The Five Little Ducks Blog

Yesterday Miss L came home from school with a rubber band holding together one of her broken black shoes. Her teacher was concerned that the shoe had become a fall hazard. Last term I purchased an $80 pair of school shoes for Miss A, so today I tell Miss L that she can wear her sister’s outgrown shoes. She is happy with the arrangement, Miss A is not. Miss A starts shouting at Miss L that she is not allowed to wear her shoes. I explain that Miss A has new shoes which fit her, Miss L’s shoes are broken so she needs the old pair today. Miss A repeatedly snatches the shoes and repeatedly screams “I hate L, I wish she was dead! I wish she wasn’t in this house!” I give the shoes to Miss L and tell her to leave the room so that she doesn’t have to listen to Miss A screaming at her. I give Miss L a quick hug and apologise to her for the mean things being said to her.

Miss L sits down in the kitchen and starts putting on the shoes, then Miss A, still in her pyjamas, storms in and snatches back her old shoes. I take them back and ask her to leave the kitchen because she is screaming so loudly. My body forms a wall in between Miss L and Miss R who have huddled together in the corner of the kitchen and Miss A who has become hysterical and disregulated. She keeps shouting abuse at Miss L and I repeatedly ask her to leave the kitchen. She is pushing against my body and in the kerfuffle, I accidentally step on her toes. She screams and drops to the ground, I explain that it was an accident, I didn’t mean to step on her toes. You did! She replies, crying, then resumes shouting hatred at her sister. I ask her to go to her room until she has calmed down and she continually defies me. I take her hands and try to walk her out of the kitchen, I don’t feel it is fair to make the other children listen to her screaming. She tells me to let go of her hands, I say that I will when she is walking in the right direction. She is in the hallway now. I go back into the kitchen and remind her that she can come back in when she has stopped screaming. I am shaking. Her high pitched shrieking continues. Adrenaline is coursing through my body, my arms feel so tense. She picks up a small chair and starts slamming it against the ground. Now I start to really yell. I yank the chair out of her hands and put it down, and shout GO TO YOUR ROOM! My throat aches afterwards. She finally goes to her room and the continual sound of screaming becomes dulled by the walls of our house.

Mr E stumbles out of his room muttering Boy, I have a noisy neighbour and comes into the kitchen where he finds me with an ice brick in my hands, taking deep breaths. I explain to him that I am holding the ice brick to reset my brain, to help me calm down. It is a trick I learned in counselling. The sudden shock of cold disrupts the stress hormones. Mr E is a deep feeler like me, I want to be real with him about how our bodies react to our strong emotions. After a few minutes I check on Miss A, she is complaining of a sore stomach. I explain that it probably hurts from crying and screaming so much, then remind her that she needs to get dressed for school. She’s not going to school, she adamantly claims. A little while later, she comes into the dining room, dressed, with a flushed face and whimpering. I pull her onto my lap and brush her hair, then scratch her back and offer to make her a cup of tea. She accepts. I make it weak, milky and sweet. She sips at the tea and I keep cuddling her. I apologise for stepping on her toes. It was an accident. They were my favourite shoes, I loved them more than any other shoes in the whole wide world. You have loved lots of shoes, I reply. The other children enjoyed the bowls of hot chocolate flavoured porridge I had made for them, I offer to make her a bowl. She says no, she doesn’t like porridge. I offer to make her fruit toast, which I know she likes lathered in butter. No, she wants chocolate porridge. She won’t finish it, but I decide to let that battle go today, and I don’t allow the issue of tying up her hair to enter the arena either. She has calmed down now, and distracts herself fiddling with my phone.

