Home is where the heart is
Andrew Shaw talks to a teenage basketballer who's found a loving and supportive home
The following piece is an extract out of MCV (written by Andrew Shaw)
Jayden turns 18 in August. He’s doing VCE this year, is into basketball, plays for Collingwood and has lived with Foster Parents Steve and Brendan – his dad’s – since he was a child. Actually, he says he doesn’t call them ‘dad’ to their faces, but if people ask him about his family, he says, yes, he calls them his dads.
“What I remember was that I got taken away from my parents very, very young, when I was under five and put into care with other carers.” Jayden says, remembering his first care experience. “When I first met Steve and Brendan was way down the track, when I was like eight or nine.”
Steve was single when he started caring for Jayden, Brendan came onto the scene later. “He was just a really nice guy,” Jayden says of his first impression of Steve. “I didn’t know anything about this sexuality or anything, and if someone had told me I wouldn’t have known what they meant.” Jayden’s hope at the time was simple. He was looking for “a safe place where I could grow up and try to have a normal life.” At the time he was moving around from carer to carer and saw in Steve the possibility of stability. Although he says he was not abused in any of the residential care accommodation he was put into – where children stay together under the supervision of care-takers – Jayden says residential care “wasn’t a very nice place.”
When Steve explained to Jayden that he was gay, Jayden says he did not believe him. “I thought he must be joking, I think I was ten or eleven. At that stage people have a sort of stereotype of a homosexual person. Then my real parents told me what the situation was and I’m like, ‘Ok that’s cool.’”
Did it change his feelings towards Steve? “Not a bit. Since you’ve grown such an attachment to a person, something like that really doesn’t change anything. As with any normal person, we had to take time to get used to each other. Even now, like, we act like a normal family, we fight sometimes, but at the end of the day we still love each other.”
According to Jayden, it took about a year for him to feel that his placement with Steve was more than just another brief stay. “I met his family and they pretty much took me in as their family. This was around Christmas time. We went on holidays together and, yeah, it was in the back of my mind that we were definitely a family. He was the one that I was going to be calling dad.”
Jayden has his sights set on a career as a PE Teacher or a Police Officer, but his dream is to play basketball. He plays for his school, as well as the Collingwood All-Stars in the VJBL. He wants to get into college basketball in the US however does not want to ‘put all his eggs in the one basket.”
Jayden says his sexuality has not been influenced by having gay dads. “Well, I’m pretty sure that I’m not gay,” he laughs. “I can guarantee I am not gay!”
“It’s a weird sort of question,” he says when I insist that some people think he is more likely to be gay because of Steve and Brendan’s influence. “I don’t know where they get that stuff from.”
Does he see his relationship with Steve and Brendan continuing after he grows into independence and no longer needs care in the formal social-worker sense of that word. Jayden’s response is immediate: “They will be the ones standing next to me at my wedding. They’ll be at my wedding, they’ll be my parents at my wedding.
For more information on Foster Care visit www.abrightfuture.com.au
This article is © MCV 2010 and was published in MCV magazine on 16 June 2010. It is reproduced with the kind permission of MCV and of Jayden.
