by Mia Marconi
Sofia was prescribed special drops and I was told to bathe her eye every three hours. The doctor took a swab sample from her eye and said she was very worried about her, but told me to go home. She added that she would bike the sample over to the lab and ring me if the diagnosis was anything different.
I had only been home for about half an hour when the phone rang. It was the doctor and she said I needed to come back to the hospital urgently because she had some bad news.
I phoned a neighbour, who agreed to look after Francesca and Ruby. Then I phoned Martin and asked if he could get home ASAP, and once the girls were settled I went straight there. They were waiting for me and rushed Sofia into a room. They told me that the results had come back and showed that Sofia had contracted gonorrhoea, which could cause terrible damage if left untreated.
The doctor ordered special topical medicine from another hospital and had to have it biked over. Sofia was immediately admitted to intensive care and put on a drip.
A young consultant came to see me at her bedside. His tone was sharp and the way he looked at me – or rather avoided looking at me – made me want to fall through a hole in the floor. There was utter contempt written all over his face. ‘You will have to stay for twenty-four hours, swab her eyes every fifteen minutes and put three different drops in her eyes,’ he said, staring straight past me. He obviously thought I was her mother and had caused this terrible problem. I was fuming. I felt angry that Sofia was suffering and that he was judging me, assuming I was the cause.
Sofia had contracted this disease from her mother, who had gonorrhoea in pregnancy and had passed it on to Sofia during delivery. If Maria had told the doctors about it they could have carried out a Caesarian and it would not have affected Sofia, but she might not have known that she had it. I found out later that the symptoms can be quite mild. I was not going to judge her; after all, she could have been raped, and the doctor should have known that, whether he thought I was Sofia’s mother or not.
I stayed calm and professional and told him that I was Sofia’s foster carer and that unfortunately I couldn’t sleep over as I had two young children at home. Suddenly he was very apologetic.
I went home that night and spent hours on the phone organising childcare for Francesca and Ruby, because I knew I would have to rush backwards and forwards to the hospital over the next few days.
The doctors told me when I returned the next day that they were really worried about Sofia. They said if I had not acted as fast as I had and taken her straight to A&E, she would have gone blind and eventually been brain-damaged. The disease eats through the back of the eye and into the brain, and the damage it causes is irreversible. The only thing that can stop it is antibiotics.
I was terrified. It was the early Eighties and in those days I had no idea about STDs and the effects they can have on a baby, but thank God I took her to the hospital, thank God for my mothering instincts and thank God for my mum reinforcing them. To think of the damage that could have been done if I had not been vigilant made me shudder. It was a good first lesson in caring and a really big shock.
As though I was her real mum, I visited Sofia every day and later took the girls too, who made her beautiful ‘Get Well’ cards. She was quite teary in hospital, and even after I took her home a week later she seemed really insecure. I was constantly worried about her and it took about a month before she felt safe again. As a family we were all overprotective of her for quite a while.
She still had to have special topical medicine and drops, which were so rare they still had to be ordered in advance and biked over. The day she was discharged, I left hospital with a massive plastic bag filled with sterile swabs, water, drops and medicine, and I had to continue her treatment at home for the next three months.
Every week we went back to Moorfields to have her eyes checked, and then to the Royal London Hospital’s Ophthalmic Department to have special drops administered, which really upset Sofia as they stung. Sometimes I was there for hours. Poor Sofia also got diarrhoea because of all the medicine, but despite that, and the fact that she was not even a month old, she was still a very happy baby.
I often thought about Sofia’s mum at this time. She was still missing – she had not returned to Italy or contacted her family there. I thought about how difficult life must be for her. She spoke no English, had no family over here and could have felt very ill at times with gonorrhoea. I wondered if she had been treated and whether she knew that if she hadn’t been, she ran the risk of becoming infertile. Sofia could end up being her only child.
It wasn’t until much later that there were suggestions that she was a prostitute. When I told the Italian couple about Sofia’s eye they started crying. The woman assumed that Maria must have been a prostitute, and the fact that she had no idea when her baby was due could have meant that she had been sleeping with more than one man. We really didn’t know, though.
Although her family had no idea where Maria was, she kept in phone contact with the couple – but I never met her. I never knew what she looked like or saw a photo of her, and I often wondered if Sofia looked like her. More than once I asked them if they had a photo of Maria, but they always replied no. Later on, they told me that there was a resemblance, although they said that Maria had dark hair, so I can only assume that it was her father who was blond. Was he English or Italian? Was he rich or poor, young or old? We would never know.
Six months later, Sofia was given the all-clear and no damage had been caused to her eyes. I was proud of myself and felt grateful every day that I had taken her to the hospital when I did.
She stayed with us for just over a year and fitted our family like a glove. She grew into a beautiful little girl, with blonde hair and the biggest brown eyes you have ever seen – every time I hear the song ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ by Van Morrison it brings tears to my eyes. The girls and I loved her to bits and we honestly fought over her like she was a dolly.
