The Good, The Bad and The Unwanted

PREFACE


I wrote this short novel based on some experiences during my vast and extensive career as a child protection social worker.
Some of the quotes are verbatim, taken from things which children have said to me over the years.
Some of the characters are based on children and people I have worked alongside – positively or otherwise!
The underlying message of course is how things can go badly wrong for children who are not loved unconditionally, who do not form positive attachments, who are not wanted, and how the system can fail them, and they become labelled ‘bad’.
The story is, of course, fictional and dramatised.
Any quotes from research are included under ‘fair use’ and the poetry is my own.
Despite being fictional, nothing has shaped my thinking more than listening to and working with other social workers, foster carers, adoptive carers, and disadvantaged parents, but most of all my thinking has been shaped from working endlessly with abused, neglected, and unwanted children.
I hope for my audience to be:
Social workers – who will go on to look beyond the surface and bring ‘professional curiosity’ into their daily practice.
Foster carers and adoptive parents – to always question their desire and reasons for helping and caring for other people’s children. So many of them do it lovingly and unconditionally – but not all!
Parents – who want to look after their children better than they do but don’t know where to go for help.
But mostly, I want my audience to be anyone out there who knew neglect and abuse as a child and then became labelled ‘bad’. You are not!
Everyone deserves to be loved and wanted.




THE LONELY REFLECTION
(By Diana Jo)


As I looked in the mirror through childhood,
I saw a reflection of me
Unwanted, unloved and uncared for,
which was not what I wanted to see.
I grew and the mirror grew with me,
but each time I looked was the same,
A child staring back with the saddest of eyes,
full of longing and needing and shame.
As an adult I still have a mirror,
and I look in it most days to see
The same reflection I saw as a child,
a lonely, unlovable me.
I am going to change my reflection;
I am going to set myself free,
When I’ve learned that its okay to just love myself,
the mirror will change just like me.




PROLOGUE


Nobody is born bad, but some people are born unwanted.
‘A silent cry, a hungry child, emotions that are stunted,
When I was born, I was not bad, but I knew I was unwanted.’

Leo was born on Halloween, and as he grew up, he often wondered whether this was the reason for the good and the bad in him.
Leo was born and raised not knowing who his father was.
As he grew older, he questioned whether his mother knew, but she was always ambivalent about this.
‘Just a bloke, for God’s sake, Leo. How am I supposed to know?’
Leo was about six when he realised that his mum was a sex worker, although he never really understood the ‘label’ which people gave her, or what a ‘label’ was: ‘prostitute, hooker, whore.’
He knew the men came and went, he knew there were noises and grunts from his mum’s bedroom when the men were there, and she always had money afterwards.
Leo was seven when the police came one night. He had been lying under his thin blanket in bed. He could hear his mum’s screams and pleas for things to stop. He knew she was being beaten and hurt in other ways although he couldn’t really understand.
He knew he was scared; he was picking at the skin on his hands again as he tried to not listen. He knew his hands would be raw in the morning as he picked at them furiously.
He knew his mum would be bruised again; ‘black and blue’, that’s what he had heard it called.
He knew she would cover herself in make-up. He hated that make-up so much. He wished he could throw it all in the bin.
If she didn’t have the make-up to cover the bruises, then she might stop getting the bruises, he thought.
Leo’s thoughts started to get fuzzy. He was so tired. He hadn’t had any tea tonight because mum was being a ‘prostitute, a whore, a hooker’!
He pleaded to himself for the screaming and the sounds of thuds and grunting to stop but they didn’t stop. They carried on, and he knew his mum would be all cut and bleeding again; he just knew it.

Then came the KNOCK!
The knock on the door which changed everything that night. Leo’s life was never going to be the same again.
‘POLICE HERE! LET US IN, NOW!’ The screaming stopped, the thuds stopped, the grunting stopped.
Someone let the police in, he can’t remember who – maybe they forced their way in like in the films he had watched a few times when the men weren’t here and mum was nice.
He remembers the police lady who came into his bedroom – well, his mum called it a bedroom. He had heard the social workers say that it was not appropriate. It was basically a cupboard under the stairs, but nonetheless it was where he slept night after night, cold, sometimes hungry, listening to his mum being ‘a prostitute, a whore, a hooker’, or whatever she was when the men came and went.
The police lady was kind, he thinks. She had a round face and was smiling as she came toward him.
‘Well then, what have we here? What’s your name, little fella?’
Leo had hidden under his blanket. His mum had told him all about the police and social workers. They didn’t help; they made it worse. He tried to remember what his mum had told him to say.
She was closer now, the smiley police lady. She edged toward Leo’s bed and said, ‘Don’t be scared. We are here to help.’
He couldn’t remember kind words like this since his grandma had died. Something inside snapped and he started to cry, really cry, and tremble, and scream.
He couldn’t stop, he just couldn’t stop. He knew he was startling the police lady, but he couldn’t stop.
‘SARGE!’ shouted the police officer. ‘Come in here, Sarge, you need to see this.’
‘I think we will need police protection. There’s a child here – he’s terrified, he looks half-starved. Please, Sarge, come here.’
As the bulky sergeant came and stood in the cupboard doorway, there was no room left. Leo thought it was like a cartoon where everyone was big and the surroundings were small. It was comical, but he still kept screaming.
‘Boody hell,’ said the sergeant. ‘What the fuck? The poor little bugger. Call Children’s Services, Officer. Do it now, right away. He can’t stay here.’
Just as Leo was wondering what would happen to him next, he saw another police officer leading a man out of his mum’s bedroom. The man wasn’t resisting. He was half-dressed, head down and muttering ‘obscenities’ (Leo thought that was the grown-up word for swearing, anyway).
‘Fuckin’ bitch. More trouble than she’s worth, bloody big mouth screaming and crying. She got what she deserved. She would have soon taken my money.’
Behind the man, Leo could see his mum. A different police lady was trying to help her get dressed. She was really black and blue. She looked as if she were broken in two. She couldn’t stand up; she was doubled over.

