Dawn & Gary’s Fostering Story

Dawn and Gary have been married for 32 years and fostering for seven of those. They have one birth son, Simon, 30, who is married with four children. Family are a huge part of Dawn and Gary’s lives and while their much-loved grandchildren “unfortunately don’t live here”, the family get together often and remain very close.

Dawn shares, “Si was an only child and we always wanted lots of children, it just didn’t happen but when Simon was growing up, even though he was an only child, I don’t think I ever cooked for less than six kids at night, especially when he was a teenager – When he went in the marines my husband, Gary, had to say, ‘Stop buying so much food! They’re not all coming every night, he’s left home!’ So, we always had a house full and we think it’s important siblings stay together – I mean we’re grandparents to four and if anyone split them, oh wow, it would be devastating. We had three little [foster] girls and they’d split them and it was awful, it was dreadful.” 

Dawn was a baker for 35 years and still loves baking (the CFC Cumbria office can attest to her fantastic skills!) Gary worked in the Kangol hat factory until their close and so, due to his love of fell and road running, he re-trained and now works as a self-employed fitness trainer.

“My experience of growing up was wonderful” says Dawn, who was the youngest of four, with an 11-20 year age gap between her siblings and so, grew up much like an only child.

“I had a wonderful childhood, memories of me mam learning me to knit and sew and embroider and bake. Memories of dad in the shed – always in the shed – making things and the smell of wood.”

Both Dawn and Gary share the responsibility of fostering, with Dawn attending lots of the meetings and covering admin and Gary spending lots of time with the children when they’re not at school. Dawn says, “We couldn’t do it without each other.”

On asked how their experience of fostering siblings has been, Dawn says, “Great. Much easier than fostering solo placements – in all the years of fostering we’ve only had two solo placements – fostering siblings is so much easier because they come together and they support each other. It’s hard – I can’t imagine – being a foster child, you see their faces when they come in and they don’t know you and they come into a strange house but if they’ve got each other, they cope better.”

“Ours were both 9/10 when we got them and they both left other siblings, they all went separate places and that’s hard.”

“When you’ve got siblings - the oldest one has nearly always been the primary carer – to get them to trust you and give that responsibility over to you so that they can be a child is amazing, it’s just lovely.”

Speaking of a sibling group of two, Dawn shares, “The oldest gave me control the same night [they arrived]. Her sister knocked on her bedroom door and I said to her ‘You don’t have to knock on your sister, just knock on us if you need anything in the night, we’ll look after you’ and her sister said, ‘There you go, you don’t have to knock on me anymore because Dawn and Gary are gonna look after us both’ – I was in bed crying!”

“But three girls we had [before], it took the oldest one quite a while to hand over the responsibility, it took a couple of months – when they do it’s amazing. They just need to be children, doesn’t matter whether they’re 2 or 13, they still need to be kids and have their own life instead of looking after other people.”

“We love watching them learning to play together – most of them don’t know how to play because they’ve never been in an environment where they felt safe enough to play. Interacting together – there are so many positives but they’re my biggest ones.”

When asked what had been challenging while fostering, Dawn says, “Because we only had one [birth child] and only ever had friends here, friends don’t fight like siblings do and they literally fight! We had one little boy – I was on the phone, and he hit his sister so hard – and I just put the phone down and I said, ‘What are you doing?!’ and he said ‘Well she was annoying me’ – she wasn’t! She wasn’t doing anything but that was what he’d been brought up with, he’d seen people hitting his mam and he thought it was acceptable - that was challenging.”

“When one attaches to us and the other one doesn’t because their loyalties are still with parents, that’s hard because it kind of causes a divide between them. The one who’s attached is like ‘Well I don’t know why you don’t love it here, it’s lovely’ and the other one is like ‘Yeah but we’re not with mam and dad’ and that’s quite challenging, actually.”