We walk to school. Miss M is in the Ergo, Mr J in the double stroller. The other children are on foot. Miss A is carrying sheets of Toy Story 4 stickers that her mother had given her at the weekend. We are short for time, so I decide that we should do some intermittent jogging. Everyone is giggling and happy as we fill our lungs with the cool morning air. Suddenly Miss A starts shrieking that she dropped a sticker on the road. I push forward, we only have ten minutes until the bell rings. It is not until we are further down the path that I am made to understand that it was a page of stickers, not just one sticker. If we turn back, we will be late. So we forge ahead. Miss A keeps complaining about the missing page, I try to empathise about how disappointed she must be, but also remind her that she is still holding two pages, and perhaps they would be safer in her backpack. No, she wants to hold them. That was her favourite page of stickers, she was going to give a sticker to the whole school. They will be all muddy and ruined. She still has enough stickers for her whole class, I say. No, there are 101 kids in her class. Maybe its like in the movie Toy Story, Mr E proffers. They got lost and they have to come to life and find their way home. No! Stickers don’t come to life. As we approach the school gate, Miss A asks if I can look for the stickers on my way home. Even though I am going to walk home via the shops, meaning I won’t need to walk the way we had already come, I say yes. Later, with my pram laden with Mr J in one compartment and with fruit and milk in the other, and Baby M crying for a feed in the Ergo, I go back. Amazingly, I locate the lost sticker sheet and it is still in tact. Looking both ways before I cross the road, I hope that the cause of my death is not being hit by a car during the retrieval of a page of stickers.

Not every morning is this exciting, stressful or dramatic. I feel that Miss A has far fewer meltdowns than she used to. In many ways she seems calmer and happier. Every child has their moments, their difficult stages.

But I still feel ill equipped to handle it all. The way she treats her sister. Her constant pessimism. The way she makes me feel.

I think back to our application process with Community Services four years ago. The interviews where we had to prove that we were good parents, capable of caring for our nieces. We were good parents. I am a good mum. Doesn’t mean that I had what it took to foster.

I was a 24 year old girl in love with the idea of two girls I had barely seen since they were babies. I had read about attachment trauma, but I was wearing rose-tinted glasses and thought that my Pollyanna optimism would fix everything, that LOVE CONQUERS ALL!

I remember attending a one day training course for kinship carers where they explained our responsibilities and the rights of children in care, and they discussed the issue of disrupted attachment. Every other carer in that room already had a relationship with their kids in care, most of them were already caring for them and were ticking a mandatory box. We hadn’t even had contact with the girls yet, and wouldn’t get contact until they began the transition to move into our home, a process which took place in less than a week.

In the last few years I have seen social workers and psychologists and undergone several parenting courses. These professionals are quick to make blanket statements and to criticise. Their main priority is protecting vulnerable children. They give you a list of dos and don’ts, but don’t really prepare you for what to do in the moment when the pressure is on. Raising kids is not black or white.

If I were to sit in a parenting program and put forward to the group issues I had faced this morning, I would most likely be told that I am not allowed to physically restrain a child (even though I was doing it to try to protect Miss L) or send Miss A to her room. Instead, I am supposed to do a “Time In” (Time out has negative connotations which might traumatise a child in care) where I sit with Miss A through all of her big feelings. If she was my only child, that might be attemptable, but even then, by sending her to her room I allow myself to calm down and stop myself from doing something I might regret. I figure that if a bedroom a space safe enough to sleep in for eleven hours a night, it is safe enough to cool down in. In all of the training, the parenting courses and the sessions with different specialists, nobody warned me that sometimes I might get really, really angry and not actually like my foster kid! Raising your own kids is tough, so when you add extra layers like attachment trauma, a different temperament and a whole set of genes unlike your own, it gets complicated.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have given Miss A’s old shoes to Miss L, knowing the dynamics between them. Now I need to decide whether to buy Miss L a new pair of school shoes or wait and see if Miss A forgets about the old pair and moves on.

Perhaps I should have gone back for the missing page of stickers straight away and accepted that we would be late and the children would need late notes from the office.

Perhaps I should have better utilised my emotion coaching skills, or asked Miss A to draw her feelings, or one deep breathing together, or I could have handed the ice brick to Miss A To help her calm down (although she probably would have thrown in on the ground).

It is easy to wonder what to do in retrospect, the challenge is knowing what to do in the moment.