The Secret Diary of a Social Worker

One year ago today, I walked into Children's Services for the first time as a qualified social worker. I remember the exact weight of the lanyard around my neck. The way the ID photo made me look like I'd been arrested. The sound of my new shoes on the corridor floor - too loud, too eager, trying too hard.

Like the rest of me.

Twelve months later, the shoes are scuffed. The lanyard photo is scratched beyond recognition. And I'm sitting here on a Wednesday evening trying to work out whether I've become the social worker I wanted to be, or whether I've just become someone who knows where the good biscuits are hidden.

I think it might be both.

This year, I've learned that you can hold two completely contradictory truths in your head at the same time and still function. That the system is broken and the people inside it are extraordinary. That you can lose faith in the process and never lose faith in the families. That the worst day of someone's life is your Tuesday morning.

I've learned that supervision isn't weakness. That crying in the car park is not failure. That the colleague who makes you laugh until tea comes out of your nose is doing more for your mental health than any wellbeing initiative your employer will ever roll out.

I've held babies who didn't know my name. I've sat in living rooms where the walls told stories the parents wouldn't. I've stood in court and felt my voice shake and carried on talking anyway.

I've been threatened. I've been thanked. Sometimes by the same person, in the same visit.

Would I do it again? Ask me on a Monday.

But tonight, on this scuffed-shoe Wednesday, with this glass of wine and this blog no one reads - yes. A thousand times yes.

Here's to year two.

PS: Someone left a card on my desk today. Unsigned. It just said "You're doing alright." I'm not crying. I'm typing.

PPS: Mr Whiskers has eaten the corner of my ASYE portfolio. I'm choosing to interpret this as a sign.

I've been thinking about fathers.

In this job, you see every version. The ones who fight. The ones who disappear. The ones who sit in contact centres trying to remember how to play with a child they made but barely know. The ones who rage against a system that - let's be honest - wasn't built for them. The ones who cry in their cars and then walk into conference rooms like nothing happened.

We're not very good at fathers in social work. I don't mean the men themselves. I mean us. The profession. We write about 'the mother' and 'the mother's partner.' We assess maternal capacity and father gets a paragraph on page nine. We hold case conferences where Dad is the afterthought, the risk factor, the absent referencing point.

And sometimes he is the risk. Sometimes the assessment is right and the danger is real and the child needs protecting from exactly the person who was supposed to protect them.

But sometimes - more often than we're comfortable admitting - he's just a man who doesn't know how to ask for help. Who was never shown how to hold his own child. Who grew up in a house where fathers were fists and silence, and he's doing his absolute best to be something different with no blueprint and no support and a system that treats him like a problem to be managed.

I think the best fathers I've seen this year are the ones who kept showing up. Not the grand gestures. Not the big speeches in the conference room. Just the ones who were there. Tuesday after Tuesday. Contact session after contact session. The quiet ones who learned to plait hair because no one else was going to. The ones who put meal deals in their daughters' school bags and got the sandwiches wrong and tried again the next day.

My own dad once told me that being a parent isn't about getting it right. It's about getting it wrong and coming back.

I think about that a lot.

PS: The garden is still going. Someone is watering the leeks.

It's 11pm on a Friday and I should be asleep. I've got a home visit at half eight tomorrow and I haven't ironed a single thing.

Instead I'm sitting in my pyjamas writing this, because today was the kind of day that won't let you sleep unless you put it somewhere.

Christmas in child protection is not what the John Lewis advert would have you believe.

Today I watched a six-year-old pack a bag. She knew exactly what to take. She's done it before. She folded her school jumper so carefully, you'd think she was packing for a holiday. She asked me if the people she was going to had a cat, because she likes cats.

She did not cry. She did not ask why. She was six years old and she knew better than to ask why.

I cried in the car afterwards. Not the cute, single-tear-rolling-down-the-cheek crying you see on telly. The ugly kind. The kind where your whole face crumples and you grip the steering wheel and make sounds you didn't know you could make.

Then I went back to the office and wrote up my case notes in clear, clinical language and used phrases like 'the child presented as settled' and 'transition was managed without incident.'

This is the job.

The tree in the office has tinsel on it. Someone has put a referral form on top instead of a star. It's the funniest thing I've seen all week.

So no, I won't be sleeping any time soon. I'll be here, with my wine and my laptop and this blog no one reads, trying to hold the weight of knowing that Christmas morning is not the same for every child in this city.

To anyone else working through it - I see you. Pour yourself another one.

Merry Christmas.

PS: My mum has sent me a parcel. It's the size of a small wardrobe. I'm frightened to open it.

PPS: Mr Whiskers is sitting on the tinsel I brought home from the office. He looks furious. Merry Christmas to him too.

There's a boy I can't stop thinking about.

I'm not going to tell you his name, obviously. I'm not going to tell you his age or his school or the colour of his eyes, because this is an anonymous blog and I'm already playing fast and loose with the HCPC.

But I'll tell you this: he drew me a picture. On his third visit. A house with a chimney and smoke coming out and a door that was open.

It wasn't a good drawing. He's not Picasso. The proportions were off and the sky was green and the sun had a face, which I find unsettling at the best of times.

But the door was open.

You know that thing where you see something small and ordinary and it hits you like a lorry? Where you're holding a piece of A4 paper with crayon on it and suddenly you understand, with absolute clarity, why you spent three years doing a masters and wrote a fifteen-thousand-word dissertation and sat through forty-seven lectures on attachment theory?

This is why.

Because sometimes a child draws you a door that's open.

And sometimes that's enough to keep you coming back on Monday.

