Foster

I have spent much of this year helping Sam learn to read and write. Slowly, we have moved from a state of fear, resistance and distraction to a steady and committed attention to words. It started when I read him James and the Giant Peach. ‘Maybe one day you’ll go to New York,’ I said. He looked at me, his face open with wonder, ‘But is the giant peach still there?’ Together and slowly, one word at a time, we read books about the solar system. My mum comes to visit and tells him that her house is like a spaceship because windows open at the press of a button. ‘I can’t wait to visit,’ he says, ‘because we’re going to the moon’. After an excursion to the Planetarium he writes in his notebook, ‘I found out we are all made of stars. It’s nise to no we are all part of the uneverse.’ Sam is my 14-year-old foster son. By the time this is in print he will be 15. He and his sister came to live with my partner and I one year ago and they will remain with us. When they arrived, I was shell-shocked from managing traumatised children, sleep-deprived from their endless nightmares, and exhausted from meetings with case workers and the daily grind of navigating an opaque child-protection system. A line of poetry became a refrain in my mind: ‘The world is gone, I must carry you’