Sharon Kelly has fostered children for more than a decade, but she still remembers the pain of saying goodbye to her first placement, a six-year-old boy who stayed with her family for 13 months.
“We always knew that he was going to go home and we’d always planned towards it, but it’s still a shock,” the Kilkenny woman tells The Irish Times Women’s Podcast. “I cried for about two weeks. I couldn’t even walk past the bedroom for days and days.”
Speaking to podcast presenter Róisín Ingle, Kelly says she still remembers where she was when she got the phone call to say the boy was moving on. “I was just frozen in the moment,” she recalls. “You could have just knocked me down with a feather, even though I knew it was happening.”
Preparing for the young boy’s departure, came with a lot of mixed emotions. “It’s really difficult because it’s really happy and it’s really sad at the same time. We were absolutely delighted for him, because there’s nothing like growing up within your own family… your family have all your history, they have all your stories,” she says.
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Kelly, who has four biological children of her own, says it was really important for the family to host a “lovely goodbye” at their house, playing games and making the most of their last day together. “Our own children had made this connection with this child as well and that’s going to be a loss for them.”
In this episode, we also hear from Sinéad O’Donnell, a foster carer based in Donegal, who is adamant that although these goodbyes can be difficult, they shouldn’t deter anyone from fostering.
“A thing that really frustrates me is when you talk to people, [and they say] ‘oh, I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t say goodbye’,” she explains. “Well, our hearts break every time… and like really break”.
“It’s going to be hard. Yes, there’ll be difficult times, but don’t let that stop you,” she adds.
In Ireland, more than 5,500 children are currently in foster care. This could be because of illness in the child’s family, the death of a parent, neglect, abuse or violence in the home, or simply because the parent or family is not coping.
In this wide-ranging conversation, O’Donnell and Kelly discuss their reasons for becoming foster carers, the support they are given through the Irish Foster Care Association and why they’d encourage anyone considering fostering to do so.
“I think there’s a lot more single carers, single men, single women, same-sex couples, you know, anybody can foster and everybody should foster because that’s the society we live in now,” says Kelly.
You can listen back to this episode in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
