show Trudy to them.”

Patty understands, and so guides Haley through to the kitchen where Sophie and Naoise are watching the Simpsons. Patty introduces them (click here to explore the topic of introductions!) and she can see that they are oblivious to Trudy’s presence. But as she gets a closer look at Trudy, she notices a glint in the shadow girl’s eye and realises that she may not be visible right now, but there’s something of a leak about the glass case she is concealed in. As Haley settles down on to the sofa, Patty makes a decision to keep a close eye on the girls for the next two weeks.

In the meantime, Trudy and Haley have to find a way to settle into this strange environment. Trudy is quite the opposite of Haley, who is a quiet, shy and wonderfully sweet girl. Trudy torments Haley from behind her shoulder. When the girls are playing in the kitchen, Trudy makes Haley drink five glasses of juice and then locks the door to the bathroom until Haley can hold it no longer. Sophie was sure she had seen another hand helping Haley drink. She asked Patty about it later.

“Mam, why couldn’t Haley hold her bladder earlier?”

Patty thought for a minute, and then replied.

“Well, honey, you know the way Peter Pan has a shadow?”

“Yeah!”

“Well, Haley has a shadow, too. And she’s a trickster. Sometimes she comes up with tricks, and Haley has accidents because of it.”

“What kind of tricks, Mam?”

“Trudy Tricks! Nobody knows how she comes up with them.”

Sophie seemed to accept this, and things continued as normal.

A few days later, Naoise found Haley in the kitchen with a pair of scissors; she was cutting off her hair! Naoise was sure she had seen another girl that looked just like Haley. She was holding a mirror up so that Haley could see what she was doing. When the danger had been avoided and Haley went with her social worker on a trip to the hairdressers, Naoise approached Patty.

“Mam, why did Haley cut her hair?”

Patty thought for a minute, and then replied.

“Well, honey, you know the way Peter Pan has a shadow?”

“Yeah!”

“Well, Haley has a shadow, too. And she’s a trickster. Sometimes she comes up with tricks, and Haley has accidents because of it.”

“What kind of tricks, Mam?”

“Trudy Tricks! Nobody knows how she comes up with them.”

Naoise seemed to accept this, and things continued as normal.

But Patty was worried about Haley, and the embarrassment Trudy was causing her in front of Sophie and Naoise. She was also worried about the effect Trudy’s tricks might be having on her girls. Haley had already had two accidents, and Trudy was gearing up for more.

Folks, when you begin your fostering journey, you will be taking care of children with every kind of trauma known to man. You will find yourself faced with adversity that may scare you, and I warn you now that if you feel you are not prepared and motivated to deal with Trudy Tricksters, then you need to do some workshops and build your mental strength.

Haley was a victim of sexual abuse, and the accidents that Trudy fabricated for her were caused by the adverse effect that her abuse had on her childhood development. Trudy caused behavioural issues, stunted learning abilities and confusing dialogue. When I was out in the estate playing with Haley one day, she pointed at a man on the main road and said, “There’s my r*pist.”

She was ten. I was the same age as her and I had never heard the word r*pe before. And yet she was wise beyond her years in the subject of what goes in the life of a mature woman, and suddenly Trudy had stepped out from behind her and introduced herself to me with an outstretched hand. I took it and shook it, tentatively, and then I ran inside and told my mam.

What you need to understand is that your children are so incredibly resilient, and that what they have heard from the children you are fostering hasn’t happened to them. Trauma is not transferrable. It can’t be handed out and consumed and absorbed like a packet of crisps. They are not going to spontaneously manifest a Trudy of their own and begin replicating the accidents Trudy likes to cause. But they are going to ask questions, and you are going to have to answer them. I was an absolute plague to my mother when it came to questions, and often times she would have to cut me off with a stern ‘stop asking’ in order to protect the integrity of the foster child. When I look back now at situations like Haley’s and how they affected me, I can say with confidence that I do not recall those memories with a negative feeling in my chest. In fact, I recall them with a sense of gratitude that I was able to be there for that child. I was grateful they looked at me and felt that they could tell me something like that, and I had such a strong relationship with my mother that I always felt I could tell her, and she would always have an answer (God love her, though, she probably wasn’t ready for half of the stories I came out with).

And with all of this being said, Trudy will not be bounding in the door in full costume after every child that enters your home for a temporary stay. Sometimes she will be nothing but a distant shadow, able only to poke annoyingly at the foster child every now and then. Sometimes she may not even be there. However, I wanted to broach this topic as one that will be explored again in the future, as I remember the days when Patty and I would do group sessions with foster parents in training, and this was a question that came up time and time again. I’m also hoping, down the line, to have Patty give her own say on this topic, because I know how difficult it can be to explain these things to young children, and she has over twenty years of experience doing it.

