Let Me Go by Casey Watson

Author:Casey Watson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-03-18T22:27:39+00:00

Chapter 12

It’s a mantra I’ve had cause to use a million times in fostering, but I said it to myself again: Rome wasn’t built in a day. When we returned to the car – I kept a calculated two or three steps behind her all the way – she had her earbuds back in and was waiting by the door for me, eyes firmly fixed on the ground, as if making any sort of acknowledgement that I’d won this battle would be a step too far. Which was fine. I didn’t speak to her, just whooped away inside. Because it felt nothing short of a miracle.

I also reminded myself of another fostering mantra: that children – all children – needed boundaries. Responded to boundaries, which was the crux of the matter. Harley might not be one of the hard-bitten children of the system I’d often encountered, who, playing the game, wilfully tried to break any that were given to them at every turn, but she had fallen into a pattern and it was beginning to make sense for me. Finding the pressure building up so much that she had to relieve it – by harming herself, running away, making ineffectual attempts at ‘ending it’ – and then, having done so, not quite knowing what next to do. And the professionals, constrained by their necessary protocols, didn’t know what to do with her either. They couldn’t force her to do anything, because the law said they mustn’t – since her discharge from the hospital, she was no longer sectioned, and if they were agreed that she shouldn’t be (and they all agreed on that one) then what else could they do for her? Just try to instigate interventions that, by the nature of her legal rights, she had absolutely no obligation to engage with. And why would she? Because I had a hunch she was intelligent enough to see things as they were; that all the people around her were there for one reason. Because it was their job to be, nothing more. Which wouldn’t alter her miserable world-view at all.

And that was probably how she’d seen me and Mike, when she’d come to us. Just a couple whose job it was to provide bed and board for her. Who’d do what we were asked to because it was our job to. What love and security had she experienced, after all? With a long-dead dad, an absent mother and a sister who’d left her?

She was wrong, of course. We all cared. You didn’t choose a career working with troubled children if you didn’t care. But it struck me that she needed to see that for herself in the same way my own kids had experienced our love and care, not just in the obvious ways, but in the less obvious ones too. When we freaked out at them because they’d worried us senseless.

What was that saying? That the opposite of love wasn’t hate, it was indifference. What had she seen, since

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