I would bathe her, put her in a pink babygrow, wrap her in her pink blanket and sit and gaze at her, wondering what kind of life she was going to have. Time flies when you hold a baby – one minute I would be doing her 10 p.m. feed and the next it would be midnight. One thing I noticed about her was that she never guzzled down her milk; she always drank it slowly. She already had impeccable manners!
Sofia was a bright little girl. She never seemed to take her eyes off me, following my every move, listening intently as I chatted to her in Italian, absorbing every little noise and taking in everything around her. She was also totally attached to the family and loved it when my brother and sisters, mum, dad, cousins, aunts and uncles popped in. She seemed really happy in the hustle and bustle of my huge family.
As she grew, she was never quite as confident as Francesca and Ruby and was sometimes quite nervous, especially when we were outside. Her big brown eyes would look around for reassurance, but she never had to wait too long before one of us came rushing to her aid, and it would usually be Francesca or Ruby who got there first. Her first words were ‘Chesa’ and ‘Ubi’, and her face broke into smiles whenever she saw them.
Bathtimes were a joy. She loved the water and her little legs would start kicking as soon as you turned the taps on. I often bathed all three girls together, and they would laugh and splash for hours. Sofia would sit inside a rubber ring that was secured to the bottom of the bath so she could not slide under, and they would play with all the bath toys. She also loved Winnie the Pooh videos, although really she had no choice, as the girls had them on all the time. And it was lovely watching her reach her various milestones: first crawling, then babbling and then, by the time she was one, she was cruising round the furniture.
Throughout the year, we had more contact with the Italian couple her mother had stayed with, but they still only visited Sofia half a dozen times. When they first came by they were a bit awkward and embarrassed with her – it was almost as though they were worried I was judging them. The husband was a jolly, warm man, the opposite of the wife,
who had built an invisible wall around her to shield her from goodness knows what.
As time went on and she realised I had Italian heritage, she softened and became more open. She told me she was angry with Maria and blamed her for her family’s heartache. Maria’s mother was her best friend, they had known each other since childhood, so her loyalties were with her. She could muster no sympathy for Maria, only anger.
Whatever their personal feelings towards Maria, you could see that they cared about Sofia, especially the husband, who was far more tactile with her. He cradled her constantly, speaking softly to her in Italian, reassuring her that he would look after her. I had a feeling deep down that they would love her and care for her as though she was their own, but as I secretly wanted a fairy-tale ending for Sofia, I hoped that one day her mum would come back to get her. The fairy tale remained a fantasy and a decision was made about Sofia’s future: the couple decided they wanted to adopt her.
Social services began sorting out the legalities with Sofia’s grandparents in Italy, who had made it clear from the start that they did not want her. I suppose if they had taken her in there would have been too many questions for them to address. Southern Italy is far stricter than northern Italy, and they were from a small village, so there was no way they could have kept it quiet.
It’s all too easy to feel angry towards a family who have rejected one of their own, but it might have been the best thing for Sofia. Social services do a brilliant job of trying to identify any family member capable of caring for a baby and they do not give up easily. I have no idea whether Maria’s family was really dysfunctional or not, but whatever their story, none of them could take responsibility for raising Sofia, so the next best thing was for her to go to close family friends.
Sofia’s grandparents did come over once to finalise the papers so that the family’s friends could adopt her, but we never got to meet. It was a painful time for me, although I was prepared from the very start to lose her, and I kept that fact fresh in my mind on a daily basis. I knew the day she left I would feel heartbroken, but I knew I was prepared for it.
What I was not prepared for was seeing my two little girls’ faces as I explained to them that Sofia had a new forever mummy. They were really crying and holding onto me, kissing Sofia, and I realised that no matter how much I had prepared them – and I had been telling them throughout the year that social services were looking for a new mummy for Sofia – the reality was that they were going to miss this little girl who they had treated like their baby sister for a whole year – and a year is a long, long time to a child.
I had not expected this and began to wonder what the hell I was doing. I watched them grieve and they asked me over and over again: ‘Mummy, why can’t you be Sofia’s forever mummy?’
Even more heartbreaking was when Ruby said, ‘Are they going to take me away from you? Are you our forever mummy?’ That really got to me and I cried, cuddled her and said that no, no one was ever going to take her away from me and that she was mine for ever and ever and ever, and that when Sofia went to live with her new mummy, she would be her mummy for ever and ever and ever. I told her that Mummy was there to look after other children until they could go back to their own families or find forever families, and again that she would always stay with me.
I dealt with it, but I began to ask myself whether by helping someone else’s child I was damaging mine. I look back and wonder: did they need to go through that? And I still do not know the answer.
I confronted their grief head-on. I went to the library and got lots of books about mummies and daddies and families, and I did lots of drawings with them, showing all the different types of families you could have. I kept talking about Sofia so that they could tell me what they were feeling and I could deal with their hurt.
