Home life was tricky growing up – and that’s putting it mildly. ‘Family’ for me was my sister and brother, three years older and one year younger than me, respectively, and my mum. My father was around too, but our relationship with him wasn’t a positive one. He had issues with alcohol, and often became violent towards our mother. It was a horrible thing for anyone to have to witness, let alone a child. We were terrified of him.

But when I was ten, things changed.

I can still recall the day – we were outside playing when mum turned up in a car with a man we hadn’t seen before. He was a social worker.

Mum just told us that we were “going somewhere” and so got into the car. We were taken to meet the people who we would soon come to know as Aunty Janet and Uncle Bob. Mum wasn’t staying with us – we were being placed into temporary foster care, but at her will. She had planned this day very meticulously – she had picked this day to leave our father, get a temporary place of her own, make sure we were safe until we could be reunited permanently with her away from my father. We were sad, but she was calm and that was reassuring.

When we first arrived at Bob and Janet’s house, I was on guard 24 hours a day. But within a very short time I began to realise that what we had come from wasn’t normal. Fear began to leave us. Bed wetting stopped, the house felt so calm. Uncle Bob wasn’t violent in any way – in fact, he radically changed my perception and experience of what a real father should be. He was gentle.

I remember one occasion when I broke the stand on my bike. I didn’t tell anyone for quite some time because of the reaction I thought would come my way. But when I eventually told them, all I was met with was reassurance. I began to realise I was safe.

Mum would come to visit us every now and then. We loved seeing her, and would all break our hearts when she would leave. It was not until I grew up and had children of my own that I realised how difficult it must have been for our mother to put us into care, to see us only occasionally and to say goodbye so often.

After some time, mum was ready for us to move into her new council house. Leaving Aunty Jane and Uncle Bob brought mixed emotions; we had so much been a part of their family, they had kept us safe and made us feel extremely valuable, but at the same time we were so happy to be reunited with mum who we then lived with in our new house for the rest of our childhoods.

This season in my life was a difficult one. It shouldn’t have had to happen at all; no child deserves to experience abuse in their own home, or to be separated from the people, things and places that they love. But when I look back, I can identify two things that were so important in making things feel as ‘okay’ as they could. The first is the love that Aunty Janet and Uncle Bob showed us, welcoming us into their family as their own and each providing stability, a sense of safety and care. And the second is that when we were fostered, we were welcome in together as a sibling group of three. My sister and brother were so important to me – they felt like all the family I had left. Splitting us up would have only made things harder, adding more loss and pain to an already difficult situation. It’s hard to imagine where we each could have ended up; we could have had very different outcomes.

I know that today, there are siblings in care who are having to be separated because there are no foster carers who can look after them together. So I want to leave you with this question – could you be an Uncle Bob or Aunty Janet to a group of siblings who desperately need to stay together, and who need the stability and love you can offer them? Could you foster a group of siblings?

Oh! A final word about Uncle Bob and Aunty Janet - years after we had moved into our new home, I was at a local fete. I heard a voice, and instantly recognised it. I said to my mum ,“I can hear Aunty Janet,” and sure enough there she was. We went back to the house where we saw Uncle Bob too. It was such a special moment. I thanked them so very much for what they did for us and told them how incredibly significant the part they played, along with mum, was in changing the course of our lives – for the better.