Sam asks Jah “What does it mean to be 4?”

Jah’s fourth birthday was due three weeks after he came to live with us.  He had a lot of fun with his brother.

He enjoyed the Playgroup.  His big sisters were lovely and spent time with him.  In fact he had so many things to get used to that his birthday did not appear to feature much in his consciousness.  However, we talked to him about our plans.  They were fairly low key.

The main thing was that Pat his social worker would be coming.  She was going to bring presents from herself and the foster family.

She was also going to bring the Life Story she had been working on.  It wasn’t quite finished, as she had more photos to obtain.  She had, however, managed to track down his birth mother and obtained her permission to include a photo of her in the book.

His birth father had been most obliging and had listened with great attention to everything Pat reported about Jah’s life and how he was settling down with us.  His photo shows him with a beaming smile.  He wrote the words “to Jah. With love from Daddy” at the bottom of the photo.  However, it was a Polaroid photo and the paper was shiny so the words could only just be deciphered.

Our present to Jah was a hobby horse. He loved it, which was fortunate.

At the Playgroup he was allowed to pass round the plate of fruit before the singing-in-a-circle time.  Every child did that on their birthday and then the whole group sang “Happy Birthday”.  Jah looked both surprised and shy, but I think he quite enjoyed being the centre of attention.

When Pat came, she brought an amusing book where you could interchange the head, shorts and feet of ‘Goofy’.  He loved making crazy combinations!  (“Because his shorts fell down” being the most popular.  It usually featured in all his combinations.)

Fortunately the weather was fine. We had made a sandpit in the back garden.  Jah enjoyed playing with the sand and with Pat before the others came back from school.  All together we felt that everything had gone well.

Imagine our surprise, when Sam reported at breakfast the following morning that Jah had whispered to him at bedtime. “Sam. What does it meant to be 4?”

We felt guilty.  We thought we had covered as many aspects as possible of this small boy’s life and the changes he faced.  How come we had not adequately explained the passage of time? There are plenty of ways that we could have done this, for example we could have asked him whether he remembered his third birthday with the foster family.

At least this feeling of failure had the positive result of reminding us to be as clear as possible in future.

The next thing that lay ahead of us was the summer break.  We explained carefully to Jah where we were going and which members of the family we would be visiting.  I am sure that he could sense how much this meant to us, but of course we were slightly apprehensive about all the travelling and the visiting.  We would just have to hope that all would go well.