A day in the Life of a Carer 🤔

Who Cares?

There is always a response when I say to people I am a foster carer. It is a variation of: “You are amazing”; “I could never do that”; “I would get too attached”; “I could not give them back”.

Let's get a few things straight.

I am not amazing. I am ordinary. My husband works full time and I work part time. We have a bunch of beautiful kids at home. Our home is noisy, busy, messy and there are days where I serve cereal for dinner and pretend it is a big treat rather then just mummy being super tired and not wanting to cook. There is love, fun, tantrums and laughter but there is no magic happening here. We are exceptionally ordinary.

I was 13 when I first learned about foster care. Unlike some other kids, I had a safe home, a safe childhood and I never needed to consider living anywhere other than with my parents.

When I was 13, a family friend was working at a daycare centre when an infant in the centre suddenly couldn’t go home and needed somewhere to stay. My family friend took the baby in and became a kinship carer. That’s when I learned there are kids who don’t have a safe home.

Husband and I started talking about fostering while we were dating but it was always a later plan; after we got married, after we had travelled, after we had our own children and they were grown and we were older, that is when we would foster.

The universe had a very different idea. Husband and I found out we couldn’t have biological kids. At least, not easily and not with our DNA. So, we went back to the drawing board to figure out what our family was going to look like. Once again, we started to talk to about fostering. But fostering is not a way to build a family and we knew we could not go into fostering with the idea that we were trying to create our own family. You see, the goal is ALWAYS reunification, at least to start with, and to be a foster carer you must be committed to working towards these children, who you love and care for, going home. I was not ready to do that. In fact, it took us a couple of years to grieve the loss of the idea of having our own biological kids. Throughout those years we kept talking about why we wanted to have children in our home and what we could provide, and the idea of fostering kept coming back up.

In 2012, we had two spare bedrooms, we had family support, I had a flexible job, we had a heap of love and we really wanted kids around. We still had worries. We were only young; 26 and 25 years old. We had never parented before, let alone parented a child with a trauma background, and what did a “trauma background” even really mean?! But we decided to give this fostering thing a go.

It took us nine months to go through the training and assessment process. The training provided many new things to think about and learn. The assessment process was invasive. We were asked about our childhoods, our jobs and finances, our infertility and whether we really understood that foster care was not a way to build our family. It was invasive because it needs to be, and our assessor encouraged us to ask questions about why she was gathering certain information.

We made it through the assessment and training, ready and determined to be foster carers. Our very first placement came the day we were approved, an 18-month-old boy, Connor, an emergency placement. We were told from the start it was going to be a short placement because there were family (kin) options for him. I loved that little boy from the moment I saw him. I fed him home cooked meals, and played with dolls because he preferred them to trucks. I took him to his paediatrician appointment, unable to answer any questions about his mum’s pregnancy or his birth or their family history, but I could cuddle him and reassure him. Connor was able to go straight home to his mum, who had put in a tremendous effort to get her baby home as fast as she could.

Two weeks after meeting Connor, I took him back to the Child Safety Service Centre. I gave him back to his mummy who cried and thanked me. I wished her luck, gave him a kiss and got in my car with the empty car seat. I made it out of the car park before bursting into tears. Then I cried for two days and questioned whether I was cut out to do this. I thought I had gotten “too attached”.

But here is what I decided.

I wish Conner had never needed foster care. I wish his mum had been able to prevent that from happening. She couldn’t, but as soon as she was able to and with a little bit of help, she made the changes and did the hard things to bring her baby home.

He could have landed with someone who would not get attached. I knew this little boy wasn’t staying long. But, Conner had lost his mummy and the only life he had ever known. He was put in a strange house, with strange food and strange toys, strange smells and strange adults. And his mummy was gone. He needed to be held. He needed to be loved and cooed over and fed and rocked to sleep. Just like his mummy would have done if she could have. Connor needed these things so he could get through the most traumatic experience of his little life with as minimal damage as possible.

There is nothing amazing about what I did with Connor. Or any of the other little ones who have come through our home. I have fed them, read them bedtime stories, cleaned skinned knees, kissed and cuddled them. I helped most of them go home and when going home stopped being an option for one little one, we committed to loving him long term.

Today, being a foster carer involved packing three lunchboxes, multiple school and kindy drop offs, a phone call with Child Safety about taking a child for respite next week, a little bit of working from home and baby cuddles. This afternoon, we get to go see one of the kid’s mums at the local water park after school before heading to dance class. And tonight will probably involve someone complaining about not liking the dinner I made. This is foster care. It probably sounds pretty similar to your life, because we are actually very ordinary people. We just have some extra kids come and stay a while.

“You are amazing. I would get to attached. I could not give them back. I could never be a carer”.

You are amazing. We need amazing like you.

You will get attached; these kids need that.

And you will cry when they go home.

But you could care.

There are 17 000 kids in foster care in Australia who need someone to care. Take the next step now, by completing the pre screen quiz.