Dave’s story

A Friend offers a personal insight into adoption

Dave (not his real name) was twenty minutes old when he ‘lost’ his parents. Social services took him into care at birth. I won’t say why, but you don’t have to be a genius to work out there were serious protection issues involved. By the time he was two months old he was on his third set of parents; at six months he was put into long-term foster care with the fourth – people who, a year later, adopted him and his elder brother.

By all accounts, this was a loving and happy family, but Dave always felt a sense of loss he could neither identify nor explain. He fell over a lot, often banging his head, and once his parents took him to a cranial osteopath, who told them that his head was alright physically… but he felt other emotions coursing through this two-year-old. ‘What emotions?’ they asked; and the practitioner welled up. ‘Despair’, he said.

Destructive rages

As he went through primary school, Dave seemed fairly happy; he had an infectious laugh, and when he did so he was almost incapacitated by his laughter. But when he was upset his parents would see his face crumple and they would be unable to prevent him sliding into a pit of misery. When he gave way to his rages, they were destructive; he was never violent towards people, but a lot of ornaments got broken, some of them selected for their sentimental value.

His parents were bewildered; they had two lovely children of their own, a son and daughter, who had become delightful teenagers on a diet of love and books, swimming on a Sunday and a shared hot chocolate afterwards. Now they were better off and able to offer their two adopted children more opportunities, like horse riding and foreign trips – but neither blossomed in the same way.

Dave loved his parents, I’m sure, but it was as if he felt he was unworthy of their love. They took him and his brother to the local Quaker Meeting, where the kindly Friends who looked after the Children’s Meeting were irritated that they did not behave ‘properly’. The parents were invited to discuss these difficulties over a meal with two elders, and did not trouble the Meeting again.

In his final year at school Dave’s parents finally found a therapist, who diagnosed dyspraxia, which is sometimes called ‘clumsy child syndrome’. On early diagnosis, treatment for this condition would have involved activities designed to improve motor skills and coordination, like horse riding and drumming, that – entirely coincidentally – his parents had encouraged. It could have been worse, but it might have been better. He got an extra fifteen minutes of exam time in his GCSEs.

Dave left school at sixteen with a string of meaningless ‘qualifications’– no Cs, mainly grades D, E, or less – at GCSE. He didn’t bother going in to collect his certificate. For a year he worked in an old people’s home, preparing vegetables and making cakes in the kitchen. He took an NVQ at the local further education college, where they gave him tinted glasses to help his reading. He got a Level 2 in Catering, and a £300 bonus on top of his minimum wage.

The old people seemed to like him, but he was oversensitive to the low-level tensions in a kitchen and one day, when his parents were away on holiday, set off for work and turned left instead of right.

It was the start of a long, unhappy time. Tensions at home grew as he went from one job to another, abandoning each suddenly, often literally running away, leaving items of clothing, like shoes and coats, behind. Eventually he left home and went to stay for a while with his older adoptive brother, then got a job working on a farm.

Things began to look up. The farmer was a person of great patience, who recognised in Dave someone with talent looking after livestock, and was prepared to nurture it despite Dave’s mood swings and mercurial behaviour. Installed in a tied cottage, he began a part-time relationship with his girlfriend, who moved in but kept her room at home and still stayed there half of the time. He acquired vocational certificates in things that farmers need: artificial insemination of cattle, tractor and low loader driving, and soil analysis. The farmer saw him as a potential farm manager, telling him the only thing that was stopping him was his lack of confidence.

A cry for help

No one knows for sure when he became exposed to drugs; he first started smoking cannabis at about thirteen, when his grandmother died, exacerbating his sense of loneliness and despair. Cannabis did him no good at all. It seemed to keep him calm, but without it his depressions became deeper and his behaviour more uncontrolled. His relationship with his fiancée broke down and, after she moved out, he disappeared for several days from work, finally exhausting the patience of his employer, who gave him £1,800 redundancy money and a good reference. The money went in a weekend.

Without a job, a home or a relationship, Dave plumbed the depths. He went back for a time to his parents’ home, started, and was fired from or left within a week, a series of jobs. He fell into debt and drug abuse and ended up living either on friends’ floors or in his car. His siblings had nothing further to do with him and he would have lost all contact with his family had not his mother somehow kept a tenuous line open (in the teeth, it has to be said, of opposition from the rest of his family).

Bailiffs and other, less salubrious, characters started turning up at the parental home looking for him; and phone calls from debt collection agencies became commonplace. He moved further and further away in an attempt to dodge the debt collectors and the shady individuals who pursued him. Eventually, in what was probably a cry for help, he broke into a house, took nothing much of value and practically left his name and address for the police.

Probation

Dave was put on probation for a year. He was ordered to pay compensation and to attend rehab. The person whose house he had burgled asked for a restorative justice process to be initiated, but the police said: ‘We don’t do that here.’

Is he dead now? No, he’s not. Somehow, at thirty, Dave has slowly started to turn his life around. He is still very fragile, but he’s holding down jobs for longer, and his debts and fines are nearly paid off. This could be an optimistic New Year story.

Except… a month before Christmas, he was paring cow’s feet when, on the last foot of the last cow, the knife slipped. He cut one finger and almost completely severed the tendon in a second.

The surgeon who operated on him signed him off for eight weeks. The farmer fired him because he can’t work, and he’s had to leave his tied cottage. He will get £73 a week in Jobseeker’s Allowance, and £280 a month (in arrears) towards housing, in an area where the worst bedsit is £100 a week. Some time ago, the government quietly changed the age at which they pay higher rate housing benefit from twenty-five to thirty-five – to ‘encourage’ people without jobs to stay at home and to ‘help’ them get a job quicker. He is six hours’ drive from home; and his car is ‘knackered’.

Dave was never dealt a good hand, and he’s not played his cards very well. But he lives in a society where the high wire is thin, the safety net low and full of holes, and the audience judgemental. Some people just don’t get the breaks, and as Joan Baez sang: ‘There but for fortune go you or I.’

How will this story end? Toss a coin, and hope.

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