‘Mine’ he said, clutching hold of the cheap, black plastic bin liner protectively with small bunched-up fists. He had frightened, watchful eyes and a smile that he could turn on and off, and which did not extend to his eyes. He was not sure of anything, only that this bag which contained all of his worldly possessions was his and his alone, that much he knew.
When he arrived with my parents-in-law, Hilary and Keith, as an emergency fostering placement, in the hot summer of 2008, dropped off by a social worker after being extracted from a family who were supposed to be offering him a place of refuge and warmth, no one asked the obvious question: ‘How can he fit all of his things into that one bag, where’s the rest of it?’ He had been fostered for almost two years, the family had been provided with a generous allowance to cater for all his needs and to buy him all of the things he needed and all of the things a two-year-old boy would want. Yet this amounted to one plastic bin liner, the set of cheap supermarket clothes that he stood in and buzz cut hairstyle, the cheapest and lowest maintenance option available. Something had gone badly wrong.
And so it was that this beautiful soul arrived into our lives. He flashed us a smile and said, ‘Hi, I’m Aaron’. He was three years old by this point and it was not how one might expect a three-year-old to greet you, if they greeted you at all. He was a bundle of nervous energy who had spent the last two years in a punitive environment. It transpired much later that he was only allowed to play on a certain rug in the sitting room and he would be chastised for leaving the designated area. He did not remember receiving Christmas presents, when the family’s two sons were lavished with gifts and a cold bath was the remedy for when he ran off across a car park, as toddlers do. And above all, he must never get dirty or there would be further consequences. An unforgiveable failing in the social services’ duty of care had unfolded, addressed immediately when a new social worker, with a sharper eye for what was actually happening, took on his case and recognised an environment entirely unfit for any child, let alone one with Aaron’s background of neglect.
Aaron arrived at Hilary and Keith’s home and into a different world. This was a world full of love and endless patience, but it was a world he did not recognise, a world in which they seemed to speak a different language, and it was a world in which he did not feel he belonged. He had endured his early life ordeal with an incredible resilience, bravely accepting all that came his way in his scary and unpredictable formative years. He had already moved house more than ten times by this point in his life, so what was one more home to him, even with the lovely garden, plentiful toys (although he wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to do with them) and where people seemed to be kinder and to smile at him quite often? He was tightly bound, clutching himself together just as he had clutched the bag.
Time would soften his edges, gradually, although never entirely, lowering his guard. The hyper vigilance would stay with him for years to come, but the wall of love gave him some tools to work with as he started to navigate a new version of his life where conflict was the exception not the rule, where people put your needs ahead of their own and where dinner was freshly cooked and came on a China plate, not in a bag smelling of warm chip fat.
Two years after he arrived at Hilary and Keith’s home, on 10th March 2010, Aaron became our son, when we completed the legal adoption process at Guildford County court in Surrey, England. So began fourteen years of our lives where Lucy, Aaron and I found out more about one another and about ourselves than we thought was possible. A time where we took each other to places within ourselves that we never thought we would go, places none of us knew existed. It was fourteen years where we laughed and cried and fought and played in equal measure. A time where we grew and contracted and grew again as we unpicked one another piece by piece.
Aaron will be twenty this year. He has a wonderfully dry sense of humour, a highly individual sense of style and a kind heart. We still, verbally and ideologically, spar together on an almost daily basis and sometimes his smile does not quite reach his eyes, sometimes he still seems to be clinging onto that plastic bin liner for dear life and looking at us defiantly as if to say ‘Mine!’ And it is his, his life is his because he has endured more than most people will in their first three years, yet he had the courage not just to battle through that period of his life but, far more challengingly, to be able to not let it taint him and to show a capacity for love that he did not experience himself in those early years. This is his greatest achievement, this is testament to his enduring spirit and it is the accomplishment for which we are most proud of him.
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This post was previously published on The Memoirist.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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