Sofia was adopted just before Christmas, which was just after her first birthday, and I wondered how it would be for her going from having two sisters and being in the heart of the hustle and bustle of our big, chaotic family to living with a middle-aged couple who had no other children.
I put that thought to one side as the kids and I made a memory box full of photos of Sofia with our family. There were pictures of the party we had had the day she arrived, there were pictures of her first Christmas and birthday. There were lots of photos of Francesca and Ruby playing with her, of her cuddling my mum and dad and Martin and me, of outings and other family occasions. I included her first dummy and her first outfit, and I also made sure that she knew that her eye had been infected and what it had been infected with. It is not a nice thing to know, but I believe there should be no secrets. My experience with Dad and Mum made me sure that it is best to know about your past and to deal with it. So many secrets had been kept from Dad, which damaged him a great deal, so I decided: no more secrets.
I handed the memory box to the social worker when she came to take Sofia. I don’t know whether the box was ever given to Sofia, though, because once a child is adopted there is no guarantee that the information will be shared. The couple had the mentality that anything uncomfortable should be kept secret, so in my heart I have always suspected that Sofia was never told the truth and that, to this day, she knows nothing about me, Martin, Francesca and Ruby. It is hard to live with, but I have no choice.
After she left, we cried. We sat on the sofa and cuddled and sobbed together until we had no more tears left. Although I was upset, I felt I had accomplished something. This was nothing like all the other jobs I’d done; I had never had that same sense of achievement. I felt I had been in the right place at the right time, and I knew that I did not want to give up.
After she left, I never saw Sofia again. She would be nineteen now. I lost touch with the couple, but I did hear from a social worker who supported them for a while that the woman had suffered from cancer when Sofia was about three. I never actually found out whether she survived. It was sad, and I never stopped hoping that her mother had sorted herself out and come back for her. I cling to that fairy-tale ending for her, but I have no idea if she ever had it.
Chapter Six
The nature of foster caring means that it was only a week or so before another baby came to us, and once that happened we began to put our grief behind us.
The new baby stayed for eight months, and Francesca and Ruby played with her with the same enthusiasm as they had with Sofia. They were still upset when she left, but it was not the same; their grief was not as fierce. It was right that they did get upset, because if they had stopped caring it would mean I had done something wrong, that they could not attach themselves any more or form close relationships. They came to an understanding about the leaving aspect of the process, that these children were part of our family while they were with us, but they were not staying forever. They knew who the ‘forever’ people in their lives were, and they knew that these babies were not in that group.
For the next few years I cared for lots more babies, whom I mainly collected from hospital when they were just a few days old. The majority of them had been born to heroin or crack addicts and were already on the ‘at risk’ register. Some of their mothers had already given birth to five or six (or in one case, seven) children, all of whom had been taken into care. There was little hope for some of these women – the sad truth is that only a tiny percentage ever kicks their habit and turns their lives around.
Their children are born addicted to crack cocaine or heroin and the minute they enter this world they are put on a special programme to help them withdraw from drugs. That is their start in life. My job was to pick them up, love and nurture them and do my best to help them until they could be placed with a loving forever family.
There is a lot of judgement of drug-addicted mothers, less so than of mothers who drink throughout their pregnancy. What is not generally known is that it is a medical fact that drink can do far more damage to unborn babies than drugs. It is a game of Russian roulette, really: some mothers can drink or take drugs throughout their pregnancy and be bless
ed with a healthy baby, while others will give birth to children with terrible disabilities and some might be so damaged they die. You can never tell what that bottle of vodka, crack pipe or syringe full of heroin will do.
I will never forget Hope. Her mother was only fifteen and had drunk heavily and smoked drugs all the way through her pregnancy. Poor little Hope was born prematurely and there were complications during labour. She was very sick when she was born and was taken straight into intensive care. She spent her first few months in an incubator, but against all the odds she survived, although she was in and out of hospital during the first year of her life.
When I first saw her she looked like any healthy, chubby little girl, with her dimpled cheeks and blonde hair, but her looks were a mask. I quickly realised that steroids were responsible for her rounded appearance, and as I looked into her blue eyes I could tell that she was still very sick.
Hope was the quietest baby I have ever cared for; she was almost emotionless and very rarely cried. Numb because of the mountain of medication she was on, not only did she barely cry, she barely smiled either. There were rare times when her little face would break into a grin, and when that happened it was magical.
She was also the hardest baby to care for, and I had no idea what I was taking on. Although I had listened intently while the nurse explained how to care for Hope, there is a big difference between theory and practice. Any parent who has a disabled child will know what I’m talking about, but it is twenty times harder than anything you can imagine.
Hope lived in babygrows, as any other clothing would have been uncomfortable. She had so many tubes and lines stuck into her body that everything she wore had to be really loose and easy to get on and off. I will never forget filling a bottle-sized syringe full of formula milk and feeding it through a tube that went straight into her stomach.
