by Rachelle de Bretagne

Created on: January 06, 2007   Last Updated: December 24, 2008

I read an article on the Internet the other day which prompted me to write mine, on the subject of foster care. You see, what that article did was something I should have done a long time ago, i.e. used experience of fostering in an effort to help those trying to make the decision whether fostering children is right for them.

My family was a large family. My mother had six children, although what she developed as we grew up was a seeming disinterest in anything except babies. Sounds strange doesn't it ? Although I know that one of my sisters inherited the same trait. It's almost as if there is a need to have little infants around them, and once my sisters and my brother had grown sufficiently to be at school, my mother fostered little children and brought them into our lives. This was never discussed in advance. We would arrive home from school to find yet another stray in the house, and although we didn't resent them that much at the time, the long term effect on us all was a marked one.

My mother held the record for the County for the number of short term stays in our home. There were literally hundreds of kids that passed through our childhood, and whilst some were adorable, others were extremely troubled and attention seeking. Our lives as children were totally disrupted and somehow our needs took a back burner. My mother thought that the way in which she was dealing with these kids was okay, but what she failed to see was the effect that it had on us.

A prime example is being woken in the middle of the night at eight years old, knowing that I was about to be asked to clean the cot after one of the children had made themselves sick. Sounds like nothing, perhaps, to a lot of people, though listening to the child vomit every night in the darkness for weeks on end, and having to clear it up had a marked effect on me, to the extent that forty years later I still have a phobia that will not allow me to be physically sick. My sister was similarly affected after finding one of the foster children attempting to hang themselves in the back garden. She still has nightmares. The child badly bruised their neck and did not die, though the effect of that event still haunts my sister at the age of 56 years old.

Children who need fostering are at a time in their lives when the normal security that is afforded children is not available within their own family unit. This can happen for many reasons, although having taken that security away from a child, it places them in a very

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>