Mother’s Day is always such a special time for any mum. It’s funny how a home-made card or a little bunch of daffodils can reduce us mums to blubbering wrecks. It’s always so lovely to see the joy on the children’s faces as they give them to us too. Up in my attic I still have the very first card my eldest daughter made me at nursery school, it’s one of my most precious possessions. Over the years I added all the others that were given to me and now after fostering for many years that adds up to quite a sizable amount.
I always tried to make Mother’s Day a special occasion for the children we cared for even though they couldn’t be with their birth mums for various reasons. Many of them bought cards for me, but I always encouraged them to buy or make one for their real mums too. I’ve lost count of the hours I’ve spent sitting with the children pasting little flowers to cardboard cards or shopping with them for little gifts for their mums.
Some people wonder why I did this. They assume that every child that comes into care is abused or neglected, but as I learned very early on in my fostering career, that isn’t always the case. Parents can have illnesses that mean they aren’t able to properly look after their children for a time, or perhaps have to go into hospital for a stay. Whatever the reason it’s so important for a foster carer to try and be on good terms with the child’s parents. It makes it so much easier for the child as they will always be loyal to their birth families!
Me and my husband first started to foster when our daughter was five years old. Sadly, we had lost two babies after she was born to miscarriages and so decided that we would become foster parents. There followed months of meetings and training until we were finally approved and we were delighted when shortly after a little girl of a similar age to our daughter was placed with us. Needless to say, she was very special to us and stayed for some time until the happy outcome was that she went to live with her grandparents.
Even to this day she still sends me a Mother’s Day card every single year though she is now grown up with children of her own. Next came a steady stream of short placements and then when our daughter was seven we discovered that I was having another baby and our lovely son was born. We felt very blessed, even more so when soon after another little girl came to live with us. She stole our hearts immediately and we asked if we might adopt her only to be told that we couldn’t because we lived too close to her birth family. There was an easy solution to that, we put our house up for sale and moved to the other side of town.
Suddenly we had gone from having one child to three. But that wasn’t the end of it! Two years later I came down with what I thought was a summer flu bug that was going around and ended up in bed. Eventually I dragged myself off to the doctor’s to be told that my ‘flu bug’ was actually going to last for another seven months. Enter our youngest son, then there were four!
Next, we were asked to take a little girl from a sibling group of three. On the following Monday morning her two sisters were also placed with us. As it was close to Christmas I suggested that the children should stay with us until the holiday was over rather than have them carted about from one place to another. They stayed a little longer than that, 18 years to be precise! Then there were seven!
Next came a girl with special needs, she too became one of our special children, making eight of them. My fostering career along with my love of writing kept me more than busy and I was often to be found scribbling away writing short stories for them in the early hours of the morning.
When they all reached school age I then went back to college and did a teacher training course and when that was completed I went to work for social services as the placement support worker for our area. This entailed supporting more than 300 households that fostered as well as running lots of training courses for them. During that time, I also became the first person in Warwickshire to become a qualified level three NVQ Assessor and the two jobs, the house, the children and all the animals ensured that I never had time to be bored.
Eventually it was my husband who encouraged me to write my first novel. It was no mean feat as I didn’t have a lot of spare time but after writing the first one and thoroughly enjoying it I had the bug. I actually wrote the first two and a half books in longhand sitting in our touring caravan in the back garden. Eventually I was lucky enough to acquire a London literary agent who then got me my first two-book deal and my first novel was published in 2004.
Since then I have written 33 books and am currently writing a seven-book series set around the days of the week rhyme. Tuesday’s child, my 30th book to be published recently, A Mother’s Grace, has just gone straight into the Sunday Times top 10 bestsellers on the first partial week’s sales and I do hope that some of you will receive it and enjoy if for Mother’s Day. I no longer foster but write full time now but I can guarantee that I shall be very spoiled on Mother’s Day and I hope that all of you will be too.
