Mummy’s Little Helper: The heartrending true story of a young girl secretly caring for her severely disabled mother
The fifth book from bestselling author and specialist foster carer Casey Watson.A recent census shows that there are at least 175,000 child carers in the UK, 13,000 of whom care for more than 50 hours a week. Many remain invisible to a system that would otherwise help them. Abigail is one of those children. This is her story.Ten-year-old Abigail has never known her father. Her mother, Sarah, has multiple sclerosis, and Abigail has been her carer since she was a toddler – shopping, cooking, cleaning and attending to her personal needs. When Sarah is rushed to hospital, suddenly this comes to the attention of the social services, and Abigail has nowhere to go.Though she doesn’t fit the usual profile of a child that specialist foster carers Casey and Mike Watson would take on, they are happy to step in and look after Abigail. It’s an emergency, after all – and all that’s needed is a loving temporary home, while social services look into how to support the family so that they can be reunited.But it soon becomes clear that this isn’t going to happen. Sarah’s MS is now at a very advanced stage, and the doctors are certain that there will no longer be periods of remission. Abigail’s emotional state starts to spiral out of control as she struggles to let go of the burden of responsibilities she has carried for so long.Sarah and Abigail insist that they do not need help, but with no other family to contact, social services are left with no choice but to find long-term care for Abigail, against their wishes. But Casey never gives up on a child in need, and she knows there must be another solution…Includes a sample chapter of Sunday Times bestseller Trafficked.
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Contents
I would like to thank all of the team at HarperCollins, the lovely Andrew Lownie, and my friend and mentor, Lynne.
I love my family. I really do. They’re the best in the world in almost every respect. But sometimes they do tend to gang up on me.
‘Mum, that’s bonkers,’ my daughter Riley said, as I brandished the clutch of paint-colour cards I had collected that morning from the local DIY superstore. ‘You said it yourself. Trust me, I remember very clearly. You said, “The upstairs is just fine as it is.”’
‘Perfect,’ my husband Mike chipped in pointedly. I glared at him. ‘Honest!’ he persisted, ignoring it. ‘That’s what you said, love. That the whole house was perfect. Perfect as it was, you said. Remember?’
That was true, certainly. But I chose to pretend I hadn’t heard him. Instead I looked at my Kieron, for support. If I could rely on one person at this point, it would be my son. He wouldn’t let them browbeat me in this scurrilous fashion, surely? But I was sorely mistaken.
‘Come on, you did, Mum,’ he said, his face a picture of innocence, even as he threw me to the lions. ‘And we did do the downstairs …’
‘The whole of the downstairs,’ added Riley. ‘And in a week. Look. I still have the blisters to prove it!’
I fanned my rainbow of blues and pinks and fixed them all with a steely glare. ‘All right then,’ I said. ‘I’ll be the little red hen, then. I shall just have to do it by myself!’
Except I wouldn’t. I knew I’d talk them round eventually.
That had been a week back, and true to my prediction I had managed to persuade Mike of the logic of my plan, and with him on board the kids had caved in and helped too. It had been, I’d decided, an inspired idea. With one bedroom for us, and one earmarked for visitors, we had two bedrooms free for our fostering needs. Two bedrooms, to my mind, meant one blue and one pink. That way, I explained to Mike, we’d be always at the ready, whichever gender John Fulshaw sent us next. John Fulshaw was our fostering-agency link worker, and a dear friend. He’d trained us, and had been by our sides ever since.
‘Save time and money doing it this way in the long run,’ I’d pointed out. And I knew Mike couldn’t argue with that. We’d been fostering for four years now and had no thoughts of stopping, so being prepared for anything – and anyone – made sense. Though back at the start, when we’d taken in our first foster child, Justin, I had, I knew, gone slightly overboard. So much so that, when he left us, and our next child was a girl, it was no small task changing our boy’s room to a girl’s room. I’d gone so mad I’d football themed almost everything in it, right down to the border, the carpet, the clock and the curtains – I’d even painted footballs on the bookcase!
And, as ever, the family rallied round, just as they had this time. It seemed incredible to think we’d been in our new home for barely a month. It was the beginning of February now, and we’d only moved in a couple of days before Christmas. If it hadn’t been for everyone pitching in to get the place the way I wanted it – what with the holidays, and having just waved goodbye to our last foster child, Spencer – I felt sure that I wouldn’t have felt half as settled as I did.
But, yes, Mike was right, the house was perfect. It had been perfect when we’d viewed it, and was even more perfect now. I could barely believe our luck, really. We’d been eighteen years in our last house, and it had been something of a wrench leaving our children’s childhood home. There were just so many happy memories wrapped up in it.
And it had been a stressful situation that had prompted it, as well. The move had actually been brought about because of problems with Spencer. He’d been a particularly challenging child to foster, to put it mildly, and his antics (at just eight he’d already been like a one-boy walking crime spree) had caused a lot of upset in the neighbourhood. We weren’t exactly forced out, but a great deal of bad feeling had developed, and it had hit home that bringing children such as this into our lives could (and in this case did) have an impact on others, too.
It had certainly forced us to think about the future. And as soon as we’d sat down and considered our options, we realised the timing was right anyway. Not that we’d downsized. Though our own children had flown the nest (Kieron was settled with his girlfriend Lauren, and Riley and her partner David even had two little ones of their own) we’d moved house with children very much still in mind. Our new place was that little bit further out of town, that bit more open and leafy, that bit more suited to serving our fostering needs.
