Tag: Raised in Care

Part One – 150. An Early Memory I Didn’t Ask To Keep

⚠️ Content Warning: This post contains descriptions of child abuse and trauma. Please take care while reading.

One of my earliest memories is the day I was divorced from my mother.

Not quite, but almost, actually.

I couldn’t find the school sweatshirt she had bought for me. Running late for school — the youngest of four — that would be me. I’m the little pain in the backside. The mess-maker. The mistake that wasn’t meant to happen. I was the gratitude I never gave my mother for existing.

I don’t remember the actual act, but I remember everything that followed.

At school, my back was sore.

I rubbed it to try and comfort myself, and my teacher noticed I wasn’t quietly working. She asked what was wrong. I innocently replied, “My back is a bit sore.” She lifted the back of my top and let out a small gasp. I would later learn that gasp was horror.

I was taken immediately from class. No idea where I was going or what I’d done wrong. My brain decided it was punishment. I must’ve been naughty. Extra naughty, knowing me.

They led me to another room. Another adult appeared. Another look at my back. Hushed tones. I couldn’t hear what they whispered to each other, but I imagined them calling my mother. Maybe she would show up and explain and then everything would be okay?

She didn’t.

Instead, I was put into a car. “We’re going to see a doctor,” they said. Maybe I was sick? I sure didn’t feel sick. Just really sore.

At the doctor’s, I was told to strip to my underwear. A man I’d never met looked inquisitively over the back of my bony frame. I remember being grateful my sister had found clean knickers for me. I stood there, not knowing what to expect next. Just every so vulnerable and totally scared.

Then I heard counting.

He was counting something on my body.

The number I remember is: 150.

That was the number of bruises on my tiny body.

I later would learn that my mother had used a Henry Hoover pipe and battered me with it, I was quite literally black and blue.

I’d be an adult when I’d discover that that day, I became an instant urban legend. The kid who was there one minute and the next?

Just, Gone.

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→Continue to Part Two – The Holiday That Never Ended

Part Two – The Holiday That Never Ended

I remember feeling utterly humiliated as they peered at my tiny, bony frame. With only a pair of knickers to protect me, I hadn’t felt so exposed and so awkward.

Minutes later, finally allowed to get dressed, I waited. I was still expecting my mother to appear. She didn’t.

Instead, the same woman who had picked me up from school told me I was going to stay with a lovely set of foster parents for the weekend — a little holiday, she said. That sounded alright. But first, we needed to stop at my house to get some clothes.

My mother wasn’t there either. Just my sister Mia, who scrambled to gather up clothes that weren’t covered in cat hair or smelling of cat pee. She emptied a bin bag, filled it with what she could, and handed it over. And just like that, I was gone.

I don’t remember arriving at the foster home, but I remember the smell. It wasn’t bad — just… strange. Like when you visit your grandparents and the air just feels like it belongs to someone else’s life.

They gave me my own room with a bunk bed, a wardrobe, and drawers. I remember thinking, this’ll do for the weekend. Just the weekend. I’d be back home with my brothers and sister soon enough.

No.

The weekend became a week. Then another. Nobody spoke about time anymore. I was enrolled at the local school. And I tried — really, tried — to be a “good girl.” Trouble is, I had no idea what that actually meant.

I watched the other girls: neat, well-behaved, always praised. I was desperate to fit in. But I was “the foster kid.” My foster parents were seen as saints for taking me in, but I knew the truth: I didn’t belong there.

One day, I was painting at the kitchen table. The younger of their sons joined me, and before long we were flicking paint at each other, giggling. Just kids being kids. But then she came in.

She screamed at me, slapped me, forced me into pyjamas, and locked me in my room.

I’d never been locked in a room before. I panicked. What if there was a fire? What if I died and nobody knew I was even here?

Lying on the bed, I sobbed myself to sleep. Nothing I ever did seemed right. But everything I did seemed wrong.

The next morning, I was allowed out. The paint fight was blamed solely on me. Their son smiled smugly from behind his mother, knowing he was protected. I wasn’t.

Eventually, I got to see my mum. She arrived with some second-hand gifts and clothes, but before I knew it, it was over. She was leaving without me.

Then I was told: one hour a month.

That was the agreement.

One. Hour. A. Month.

I was being punished again and again for a crime I still didn’t understand.

I tried to adjust. I really did. But the harder I tried to be good, the more the “bad” in me leaked out. I was blamed for everything. “Foster kid” might as well have been written on my forehead in permanent ink.

The only thing that brought me any peace was being outside. The village was tiny — just a pub, post office, church, hall, and school — but I loved exploring. It was the first time I felt free in months.

The food? A lottery.

My foster mum was part culinary genius, part food assassin.

She made this amazing fridge cake — actual heaven. But then she’d serve jelly-soaked cold meat things that looked like they belonged in a tin for the dog. Once I was forced to eat one. I retched. Hard. But I didn’t throw up — throwing up meant staying home with her, and I wasn’t doing that.

But then came the stew.

The stew deserves its own paragraph. Because it haunts me to this day.

Winter hit, and suddenly it was stew every night. Slimy hunks of fatty meat, greyish veg, and gravy that looked like it had been wrung from an old dishcloth.

I tried to chew. I tried to swallow. I gagged. I vomited — right there on the plate.

She was furious.

She told me I wasn’t leaving the table until it was gone.

Yes — that meant the stew and the vomit.

I sat there, sobbing for two hours. Eventually, I was sent to bed. Exhausted. Hungry. Defeated.

Stew became a nightly torture. I gagged every time. Even now, at 43, the smell of stew can trigger a gag reflex that takes me right back to that table, that plate, and that feeling of being completely unwanted.


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