Book Review: A Stolen Childhood by Casey Watson

So I have another Casey Watson book to review today.

A Stolen Childhood tells the story of Casey’s work in a behavioral management unit. This is where she works before deciding to become a foster carer. I personally enjoy her foster care memoirs better. Though I believe that memoirs about the ups and downs of working in such settings, such as the stuff written by Torey Hayden and Shane Dunphy (in the girl who couldn’t smile) is very important. I just feel that I resonate with her fostering memoirs more.

All that to say that I personally wasn’t moved by this book and found it hard to keep reading. I was moved by the story but the book was just not very engaging to me.

It tells the story of a 12 year old girl named Keara. Casey meets Keara during an incredibly chaotic situation at an assembly, where Keara has gotten into a physical confrontation with a male classmate. Casey takes Keara for the day to help calm her down and sees something in her. She sees Keara as incredibly articulate and without the anger that she previously displayed, as naturally a good natured child. However she notices a troubling anxiety about Keara. She pulls her hair out when anxious. She is also incredibly tired often drifting off to sleep in the middle of talking/ doing work.

These may seem like small issues compared to others displayed by the kids in the unit but Casey has an intuitive sense that Keara needs individual attention. So she goes to the unit full time. Keara mixes well with the other kids, even when as luck would have it, the boy that she fought with at the assembly ends up in the group. She good naturedly hangs out with over affectionate Kloe, and tolerates the behavior of the boy classmates appropriately.

Casey still sees Keara as somewhat of a mystery then. Talking to her it seems she has some family troubles. Keara’s mom is bitterly opposed to her father’s re-entry in Keara’s life, but Keara couldn’t be happier. Her mother often works long hours at a care home, and Keara is left home alone. She seems not to mind but it’s clear how much she enjoys the time spent with her Dad.

This seems a pretty common issue for children with divorced/ separated parents who do not have any kind of healthy relationship around co-parenting. When Casey goes to visit Keara’s mom’s house she finds it intimidating in the fact that it’s full of expensive items. It seems like a child doesn’t live there at all. Her mom wants nothing more than to bad mouth her ex which doesn’t get Casey anywhere.

When it becomes apparent that Keara is missing school after weekends with her dad, she visits her dad in the hopes of setting up appropriate boundaries for his having house rules for Keara. She finds her Dad to be shy, very loving towards Keara. He doesn’t have a job and has a messy house but other than that there isn’t much to worry about.

Until her father drops the shocking realization that Keara’s mother is envolved in sex work. Casey is stunned and wants to fix things right away. However to her frustration all she can do is pass on the information to Gary the child protection officer, and let the system do it’s thing. It’s a theme throughout the book that Casey is emotionally drained, not so much from her work with the children specifically, but by not being able to be apart of anything to do with social services involvement. At the time having little understanding of the system. It also deeply saddens her when a child leaves the school through social services and she gets no updates or contact. It’s pretty clear she’s on her way to wanting to work more personally with children, and understand more about the social service system but isn’t quite sure how.

Keara then is taken temporarily into foster care. While her mom is investigated. Her mom one day calls the school in a drunken rage hinting that Keara’s life just got a lot worse living with her father full time. Casey and staff pass it off as pure animosity and being very drunk. However just as the school year is winding down Keara and Casey are driving to an end of the year school trip and Keara reveals that her father has sexually abused her. Though tragically she doesn’t know it as such.

Casey is then flooded with even more emotions, guilt for not knowing, anger that this was happening and no one else knew, and helplessness around the process again of social services envolvement in which Casey really has no part. She has to watch as a screaming inconsolable Keara is taken away and never seen again.

I guess what did strike me was the raw account of Casey’s own feelings around the process of social services at the time, how little she knew about the system and how much she wished she knew more. For whatever reason as I said though I was moved by the story, it just didn’t resonate as much as Casey’s other books have.

Would love your thoughts.

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No Place for Nathan a casey watson short story

Today I finished reading No Place for Nathan which is a short story written by foster carer and teacher Casey Watson. Casey has written many memoirs dealing with foster parenting exploring the day to day lives of the children she takes under her wing and how they affect her family and gain whatever amount of healing is possible.

Before Casey was a foster parent she taught in a school setting in a department for children who can not handle mainstream education because of behavioral problems. She’s branched out into these teaching memoirs. I personally find her foster care memoirs more compelling and did even ask on her facebook if she’d be continuing to write these memoirs as I didn’t want her to stop. She said she would.

No Place for Nathan is about an eleven year old boy named Nathan. He is brought to Casey’s unit for fighting and anger outbursts. It soon becomes clear that Nathan is a complex person. He often dresses and acts like a girl, Jenny, and ehxibits other behaviors such as sudden angr for no apparent reason when normally he is sweet and cooperative. Throughout the book he matter of factly, as Jennydiscloses horrific incidents of sexual abuse as well as showing signs of physical abuse. The book shows the inadequacy of the social services as the social who has been assigned to the family for a long time claims that there is no abuse or behavioral problems and that Nathan is just attention seeking. It’s only because of Casey and the child protection officer at the schoo Gary’s dedication andmitulous reporting that the case is followed up. The story seems to have an abrupt ending. I wish it would have been a full length book instead of a short story so that Nathan’s psychological problems could be explored in more detail as well as what became of him.

On her website after announcing the short story Casey posts something about DID dissociative identity disorder that she believes Nathan had. Though there’s no reference to it in the story. Over all I wouldn’t recommend this story as one of Casey’s best stories. I think the full length books are more well done. ,