PS: I've kept the drawing. It's in my desk drawer. Don't tell anyone.

I went to court for the first time this week.

I should clarify: I've been to court before. I've sat in the gallery. I've read case bundles thicker than my arm. I've prepared statements and chronologies and impact assessments until the words blurred.

But this was the first time I was the one giving evidence. The one in the witness box. The one being cross-examined by a solicitor whose entire job, for the next forty-five minutes, was to make me look like I didn't know what I was doing.

You know what no one tells you about court? It's boring. Ninety per cent of it is sitting in corridors that smell like dust and anxiety, waiting for your name to be called, reading the same paragraph of your statement over and over because the words have stopped making sense.

And then the other ten per cent is someone asking you questions designed to unravel everything you've ever been certain of.

'Can you confirm, Ms MacDonald, that on the date of your visit, you spent approximately fourteen minutes in the family home?'

Fourteen minutes. He said it like it was an accusation. Like I'd nipped in for a cup of tea and left.

The solicitor was good. I'll give him that. Sharp suit, sharper questions. The kind of person who makes you doubt yourself with a raised eyebrow. He had this way of pausing after my answers - just long enough to make me wonder if I'd said something catastrophically wrong.

I hadn't. I think.

My hands shook for approximately three hours afterwards. I ate a Twirl in the car park and stared at the windscreen and thought about retraining as a librarian.

But here's the thing about court: it matters. Not the theatre of it. Not the wigs and the bundles and the legal language that sounds like it was written by someone who lost a bet. But the reason we're all there. The child at the centre of it who will never set foot in that building and will never know that a room full of adults spent an entire Tuesday arguing about what's best for them.

That's the bit I'm going to hold on to.

The solicitor can keep his raised eyebrow.

PS: I have since been informed that the Twirl I ate was not technically mine. It belonged to someone called Karen from Commissioning. Sorry, Karen.

PPS: The solicitor has very good shoes. I notice these things now.

Nobody teaches you about the shoes.

Three years of social work training. A masters degree. Two placements. Eight hundred hours of supervised practice. Seventeen essays on anti-oppressive practice. And not once did anyone mention the shoes.

Do you take them off? Do you leave them on? What if the carpet is pristine and you've just walked through a puddle? What if you take them off and then need to leave quickly? What if there's a dog and the dog is interested in your shoes and now you're doing a safeguarding visit with one shoe and a labrador who won't make eye contact?

These are the questions they don't cover in the textbook.

Here's what else they don't cover: the smell. Every house has one. Some are exactly what you'd expect. Some are cooking - good cooking, the kind that makes your stomach growl at 10am and reminds you that you skipped breakfast because you were too nervous to eat. Some are air freshener, the kind that's trying too hard to cover something up.

You learn to read a house the way other people read a book. The photos on the mantelpiece. The toys in the hallway. The lock on the bedroom door - which side it's on. The fridge. Always check the fridge. Not because you're looking for evidence. Because a fridge tells you a story that no assessment form ever will.

I did three home visits this week. In one, I was offered tea and biscuits and the kind of warm, genuine hospitality that made me feel guilty for being there. In another, I was told to leave. The third - the one I keep thinking about - I was shown the door by a woman who said, very calmly, 'I know you're just doing your job, love, but please don't come back.'

She called me love. She was asking me to leave and she called me love.

That's the thing about this work. People are never one thing. A home visit is never one thing. You walk in expecting chaos and find tenderness. You walk in expecting cooperation and find a locked door.

The textbooks don't cover that either.

As for the shoes - I've started wearing ones I can take off quickly. Just in case.

PS: My dad rang tonight and asked how my week was. I said "fine." He said "liar." We both laughed. He gets it.

So.

I have a blog now. An anonymous blog. A secret anonymous blog that I'm writing from my living room floor in my pyjamas at 9:23 on a Friday night, which probably tells you everything you need to know about the current state of my social life.

My name isn't really important. What's important is that this week I started my first job as a qualified social worker. Children's services. Child protection. The bit of social work that makes people inhale sharply at dinner parties and say 'God, I could never do that.'

I know. I know you couldn't. That's why I'm here.

Actually, that sounded much braver than I feel. Let me try again.

I am twenty-five years old. I have a psychology degree that I've done absolutely nothing with, an MA in Social Work that cost me more than my car, and as of Monday morning, a lanyard. The lanyard is the most important thing I own. Without it, I cannot get into the building. Without it, I am just a woman in an ill-fitting blazer carrying a notepad and looking lost.

With it, I am a woman in an ill-fitting blazer carrying a notepad and looking lost - but with ACCESS.

This week, I have:

• Attended three inductions
• Forgotten my password four times
• Been introduced to approximately nine hundred people whose names I immediately forgot
• Located the good kettle (second floor, next to the fire exit, do NOT use the one in the main kitchen)
• Cried in the toilets (once) (Wednesday) (but who's counting)

My mum asked me tonight if I was settling in. I said yes. What I meant was: I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing and I'm fairly certain someone is going to work this out by Tuesday at the latest.

But I'm here. I showed up. And that has to count for something.

So this is the blog. The place I'm going to put all the things I can't say at work and shouldn't say at the pub and definitely can't say to my mum. The secret diary of a social worker, reporting for duty.

If you're reading this - and let's be honest, you're probably not - hello. Welcome. Please don't tell anyone.

PS: Mr Whiskers has just walked across my keyboard and added "fffffffffff" to this post. I've removed it but I want you to know he tried.

PPS: My mum rang. She asked if I'd eaten. I said yes. (I had not eaten. I had eaten half a bag of Haribo and called it dinner.)

x
(Not my real name.) (Obviously.)