Nearly 18 years in foster care left Sadie Harpur with a sad but heartening story to tell. Dublin-born Sadie found herself – along with twin sister Kizzy – in her first foster home before her first birthday because her birth parents couldn’t cope.
She tells of troubled periods of high anxiety when she suffered from learning difficulties resulting from undiagnosed dyslexia along with bouts of depression, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, violent outbursts and was repeatedly bullied.
Sadie was described as “mentally below average” in documents she later accessed under the Freedom of Information Act, even though this was not the case. She was promised counselling on numerous occasions – but never got it.
Here, she tells of how she wrote her new book, “The Hidden World of a Foster Girl”, which explores the challenges she faced in her personal life, and the survival skills she employed to get beyond her tough early years…
I WAS BORN on the northside of Dublin city 40 years ago, grew up with my foster family on the southside of Dublin, but I now live happily with my husband and our children in a small town in rural Ireland.
Apart from being a foster child for 18 years, I have also been a foster parent and offered our family home for respite to other foster families. All those experiences turned my life into a bit of a rollercoaster, but I’ve been told the various ups and downs have also given me a relatively rare understanding of fostering from different perspectives.
Between those major milestones in my life, I went through periods of intense sadness and pain, and some traumatic experiences that I would never wish on anybody.
I know I have hurt people, including those who truly love me and whom I truly love. So, in this book, I explore the circumstances of my fostering, and how I later went off the rails. But thanks to my wonderful foster family as well as my loving husband, our children, his family, real friends, carers and colleagues, I eventually got my life back on track. It’s also important for me to acknowledge that it hasn’t been all bad, as I’ve had many great experiences in my life too.
As well as focusing on my own personal story in the book, I touched on practical aspects of fostering from different angles, especially those of the child and including those who interact with foster children. In the course of doing, so I have respected the privacy of others by giving them invented names or referring to them anonymously.
Much of the personal information in this book is culled from private diaries I wrote from time to time over the years. I found it to be a hugely therapeutic experience and a valuable outlet for my innermost thoughts and my raging anger. In fact, I also found working on this book to be a liberating and extremely helpful process.
In a way, my life as a foster child did really begin when I was in the womb, and I was born three months premature as a twin of my sister Kizzy. Actually, my birth mother didn’t know she was having twins until she went into labour a second time! My birth mother’s mother, who was a positive presence in keeping the wider family together, had recently passed away, and my birth mother was understandably struggling with her grief as well as two more arrivals.
This was not my birth parents’ first brush with death in the family either, as their firstborn, a girl, had died. The loss of loved ones can have a devastating effect on a family, and while people often say that “time heals”, it can often take a long time to do its work.
People nearly always do the best they can for their children in whatever circumstances they find themselves, but for some, the pressures can simply become too much, and I understand that. My parents were in a difficult situation, married at such a young age and with very young children, including the latest addition of unexpected twins. My birth dad earned a living as a lorry driver while my birth mum was a young mother at home looking after us. But in order to protect the privacy of my birth family, I have minimised references to them in this book.
Soon after being born in St James Hospital I was temporarily separated from Kizzy who, it was found, had been born with stenosis and was kept in hospital for three months. Shortly after I arrived home from the maternity hospital I was moved to a children’s home run by the Sisters of Charity in a southside Dublin suburb where I was kept for a few weeks.
I was brought back to my birth-parents’ home where Kizzy had already arrived, but we were both soon moved again for a spell to a place where I was looked after by nuns.
I can’t emphasise it enough, but these changes and moves back and forth, while they took place while I was still a baby, had a deeply unsettling effect on me that lasted into my adulthood. So is it any wonder that for a long stretch of my life, I felt like a total outsider in this world, shunted around as a baby from place to place with all the deep feelings of insecurity that brings?
After all, it’s not only a change of place you have to adjust to every time, but you’re also moving in with different people, often leaving more familiar people behind you. As if that was not bad enough, I also missed my twin sister whenever we were apart.
It was not an auspicious beginning to my life, and I eventually came to believe that raising children can often be about the people who come in and out of their lives at the right times and who help get them through that part of their journey.
And so it was with me.
Sadie Harpur works as a Special Needs Assistant and lives in Wexford. Her new book, “The Hidden World of a Foster Girl” is available now from bookshops for €16.99.
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