To conclude, I hope I haven’t scared you off! Please be reassured that everything will be fine when Trudy does come to visit, and that your kids will be able to handle her with fisticuffs if needs be. The fostering organisation you are with are aware of your own home life, and they will always do everything in their power to ensure that the placements you take on are as good a fit for your family as is possible. Advice is waiting for you at every corner, and remember: it is always ok to say no. Your link worker will tell you absolutely everything you need to know about the trauma a child has endured, including any behavioural and developmental issues that have been identified. And as long as you are on the list there will always be someone who needs a temporary family to help get them back on track.

I hope you were able to gain some new knowledge and enjoy this week in spite of the sensitivity of the topic. Thank you so much for reading; I’ve noticed the numbers are climbing steadily each week and I am so happy that the audience is expanding! Please don’t be afraid to request a topic to be explored; I won’t ever reveal (unless you would like me to) the names of the people who submit their questions, and besides, I want to tailor this blog to suit you.

On that note, if you have any questions about this week’s blog, or if you’d like to suggest a new topic for my next post, please feel free to ask through the question portal. As always I would like to extend a huge thanks to Kerry over at Orchard Fostering for supporting this blog! You can find out more about Orchard by visiting the homepage.

‘Til next time,

Naoise

I Don’t Wanna Eat That!

Greetings, foster mammies and daddies!

And welcome back to Adventures of a Biological Foster Child in Ireland. If you’ve been here before, you may be starting to get the gist of things, and if you haven’t, don’t worry about it! To learn more about My Child and Fostering Ireland, check out the homepage and the welcome blog. As this blog is still brand new and finding its feet, it might also be worth your while checking out the pilot blog, too, to get a feel for what kind of topics are explored, and what kind of themes will be followed. Other than that, there is nothing wild or startling that you need to know, so without further ado, let’s get started.

This week, our chosen topic is going to be about food – particularly dietary requirements and how they are navigated in a household harbouring kiddies from different cultural backgrounds. But first, the why.

Of the 4.7 thousand people who applied for asylum in Ireland in 2019, nearly 10% of these were unaccompanied minors, or UASC’s (Unaccompanied Asylum- Seeking Children). That’s almost fifty children who found themselves on Irish soil without their mum or dad: in fact, without any relatives at all. They traversed Europe alone, leaving behind war, danger, poverty, and family. While fifty may not seem like a lot in comparison to the overall number of immigrants entering the country each year, it is a lot in the sense that they are not the only children of a different cultural background ending up in care. Ireland’s rate of diversity has been booming steadily since the Celtic Tiger, meaning many different families from many different cultural backgrounds are settling in Ireland and learning, constantly. This can sometimes lead to conflict concerning how children are looked after, which can sometimes lead to foster care placements (psst; this is where you come in!). It is absolutely inevitable that, for as long as you foster, you will be fostering children from all kinds of cultural backgrounds.

I don’t think I need to dive into a lesson in tolerating, accepting and nurturing foster children whose cultural backgrounds differ from our own…right? At least, I hope I don’t need to. It’s common sense! Instead, why don’t we dive into some anecdotes?

Raiding the Pantry

What kinds of spices are you hiding in your pantry? Why don’t you check there for me. Oh, you have “all of them”? Check again.

I want to say seven years ago, but time passes so quickly and I simply can’t remember. So, about seven years ago now, my mother began fostering a girl and her younger brother. We’ll call them Olive and Adam. They were Nigerian, but had been raised in Ireland and so were used to the Irish culture and food. But as Nigerian families will know, when you’re at home with your family, you eat Nigerian food! The fact that Olive and Adam had been raised in Ireland didn’t serve as an excuse to ignore their cultural background and cook them Irish food. They were away from home, and they were worried that life was going to change and veer away from comfort and home and family. This includes smells, tastes, sounds, practices. They were in an entirely alien environment, and those of us who have experienced the plight of being thrown into an alien environment know that when that happens, all we want is home. We all have a home dinner that we love, that we’ve eaten since we were babas and barely able to hold a spoon. For me, that home dinner is fried eggs, spuds and beans, all mashed together in an orange-y heap on a dinner plate – sometimes with sausage soldiers thrown in. It’s also pig’s arse and cabbage with spuds; basically anything with spuds, really. If I woke up one day in an apartment in rural Japan and there was a Japanese person there serving me sushi three times a day, of course I would miss my spuds! I love sushi, don’t get me wrong, but I’d be miserable.

