The Story of Care Leavers

Last week Jacqueline Wilson announced the return of Tracy Beaker, the naughty, wild young girl who had an endless supply of hope to belong to a family.

The Story of Tracy Beaker was first published in 1991, when I was three and still living with my family. It follows the life of Tracy, a 10 year old who constantly gets rejected by foster families and returned to a children’s home, affectionally known as “the dumping ground”. The Dare Game, the sequel to Tracy Beaker was published 9 years later, just as I moved into a long term foster placement. The publicity around the sequel was what first brought Tracy Beaker to my attention. Jacquline Wilson actually came to my home town to talk about her work and I got to meet her. I don’t remember much about that meeting, but I remember how Wilson’s character made me feel as a foster child myself. Reflecting back now, there may have been some feelings of achievement. I had accomplished what Tracy hadn’t.

As a young person growing up in care I was enamoured with the character that Wilson had created. To me Tracy Beaker was someone who was feisty, had a wild imagination and unwilling to be someone she wasn’t to try and fit in with a family no matter how much she wanted to belong. She felt real.But the reality of growing up in care, and as Tracy discovered, belonging is a difficult thing.

Tracy had big ideas of what she would be like as an adult, of how she would right the wrongs of her life in adulthood. The new book is from the point of view of Tracy’s daughter Jess and shows the difficulties that Tracy navigates of being a single parent on a low income. The release of the book in October has got me thinking. Do children in care, ever really leave?

Obviously we do in a literal sense. We grow up, move towards independence in whatever that looks like for each individual. But being in care shapes us in a way that others don’t experience. My time in care was much smoother than Tracy’s. I had a long term placement, I was included as part of the family in all things and pushed and supported to achieve academically. Unfortunately the reality of foster care for most is much closer to what Wilson depicts. Instability, loneliness and uncertainty. As children we learn to navigate this as best we can.

Despite my wonderful placement, for most of my teenage years I struggled with loneliness. At the time I don’t think I realised what it was. My foster family were in my opinion, my family. But there were lots of things separating me from the birth children in the home. Constant meetings and reviews, for which I was pulled out of classes, missing out of family outings due to contact with my birth family, a lack of freedom to socialise. For instance I wasn’t allowed to stay at a friends house unless their parents had been police checked. This seemed completely unfair to 13 year old me. At the time I saw a ridiculousness in the idea that just because I was in care, I was somehow more at risk than my peers. For the birth children in my foster placement, all it took was a phone call between parents. I call #doublestandards

And then there’s my birth family. A lot of time had been taken away from us. Seeing family for one hour a week makes it difficult to maintain natural relationships, especially with supervised contact. They became stilted, where we wanted to make the most of our time together so avoided any ugliness or difficult conversations. The bond was there, but it felt superficial with some family. I felt I no longer belonged to my birth family in the way I had before.

There was me, stuck in the middle of two families and not really belonging to either. So I created my own family. Going to college gave me an opportunity to seek out new relationships and I found myself with a group of wonderfully clever and beautiful souled women. The natural distance that 16 and 17 year olds have with their families as they seek independence gave me this freedom guilt free. These friendships opened up new avenues and ideas to me and I felt normal. It was bliss.

But turning 18 came with the jarring new label of “care leaver”. In my opinion, it’s a stupid term but it’s shaped my identity as an adult. I’ve trained foster carers and professionals about being in care, I’ve been a voice for care leavers, and I even became a social worker in the hope that my experiences would help others. And while I’m proud of my achievements, they’re only one side of being a care leaver. The other side is relatively grim.

After living quite happily some where for 10 years and then being faced with the knowledge that you can’t stay because you’re no longer “in care” is crushing. But not feeling that you would or could live with you birth family because of the weird relationships you have doesn’t leave a care leaver with much options. I was very lucky, I got a job and my own place (a tatty little Bedsit) and lived alone. Something I’d never done before and despite all those great friends I met at college and was still good friends with, I was experiencing loneliness all over again, albeit of a different sort. But I’m an adult, and I was expected to to be able to manage this now. As if being 18 means you suddenly have a how to guide on life.

But the worst part of being a care leaver is realising that you’re not a permanent fixture in the group of people you’ve called family for 10 years. That your expectations of what it means to be family are so completely different to those around you that you feel like you’re watching a picture perfect family from out in the cold, nose pressed against the window. It reopens the wounds that grief left when you were separated from your birth family.

Being in care means you’ve had to go through some really shit times, but it also means you’ll eventually be a care leaver. Being a care leaver means it becomes part of who you are and carrying that with you through your whole life. You go through grief and loss repeatedly as you say goodbye to those you thought you belonged to, realising you never really belonged in the first place. No matter how much you want to.

So while I eagerly await the return of Tracy Beaker and wonder how Wilson portrays the life Tracy leads as an adult, I feel I already know many aspects that make up that life, because I’ve lived it.