Alice – Fostering Blog
Thursday
Although Charlie is very much into football it hasn’t really filtered down to any of the girls, and being honest it’s not something that I take an interest in. Lauren our youngest birth daughter, took a little interest when Charlie managed to get tickets to Wembley recently, but it soon wore off when their team lost and she got stick at school for supporting the losing side. However, the World Cup seems to have drawn everyone together and we have been following it more closely than ever before. Charlie even set up a family sweep stake – so we have even been keenly interested in countries other than England.
All our teams in the sweep stake were out by the quarter finals so we now focused our attention fully on England as they reached the semi finals. “Football’s coming home” right?? We have lived through the reality of this dream – since our our hopes of it coming home in 1996 when the song was first written. It was three decades before this song was written when football actually came home in 1966. We sang it like we believed it, but like many English people – did we actually believe it was coming home – probably not.
This tension of saying something is going to happen while knowing it probably or even possibly won’t became a real tension point for Alice our foster daughter. She didn’t understand why football didn’t come home – after all she heard the song being played, she sang the song (all be it with some wrong lyrics – Jewels Remain – not Jules Rimet and so on). She saw the flags flying on homes and cars and at school. So when she learnt the news the day after the match that England did not make the final and football wasn’t coming home (well at least not for another four years!!) she went into meltdown.
She was so angry, she felt like she had been tricked – and she blamed us. She could not understand why we had lied to her and she was now venting all her anger at us. It probably didn’t help that we had been off guard and not prepared for such an outburst. It definitely didn’t help that Annie and Lauren found this hilarious, and had failed to use their “poker face”; falling about laughing – which simply added to the anger of Alice and only confirmed that somehow this had been a huge conspiracy to trick her.
It was no use trying to explain, I think only time will help her come to terms with it. We simply cannot think ahead of every situation and predict how she is going to react. However, we can learn from this one and hope that if and when we believe football is coming home next we can at least prepare her that it probably isn’t.
A Less Ordinary Fostering Family