So, when we discovered that Olive and Adam would be staying with us for a while, we wanted to make sure they felt as comfortable as possible. Even with Irish children, one of the first questions my mother always asks them is what they like to eat. We were kind of lucky in the sense that we lived just across the road from a McDonald’s, and this was almost always the answer on the first night. But that aside, it was so interesting to hear about the different combinations of foods and dinners that people liked, and I’d like to think that nowadays, I have quite a versatile diet. I’m one of those people who can and will eat anything, and when have you had a problem with a person like that?

For Olive and Adam it was jollof rice – an immensely popular dish involving long-grain rice, Nigerian-style curry powder, and thyme. Patty didn’t know how to make it, but luckily the siblings had a crisp idea and so we all set off to Tesco to do a Nigerian shop. This, I highly recommend. Do a cultural shop! Ask your temporary guest what they like to eat. Maybe they only know the name of the dish, and not how to make it, but that’s why Google exists! You can turn it into a bonding experience. Cook together, learn together, and you never know – you might end up loving what you come up with.

The Everyday Reality

But wait! You’re not a chef, and this isn’t a hotel! How are you supposed to cook two separate dinners every day, and do two separate shops every week?! This is madness, you say. Absolute madness. You pull your chef’s hat from your head and throw it on the kitchen tiles and stomp on it, and then you fall to your belly on the same tiles and bang your fists and feet, screaming, “WAAAAHHHH, THIS IS TOO HARD!”, and the poor foster child is looking at you and blinking in bewilderment, wondering if they should pat you on the back or back away slowly. But as they’re backing away they bump into me, and I’m glowing like an angel, here to make everything okay and tell you exactly what to do because I’ve lived it. I have had my spuds and beans on Mondays and my jollof rice on Tuesdays, because against popular belief it is actually possible to subsist on both, and nobody will die (unless they have a life-threatening allergy to one of the ingredients involved, in which case I cannot help you as I have never experienced this…and so I will back away with the child and we will go upstairs to watch a movie and ponder over your mental health). Kidding!

And look, obviously it isn’t guaranteed that your child and the child you foster will like each other’s food. When I say I had my jollof rice on Tuesdays, what I really mean is I begged Olive and Adam to make it without added spice, and I would still be sitting down to the dinner table with a pint of milk. Sophie didn’t like jollof rice at all, and so Olive and Adam would make it for themselves because they knew how, and Patty would make something else for Soph. When you’re in a situation where a foster child doesn’t know how to make their own dish, just try to accommodate. It doesn’t have to be a four-times-a-week thing; as long as it is done, and done more than once, the child you’re fostering will know that you care about their diet and are willing to make them feel like they can be their cultural selves in your home. And as I often say: it always boils down (in this case, sometimes literally) to the context of the situation at hand.

Takeaway

The takeaway is: don’t rely on takeaway! Your kids will be fine. When listening to other people’s stories, it is too easy to detach yourself from the anecdote and imagine the foster children as robots that will self-destruct if they are fed the wrong thing. And please, please don’t feel like you have to be the host(ess) with the most-est! Accommodating other cultures in your household is about tweaking a few things here and there. My suggestion is to take it slowly. Maybe start by introducing a day of the week that celebrates a cultural dish belonging to your foster child. If it doesn’t take, try a different dish next week! And if your biological child huffs and crosses their arms and says, “I don’t wanna eat that!”, then it is time to humble them. The world is overflowing with diversity, and globalisation is rushing to the surface of a kettle that has been boiling for many, many years. Don’t be left in the past…a!

Which reminds me, Patty once made penne pasta for a girl who had never seen it before. Long story short, Patty watched in amazement as the young girl stood in the middle of the kitchen with a piece of penne in her mouth, screaming. The texture was all it took. Be prepared for this! Literally, anything can happen.

I know it was a short one this week, but thank you so much for reading, and this is not the last time we will be talking about food! Diet plays an enormous role in fostering, and I am positive that the questions will be flooding in about it in the future.

On that note, if you have any questions about this week’s blog, or if you’d like to suggest a new topic for my next post (up on 19/11), please feel free to ask through the question portal. As always I would like to extend a huge thanks to Kerry over at Orchard Fostering for supporting this blog! You can find out more about Orchard by visiting the homepage.

‘Til next time,

Naoise

Introducing Temporary Guests to Permanent Ones

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

Welcome Blog

Greetings, foster mammies and daddies!

And welcome to the Adventures of a Biological Foster Child! I am so thrilled to be welcoming you to this exciting new blog. It is only natural with any blog that the pilot post be one of an introduction – to get us all on our feet together so that we can lay out the directions we will go in throughout our fostering journey. This week, seeing as it is the first week, I will be talking about Adventures of a Biological Foster Child in Ireland; what it is about, why it was created, how it works, and how you can benefit from it. So, without further ado, let’s get started!

