One day an advert in the local paper caught my eye: 'Foster Carers Wanted'. I knew straight away it was something I'd love to do. As a child I had a friend whose family took in foster children, and I had often asked my mother if we could do the same. I was convinced fostering kids would be like caring for flowers: if we provided the right environment, nourished them well and treated them with love and respect, everything would be rosy. We could foster for a few years, and maybe even carry on when we started our own family. Of course, it wasn't like that at all! Each child had a unique set of problems, some incredibly sad, others very shocking. We found ourselves immersed in a care system we knew nothing about, yet soon found impossible to leave.
I thrived on the challenge and rewards of being a foster mum, and when I discovered several years on that I was not able to have children of my own, I didn't miss a beat. By then I had trained as a specialist carer for teenagers with complex needs, and I have never looked back, fostering more than fifty children over the past twenty-seven years.