News

MONDAY

I am leaving this job on Friday, and the teenage children in my care, some of whom have been known to me for nearly ten years, are clamouring for extra attention.

I don't promise to keep in touch with them, because I know I won't, and it may interfere with their newly allocated workers.  But the feeling of loss, even betrayal is high.

Have a difficult day ahead, as I am taking one of them, called May, to meet her birth mother.  Fostered throughout her life in somewhat difficult circumstances, she needs to do this, before I leave.  It took six months to track the mother down; they have spoken on the phone and we are all nervously waiting for midday.  The girl and her mother seen together are startlingly alike. The girl is pretty enough but her mother must have been a beauty. Now seeing her thin and frail, and in poor health, as she apparently always has been, makes the abandonment all those years ago somewhat more bearable.

When we leave, they make no plans to meet again but we detour past the hospital where May was born, and drove round the area for a while.  Life history work, never possible before, is now necessary.

TUESDAY

The foster parents of this girl phone through asking for an urgent home visit. I fear the worst - maybe she wants to leave them and go to live with her mother.  One young man recently did just that. Abandoned at three days old on the step of a Children's Home in true Dickensian style, he managed to trace his father when he was about 21 and lived with him for some six months before it fell to pieces and he went back to his adoptive home.

Anyway when I get to the house, all is well. Somehow seeing her mother has released May from her history. They all talked well into the small hours, and now she also wants the adoption that they long for, to go ahead. I promise that if needed as a witness, I will come to the adoption hearing, wherever I'm working.

WEDNESDAY

From highs to lows. The night duty team dealt with an attempted suicide yesterday of a 14 year old in foster care. I stop sorting out the deritrus of nearly twelve years and drive furiously to the hospital. She sits in bed, holding the foster mother's hand, both of them in tears. A silly story gets shuddered out, a lost cardigan, a threat, a curfew, and she reached for the paracetamol. No lasting damage to them, one hopes, although I am left feeling totally inept. They are seeing the psychiatrist this afternoon which is a positive step but I regret that my last meeting ends like this.

THURSDAY

Clearing my desk, I hadn't realised I had kept so much stuff.  Letters from successful adopters, a photo of a girl once in my care, with her new husband, my own degree and other certificates, for which I have searched at home as I need to produce them for my new job.  Articles on practice torn from countless journals, never to be read.

FRIDAY

Seen off by colleagues, clutching my present and some flowers, I come face to face with a woman who once raced up the office stairs, machete in hand, threatening to kill me..."Heard you were leaving" she carolled cheerfully, "best social worker my kids ever had. Come to say goodbye" and she pressed a bottle of stolen perfume into my hand.