As you may have gathered from the home page, I am currently ploughing through a Master of Arts in Creative Writing at University College Cork. Before diving into the world of professional writing at UCC, I didn’t have the kind of support that I do now to channel my ideas into a tangible reality (which is fine – all the more time to plan something like this!). When I began my degree this September I finally had backing from other professional writers to make a start on my career. I knew from the get-go that I wanted to create a blog. As someone who is passionate about short stories, a blog seemed like the perfect way to go, and I had had an idea brewing in the back of my mind for some time…

But who exactly am I?

Well, my mother began fostering when I was two years old (although please keep in mind that your child must now be three years old if you would like to foster). My elder sister was already four at the time, but Patricia didn’t want to wait! Fostering was something that she felt called to her, and if she was going to take the leap she wanted to make sure her own children got used to it sooner rather than later (but don’t worry, you can start fostering when your child is three, thirteen, or thirty!). Alas, over twenty years ago now my poor father found himself being dragged through the front doors of Tusla, his wages in one hand and Patty’s hand in the other. If I sat him down in the local pub now and asked him if he regretted fostering, he would sup his pint and laugh and tell me, “Regret it? I would have switched you and your sister out for those wonderful children if I had the chance”.

From then to now, an amazing and whopping fifty-two children have, at one time in their lives, found themselves between the four walls of our terraced house in County Louth. They shared a room with us, went to school with us, and ate dinner with us while their parents figured some things out. Most importantly, they learned that foster care was not something you entered and never left, and that it most certainly was not their fault that they had found themselves in it.

I would consider myself a textbook case of how to raise your biological children alongside those you foster in the best way. Not too many years ago my mother would take me along to group training sessions with new foster parents (like yourselves!), where we would answer questions they had, and tell them of our experiences navigating a world in which many different forms of trauma moseyed through our home. At the end of those sessions, I would often find a queue of parents in front of me with questions about how I ‘coped’ with other kids coming into my house. Was I jealous? Did I feel like my mammy loved me less because she was taking care of other kids? What happened when a foster child told me a big secret about something bad that had happened to them? The questions were endless, and they stuck with me years after I’d heard and tried to answer them. I felt much like my own mother in this situation; I felt called to do something. I wanted to answer their questions, to put their fears to rest because I was fine! I loved my temporary companions! But how would I do that?

I had to put the idea on hold for a while – do my Leaving Cert, focus on a bachelor’s degree, party a little – and once I arrived home with my bachelor’s in hand I started applications for a Creative Writing Master’s straight away. This idea in the back of my mind had bullied its way to the front and was giving out stink to me for ignoring it for so long. If I waited any longer it was going to storm out the front door and leave me forever, and I couldn’t let that happen.

And so, here we are. I secured my place at UCC, drank in all the information about media writing that I could, and invested in a domain! But I didn’t want to pick through the haystack to find you all myself. I wanted to reconnect with those groups I used to talk to, so I reached out to Kerry Hession, marketing executive at Orchard Fostering and pitched her the idea for this blog. To my own delight she loved it, and has been the helping hand behind the scenes that has led you here!

How will this blog work?

In honour of the days when I would sit in front of you physically and give you the floor, my wish is to uphold that tradition in the virtual realm. With this in mind, I’ve designed this site in a way that gives you, the readers, the power. Each week there will be a new topic chosen by you through the question portal, where I will pile all your questions together and talk about the one that prevails. If your question is quite specific, or maybe hasn’t been asked before, don’t worry. I will be doing spotlight weeks where I bring these questions into the light as new ground to be explored, so you’ll get your answer!

For the time being, I will be posting a new blog bi-weekly on Wednesdays or Thursdays at midday. You can subscribe to the site if you’d like notifications when a new post goes up, so you don’t miss a thing. I am a glutton for feedback, too, so any suggestions you might have to make this community more open and welcoming to the needs of all who join are most certainly appreciated. At the end of the day this blog is for you, because we need more foster carers in Ireland. The percentage of unaccompanied minors entering the country is rising every year, and the ratio of foster parents to foster children is growing further apart as numbers climb. My sister and I are twenty-five and twenty-two now, and growing up in the world of fostering has made us headstrong advocates of child welfare. We already know we are going to foster, and we’re hellbent on convincing everyone we can find to take that route with us. I’ll admit, this is propaganda. I am propaganda-ing you to take the leap, because you won’t be taking it alone! Orchard Fostering will be holding one hand, and I’ll be holding the other.

I really hope you enjoyed this first blog post. As our following finds its legs, I have decided to choose the coming week’s (20/21 October) topic for us – Introducing Temporary Guests to Permanent Ones. There will be anecdotes and real-life experiences – what went well, what didn’t – and a space for us to have a chat at the end. After that, blogs will go up every two weeks as planned. I hope to see you there.

‘Til next week,

Naoise