On asking Dawn what keeps the two of them going during the hard times, she says “We couldn’t do it without each other. The first placement we got was two sibling boys and the oldest one was on the autistic spectrum, and I’d never ever dealt with it”

Dawn felt out of her depth, especially given it was their very first experience of fostering, but the boys’ social worker reassured her that it would be fine as he went to a [mainstream] school and participated as all the other children did. As it turned out, the boy did attend [mainstream] school, but he was in the special learning unit and Dawn found his extra needs very challenging to deal with.

“I phoned Sue [a veteran foster carer] so many times – her and Gary, if it hadn’t been for them two, I would have packed in, I’d have stopped fostering after six weeks because it was so much of a shock. I suppose if you’ve got an autistic child, you know their traits from birth, you know their quirks and things that trigger them – I was like a fish out of water, I kept saying to Gary, ‘I just know how to bake, that’s all I know how to do’ and he said ‘No you don’t! You know how to mother’

We sat up the fell one day and I was absolutely in tears, and he said, ‘We’ll get through this, we will.’”

“Our support network’s really good – Simon’s wife, her grandparents ran a children’s home in London so she’s really wonderful – she’s got loads of stories.

One of my children wouldn’t eat and that’s a big trigger for me and I rang Bec and said ‘Oh my God, you need to ring your grandma and ask her, and her grandma said, ‘If he wants jam sandwiches, give him jam sandwiches. Just don’t think you’ve got to give them dinner and pudding – they’ve not had it, so it’ll just freak them out. If that’s what he wants to eat for the next month that’s fine!’ and I was like, ‘Oh my God, he’s not getting any nutrition from what he’s eating’ and she said ‘It’s fine! Give him plenty of fluids, give him what he wants to eat, even if you think it’s rubbish, you’ll get through it’ and we did!”

“If it’s more serious, we just ring CFC, you know there’s always someone at the end of the phone – it just makes you feel better, knowing that you’re not the only one going through what you’re going through.”

When asked what she would say to anyone thinking about fostering, Dawn says, “Do it, just do it – that’s what my son told me. We were going to foster when Simon was about eight and we went quite a way through the process and it was at a time when the families had to come to your house for contact and I said, ‘No, I can’t do that when I’ve got my own son at home, he’s my priority, I’ve got to keep him safe and I can’t have people coming in my home.’ So we just stopped and then when he went in the marines, I got proper empty nest syndrome.

When he got married and had [their first child] – we talked about it again and we kind of felt guilty when they were expecting because we thought ‘What if they think we’re pushing them away?’ So, I rang him and I said, ‘Listen, me and dad are thinking about fostering’ and he said, ‘I’m actually sick of you thinking about it, I’m sick of this conversation’ he said, ‘You would turn around and say to me ‘Just do it!’ and then if you’re no good at it or you don’t like it, you’ve tried.’ So that’s what I’d say to everybody really, you don’t know unless you’ve tried and the difference you make is amazing.

When you look back at photographs from when they first came to when they leave – you don’t see it when you live with it every day because it’s just a process – it’s just a journey but when you see the end result, it’s just amazing. Don’t hesitate to try because that’s all we can do, is try and I’d always say, siblings are the easiest to foster, in my opinion.”

We asked Dawn if she felt there was anything in particular that helps them with their fostering and she says, “We put our success down to where we live – we’ve lived in our village forever – we know everyone, we have really good links with both schools. We know if the children go out they’re safe because everybody knows us – and where we live, as regards to the lakes and the fells and the beach – so the kids love that. Most of our children have been local, fairly local, and they’ve never seen them, never been to the beach, never walked up a fell, never been to a lake and they love it. When they go outside, it’s like freedom.

It was actually our little boy who was autistic – we were sitting down at [the lake] – and he said ‘Oh this is so peaceful because you don’t have to think, you can just sit and watch the ducks and the swans’ – they love running around in the open spaces and getting in the lake, even in the winter! They go to the beach, and we’ll say, ‘We’re not getting in the beach today, guys, because it’s November!’ and they always end up in the beach and you always need to pack a towel! It's the freedom – where we live, and the community we’ve got around us.”

“It’s essential to make them part of your family, include them in everything” One child Dawn and Gary fostered asked their son, “Si - will you be our big brother?” and Simon said, “Oh no problem, I’ll be your big brother” According to Simon’s wife, he got in the car, and had to pull in round the corner because he couldn’t drive for crying.

