Sunday, October 3, 2010

journal

The Sad story
It was raining cat. The strategically placed picnic tables and benches in the gardens were empty, and the three or four groups of visitors had tracked indoors. It was my day on duty – a duty I loathed, for I always felt like a prison warder. At the end of the visitors’ lounge mat and his mother were talking animatedly, and every so often they turned an looked at me. mat had wanted to go home for the weekend and we had been unable to agree. And judging by their hostile-looking glances it seemed that I was at the receiving end of their disappointment.
What were they saying now? mat was remonstrating with his mother, and he remonstrated in her turn, both with gestured references to me. Had Mom taken a drink or two? Her voice was at times sharp and raised, so that some of the other groups looked across at her. In such a state she would be a formidable person with whom to have a difference.

Mat was a prickly customer. Big for his age at 14, he gave us a hard time from day one. He had been removed from a troubled home – his mother was an divorce and his father was in and out of prison. With little effective supervision, Mat was always out on his own, and had been picked up three times by the police – once for shoplifting, once for being in possession of an amount of dope legally greater that what could be considered “for personal use”, and once for assault.
Our agency was caught in that common dilemma between deciding whether his family was a candidate for “reunification or preservation” or whether we should accept the fact that we would be responsible for the boy’s parenting from here on, seeing him through to adulthood. To focus our resources on the boy in the context of the family, or just on the boy? The father’s continuing absence and the mother’s chronic alcohol problem decided the judge: he placed the boy with us on seven-days-a-week residential protective custody.
One of the immediate by-products of this decision was that the agency staff, being the only visible and tangible “officials”, became the targets for all of the family’s hurt and anger. We were each persona non grata and felt ourselves limited to the role of big bad wolf. Our team’s response to this over the period mat had been with us had been to disregard hostility, to meet every need, to continue to reach out and always to respond positively.

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