The Waiting Game

Five to five.

The clock ticks in the office. Those of us who are here listen and wait. Tick tock, who is afraid of the big bad clock.

In the impersonal staff room with motivational posters and workplace health and safety signs, the social workers silently rinse their coffee mugs, empty their lunches from the fridge and keep their ears peeled for the ring of a mobile phone. We ignore the laminated signs with pictures of rubbish bins and cleaning wipes telling us to ‘clean up after yourselves.’

We listen and we wait. We wait and we hope. There is something to be said for the idealism we maintain even after years in this game. That childish wish for everything to be all right. To make the world a better place.

We hope the call will not come. The last-minute placement breakdown or child protection crisis. We hope the call will not come and we hope even more that when it does come, it will not be one of ours. There is a place, somewhere between five to and five, where all the dreams and hopes of each one of us is allowed a space to dance.

When the call comes, and it always comes, there will be a foster carer on the other end of the line. They too are exhausted, burned out, forgetting the why when looking at the behaviour of a child who has just smashed their windows and threatened to cut their throat.

When the anger comes, it comes in a nuclear explosion. It is hard to remember a child is in pain when the child is behaving like a possessed being. The carer cries and says the cant do this anymore. They cannot keep exposing their own children to the naked fury of a child who is unable to express their pain in any other way.

They become the failure. And we become the judge. We become the enemy placing blame on the carer for forgetting their role. For forgetting their place and forgetting the training. After all, they should know what trauma does to the growing and developing brains of children. They should be experts.

We shuffle, exhausted, under resourced, silently waiting for the weekend to come. We know we will return on Monday to hundreds of emails and notices about the weekend’s crisis. Child protection and safety never sleeps. Child abuse and family violence never stops. The never-ending cycle.

But for now, we start to imagine two days of peace. No phone calls, no angry voices, just time with family. Time to recoup. In the space between those five minutes before the clock hits five, we start to hope. We allow ourselves to dream…. We also mentally prepare ourselves for the questions at the upcoming BBQ on Saturday night; ‘What do you do, that must be so rewarding, I don’t know how you do it.’ We smile and hope we have not breached confidentiality at some point in the conversation.

We know we will read stories in the newspaper about the failings of child protection practitioners. The one scapegoat who assumes the weight of the poor choices of the powers that be. We hope it will not be one of us one day; yet we keep meticulous notes because it is the reality of a profession no one seems to fully comprehend.

The truth is, no one really knows about us at all…until a child is murdered. Then we become the villains, we become the bad guy. We become the failure. We become the scapegoat of a system that is so wholly disjointed. A system of systems who cannot seem to work together holistically.

We bear the burden of the decisions of a poorly coordinated justice system, of an untrained police force, of a system of education whose focus is on the naughty kids. The bad kids. Not the kids in pain. The kids whose home life is so unsteady they cannot get a grip on stability.

We take the onus of a government who refuses to invest in the most vulnerable humans in the world. Child protection comes at a cost. It is priceless.

No government has the money for that. At least, that is what they’ll tell you. No government wants to invest in children and their families, to see the next generation take two steps forward…then three, then four. That is too long to wait and does not fit in with their political agenda.

The keyboard warriors and shocked and outraged community members make posts on social media, ‘what were they doing,’ ‘RIP Angel, fly high,’ ‘those useless social workers should be hung.’ Those same community members and keyboard warriors also turn a blind eye to the family violence happening next door, or to the drug affected mother or father screaming at their child on the train. When a child is murdered, there is no place for a social worker to go, blind eyes are not turned. They stare blankly, accusingly, at who you are and what you do. The work is so rewarding.

So, we tuck our vicarious trauma in our back pockets, and we shuffle into workday after day after day.

Even superhero's sidekicks get more mention than child protection practitioners. Hooray for Robin and Tonto.

Fuck the social workers. No heroism there. No bravery in that. No bravery in the long nights managing a crisis, transporting children to a safer place, dealing with the fury of a parent whose own childhood experiences have left them emotionally unable to cope with the pain and the hurt and the fear. No superhero to swoop in and save the day. Just us social workers, child protection practitioners, the last vestige of a pure ideology; We can make a difference. Deep down, in all of us, we still believe it.

And we push through until Friday afternoon, waiting for that call to come. The one that says you are not out of here just yet. The day is not over tonto.

Tick tock, it's five o'clock.

The phone rings.

We take a collective breath and answer.