When the family visited a few weeks later, Dawn tells us, “[Simon] kept saying, ‘This is my sister’ to anyone who asked, and her smile just got bigger and bigger and bigger.”

We asked Dawn what she and Gary take from fostering - “I personally love hugs and cuddles and sitting and watching Disney movies and hot chocolate and all those nurturing kind of things. We both love watching them thrive, seeing the difference, achieving at school, making friends – that’s what we personally enjoy, both of us.”

When considering fostering brothers and sisters, we wanted to know what the two of them notice their young people take from remaining with their siblings - “They keep their roots and the security, that they’ve got each other – they’re still sisters, or sister and brother or brothers, they’ve still got their identity as a family, but we also really make an effort with birth families. We always buy them presents and make a fuss of birthdays. They like to know they’re safe and looked after.”

There was a serious incident at school recently to which Dawn went straight down to the school to pick up M and on picking her up, M said, “It was such a shock but when I knew you were just dropping everything and coming for me, I just thought ‘she always comes.’”

Dawn says, “It’s just so nice, nice to feel safe and feel loved and feel wanted. [One of our children] was doing an exam and [they] walked out, [they] got upset, it overwhelmed [them], and I said ‘We don’t care if you pass or fail, we’re not bothered, as long as you do your best, that’s all you can do in life, is your best. Don’t ever worry that you haven’t been good enough because you’re always good enough if you’re doing your best.’ It’s things like that that make them feel safe - Keep them safe, make them feel loved and wanted and part of your family.”

Fostering siblings inevitably brings extra practicalities into consideration, especially given young people must have their own rooms, which can pose a problem for many foster families but Dawn and Gary fortunately didn’t have any worries, “We didn’t have to think about any practicalities - Even though we had an only child, he was never an only child we always had all his mates sleeping over – we always had a house full; it was just the same really.”

We asked Dawn if they had any worries ahead of their first sibling placement. Dawn says, “I think you have worries for every placement – will they like you? Will they settle? Will they like your house? Will they like your food? Will they relax? And I think you do that for every placement, it doesn’t matter whether it’s your first one or your last – you worry that you’re gonna get it right.”

On asking if they’d been shocked by anything while fostering, Dawn says, “One of our [children] weed in the corner and then just carried on playing and thought it was perfectly normal – one [child] took my Sellotape and in the middle of the night I heard this strange noise and they’d bound their legs together – really tight. Some of them don’t know how to eat at a table.”

“Most of our foster children have been affected by contact a lot. So what we do, in the summer we go to the beck – every time after contact and sometimes we take a picnic, sometimes we get sausage and chips and we sit and throw stones in the beck because we found, with all of them, that when they go to bed after contact, their memory is what’s happened in contact - and if you do that, if you distract them – in the winter we get the paints out on the table and we all paint pictures or we watch Disney movies snuggled up under the duvet with hot chocolate and biscuits – that’s the memory they’re taking to bed, not contact – distraction is a wonderful way to deal with things with them – otherwise, some of them have really bad nightmares.

We’ve found with siblings and contact, one of them enjoys it and the other won’t.”

When we asked how fostering siblings differs to solo placements, Dawn says, “It seems to be, they settle easier if they’re together. Solo placements – it’s much harder for them.” 

Dawn shares the reason they chose to foster with a not-for-profit fostering agency rather than local authority or other independent fostering agencies; “We liked that they were like a family – We like that if they’re having a day out, we can take our grandchildren as well and then we’re all a family together and really, that they’re not-for-profit, that they’re charity based.

We had to ask, what, specifically, did Dawn and Gary like about fostering with Community Foster Care; “We like that there’s always someone at the end of the phone – and also, if you are having a crisis, they ring you back to check how things are going and if things have settled down. I like our support groups and we can all chat about what’s happening with our children and it’s a safe environment and you know it’s not going to be repeated and usually if you’re having a problem, someone else in the group has dealt with that problem before and can give you tips – that’s really nice.”