WARTS AND ALL

 Blue Sky have had a flurry of feedback from readers of The Secret Foster Carer. Many of the comments and contributions are in response to posts that date back a long time. I want to say thanks to each and every respondent. And apologise for any delay in replying to all feedback; I try, but when one fosters there's not much free gtime.

I left that "gtime" back there on purpose. I'll tell you why. Has it got anything to do with fostering? YES! When you foster EVERYTHING has something to do with fostering.

Thing is this; I dash out my latest thoughts (wisdom? insights?…whatever) on fostering whenever I can.

Anyone who fosters knows that downtime is almost non-existent. When the children are at home it's wall-to-wall solid fostering. Foster parents are alert 360 degrees and tuned in to little else.

When they are at school - if you can get them to school - it's a mad rush of shopping and cleaning and bed-changing and paperwork. If you're lucky you get ten mintes for a cuppa and tune in to Ken Bruce.

Only Ken's gone, and I hardly noticed because you're rushed off your feet…fostering.

So. Sometime back I was approached privately by a "service" which offered to help me with this blog. They observed it's doing better than most blogs: had half a million hits, eat your hearts out you Khardashians.

But, they claimed, they could help.

They wanted to "tidy me up".

They offered me a service where one of their team would 'polish' my scribblings and make them more…wait for it…

'Corporate'.

Corporate! 

Well, I was amused. And because I'm pathetic at saying "No" (I pictured a couple of school leavers trying to start a business in their parents garage) I agreed to their trial offer. They would 'treat' two blogs free if I then signed up for a fixed term.

I replied "Aw go on then".

Now, up to that point, the Secret Foster Carer blog had been going along well enough. Hopefully providing some insights/comfort/amusement to fellow fostering folk. Warts and all.

Long story short; the professionals bombed.

They jazzed the pages up with non-royalty images, corrected all thw typos ("thw" - there goes another one) and turned the posts into the sort of soul-less writing you'd want for a pamphlet selling loft conversions.

But fostering doesn't.

Fostering is chock full of slight mistakes, human errors and little things that go slightly wrong because you're rushed off your feet.

The fact was that the polished, corporate blog didn't click with foster parents or would-be foster parents.

Nobody commented or fed back. Why? Because it lacked the human touch.

So I said thanks but no thanks.

Fostering is all about the human touch.

Yes we have to make sensible professional decisions about many things, but to the children in our care, it's all about the human touch. Definitely not the corporate touch.

The many tiny inperfections of human family life are the life-blood of fostering.

The hair in the sink, the slug trail at the kitchen door, the essential hair-grip the dog has eaten, the small blue mark on the last slice of bread.

The can of coke that was thrown away when there was some left, the missing beanie, the over-recording of BGT.

The wrong type of Pringles.

Nothing sums up the non-corporate nature of fostering than that we fosterers will NEVER, EVER buy the right Pringles.

In fostering you can't get further from the men and women in suits who stay up late with their spreadsheets saving doomed companies and bi-annually upgrading to the preferred BMW.

They're missing out on the joy of saving a doomed child. And having to go back to the One Stop and upgrading to the preferred Pringles..