Casey Watson - Mummy’s Little Helper

Abby was so different, on so many levels, yet it seemed we had exactly the same issue in the kitchen; that, like Justin, she needed a very clear set of rules – to know, as he had, exactly what we were eating on which day, and when. So, in terms of strategy, perhaps they weren’t going to be so different after all. At least, not in this respect. I smiled at her.

‘But now you’re here,’ I said to her, ‘I’m happy to do things your way – it will be such a treat not to have to think what to cook, I can tell you. So. What would you like for tea?’

This seemed to be exactly the right thing to say because she immediately looked happier, putting a finger to her lips, and tapping them as she consulted the chart she obviously had in her head.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s Wednesday, which is normally scrambled eggs and beans on toast day. If … um … that’s all right with you,’ she added politely.

‘Of course it is,’ I told her. ‘I’ve got plenty of both.’ I was just about to add that she could help me make it if she liked when she rolled up the sleeves of the hoodie she’d changed into. ‘Right,’ she said brightly. ‘I’ll get started, then.’

Of course, one of the things I was aware was in our brief was to gently re-train her to accept that she was a child and, as such, needed to reclaim a childhood. Which obviously meant accepting the normal child–adult roles, which, on the evidence of her first twenty-four hours in our company, was going to be something of a challenge.

But it was early days, so I decided I would let her have a degree of autonomy. For today at least. I told her we would prepare everything and cook it together, ready for when Mike got home from work.

‘And you should have seen her,’ I told Mike, after we’d finished our tea and I had the chance of a quiet few minutes upstairs with him, while Abby sat and wrote in her new scrapbook. ‘There was nothing she couldn’t do. She knew how to crack the eggs, whisk them, open the bean tins, and use the correct bowl for them, work out the microwave – absolutely everything.’

Mike grinned. ‘And it tasted good too! Sounds like we’ve lucked out with this one,’ he joked. ‘A dream, by the sounds of it, certainly compared with young Spencer! More like a housekeeper than a foster child, given half a chance!’

It obviously was a joke, and she certainly wouldn’t be given that half a chance, but even so, I was struggling to see where the challenge in this challenging child lay. Yes, she would have all sorts to deal with in the coming weeks, but compared with the sort of kids we usually looked after, this just didn’t seem to be even on the same scale.

But as later that evening we sat and watched her pulling strands of hair out again, a part of me – the rational part – knew better. She was also, we noticed, clock watching – or watch-watching, more accurately. Checking the little pink watch on her wrist again and again and again; looking at it, tapping the face, then pulling her sleeve back over it, then looking and tapping and covering it again. What she was watching for, what precise timing was being monitored, we didn’t know: when I asked why – if there was something she needed to remember to do – she coloured. Yet she continued to do it, right until the time she went to bed.

No. I knew better. However benign, compared with other kids’, her problems seemed to me, she was with us for a reason, as John had pointed out.

And we’d find out the extent of it soon enough.

The visit to see Sarah, Abby’s mother, had been arranged for around four the following afternoon and, having seen Abby off to school, I spent much of the day wondering what I was going to find when I met her.

Meeting family members in my role as a foster carer was something I’d learned I could never second-guess. It was such a singular and unnatural situation. In some circumstances, of course, you never got to meet the birth parents of a child you cared for, because all contact had been stopped by social services. Other times the relationship was civil, even if tense. Sometimes a parent was angry and downright hostile – we’d had a baptism of fire in that regard, for sure.

You never knew what to expect. Each situation was different. I’d been sworn at, I’d been threatened, I’d been genuinely scared, often, but the experience that had left the most lasting impression had been a couple of years back, with our second foster-child, Sophia, who had come to us after her mother had fallen down the stairs, and ended up in hospital, in a coma.

Like Sarah, Sophia’s mother had been on her own, with very little in the way of family, which was why Sophia, after a period of being looked after by an uncle, had finally had to come into care. Visits to Sophia’s mother, by the time she had come to live with us, meant visits to a room in a hospice. She was on a life-support system, in a persistent vegetative state, and seeing her for the first time was profoundly shocking. She was so beautiful, and so young, like a sleeping Disney princess. It was an experience I would never forget.

I wasn’t expecting anything quite so dramatic – or, indeed, distressing – today. In fact I was looking forward to meeting Sarah. Most kids are in care because they can’t be left with their families, more often than not because the families in question were unfit, for whatever reason, to care for them.

This was different. Sarah clearly loved her daughter. It was just cruel fate that had conspired against the pair of them. It was frustrating, certainly, that she’d felt unable to ask for help up to now – and the results of her over-reliance on her little girl were obviously a problem – but who was I to say I wouldn’t have done the same in her situation?

And perhaps the illness had crept up on her – multiple sclerosis was like that, wasn’t it? And the situation at home – the way everything had been arranged for Abby to do everything – had obviously grown up over a number of years. And if I knew anything about anything it was that if a situation developed gradually, it could easily become just another version of ‘normal’ – you sometimes didn’t notice it as anything that odd. Perhaps, up till now, Sarah had, to her mind, been coping, and it had taken this crisis to show her she was not.

Much as I looked forward to meeting her, however, I had realised I was woefully ignorant when it came to having a clue about the specifics of her disease.

Mike likewise. ‘Incredible, really,’ he’d commented the night before, once we were in bed. ‘Not to mention lucky.’ He was right. There was no one in the family who’d had multiple sclerosis, and neither of us knew anyone who had either. ‘I think the only person I know of who has had MS is that guy at work – d’you remember?’ said Mike. ‘The one they thought had a drink problem, and almost got sacked? Poor guy. I wonder what happened to him in the end.’

And so it went on. Though, once again, being in the dark was not a new situation for us. When Sophia had come to us with Addison’s disease, we’d had to learn a lot of medical stuff in a very short time just to be sure her illness was kept under control. Were it not, we’d been warned, she could die. This, thankfully, was different. Physically, Abby was just fine. And Sarah wasn’t our responsibility. But we still felt we needed to understand things a little better if we were going to help Abby through this stressful period. At the very least there was the central – and still unanswered – question about what was going to happen with Sarah long term.

In the end, I’d gone downstairs and got the laptop, so we could get a better picture of what we were dealing with. And having familiarised ourselves a little with the mechanics of the condition, we’d spent what turned out to be a dispiriting half-hour, reading about the many ways multiple sclerosis could disable a person. Not the most edifying kind of bedtime reading.