Leo felt his heart pounding. He wanted to go to her, to help her. He would even put the make-up on for her if it would help.
His mum looked at him through bloodshot eyes. He didn’t recognise his own emotions as pity and concern. He tried to smile at her.
Sometimes, very rarely, when the men weren’t around, they smiled at each other, and he would feel warm and nice inside afterwards.
Leo heard the sergeant say, ‘We are taking him into protective custody, madam. Would you like to say goodbye?’
Leo froze. What was protective custody? What did that mean? Was he in trouble? Was he going to jail?
The kind police lady with the round face tried to hug him. ‘It’s okay, its okay,’ she said, ‘you will be fine. We’ll find a nice family to look after you.’
She looked younger than he had first thought now she was close to him. He had thought all police officers were old and mean – that’s what his mum had said.
Leo did not realise at this point, of course, that their paths would cross again in very different circumstances in the future.
As if Leo’s mum knew what he was thinking, she suddenly became alive, not broken, not doubled in two, not as ‘black and blue’ as he had first thought.
Her voice was high, like it always was when she had taken some pills or drunk from the ‘boozy’ bottle.
‘Say goodbye to him?’ she screamed at the sergeant. ‘Say goodbye … are you mad? Seven years I’ve spent trying to feed and clothe the little bastard, seven years of going without and putting up with beating after beating to try to tell myself I wanted him, wanted to be a normal mum, wanted to do the fuckin’ school runs and play happy families. No! I DON’T want to say goodbye. I don’t want to ever clap eyes on the little bastard again! Take him into protective custody, take him … do you hear me? Fuckin’ take him and good riddance. He’ll amount to no good. He was forced onto me by one of those no-hopers. I don’t know why I ever kept him. I never wanted him in the first place, anyway.’
Leo was stunned. He had heard his mum call him names many times but never like this. This was hard, cold, and really mean.
As he watched the police officer lead her away, he thought he saw tears in her eyes. He told himself that she was sorry but deep down he knew that she had never loved him.
The words and contempt she had for him followed him, and they went on to haunt him for many years to come.

It was Halloween the night the round-faced police lady took him into protective custody, and he realised that it was his seventh birthday!
Happy birthday to the kid that nobody wanted. There had been no presents, no cake, and his mother hadn’t even used his name, preferring to call him a ‘little bastard’.

‘I have a name, a lovely name, the one you gave to me,
A simple name, a charming name, for all the world to see.

And yet you never use my name, as if I weren’t there,
The Kid, The Brat, The Bastard, I knew you did not care.

I have a name, a lovely name, well, that’s what others say,
“That thing I bred, that nuisance”, is what I hear each day.

I have a name, a lovely name, and in my dark despair
I use my name to soothe myself, ’cos no one else is there.

Why did you call me Leo? I think you got it wrong,
It stems from Latin origin, a lion brave and strong.

I have a name, a lovely name,
but I’m not brave and bold,
A child with no identity,
in a world that’s hard and cold.’




CHAPTER 1
‘THE GOOD’ – THE FOSTER PARENTS


‘No baby is born bad. All babies are beautiful, sweet, innocent, vulnerable, and solely reliant on adults to meet their needs and protect them.’
That had been Leo’s start in life, hadn’t it? Good! Of course, good!

Initially, after the night that ‘The Knock’ happened, when Leo was taken away, scared and unwanted, he had lived with a foster family.
The social workers were looking for a ‘forever family’ for him, an adoption!
There had been no fuss, no mother who fought to keep him. He was purely unwanted.
Leo hadn’t minded his foster family, ‘Ken and Angie’. There wasn’t any screaming or groaning, no men coming and going. It was peaceful.
He did, however, wonder about the things he heard them say to his social workers.
He had been in the kitchen on one occasion. They had been in the adjoining room, and Leo heard Ken say,
‘He seems angry. We have tried to talk to him, to tell him he’s safe to express his emotions, but he just shakes his head. Sometimes he cries but then at other times he smiles, and we just hope that he is recovering.’
Leo knew what Ken meant. Sometimes he did cry. He would bury his head in Angie’s lap and think about his mum. Why had she called him names? Why did she say she’d never wanted him?
Leo knew how she’d behaved was wrong, was unkind, bad, and he wasn’t going to be bad like her or the men, so as he lived with Ken and Angie, over time he learned to say thank you for all the nice things they gave him, for the kind way in which they treated him.
He learned to be gentle with Ruby, the family dog, threw balls for her when out walking and helped to feed her each evening.
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