Six Sessions, Some Charcoal, and the Collection I Never Planned to Write

I didn’t go to the session planning to write poetry. I went because one of my kiddos was there at the project, and an adult had to be in the building. So I went. To sit in a room for an hour.

There were twelve, maybe fifteen of us around a table. Cuppas. A pile of quilting materials heaped in the middle – fabric, thread, sewing kits, colours and textures stacked high. Foster carers, adopters, kinship carers, special guardians, connected persons carers. All of us there because we’d chosen, in one way or another, to stand in the gap for a child who needed someone to.

It was one of those rare rooms where you don’t have to explain yourself. Everyone around that table already knew. They knew what the night-watches feel like. They knew the particular exhaustion of absorbing someone else’s storm. They knew the joy of it too, the fierce unexpected joy, because that’s the other thing nobody tells you. You don’t have to translate any of it. You just drink your coffee and talk and feel, briefly, like a normal human being having a normal conversation with people who get it.

Everyone was getting on with their quilt squares. I can sew. It’s fine. It gets done when it needs doing. But it’s dutiful rather than instinctive. It feels like a task, and I wasn’t there to do tasks.

Off to one side was an A2 sketchbook. Left there for anyone who wanted it. Photos, quotes, a few small drawings already on the pages. And near it, a pile of pens.

It called to me.

There was an art therapy room down the corridor and I knew it would have what I needed. Charcoal. Pastels. The messy stuff. The kind that leaves dust on your fingers and smudges where you don’t want them and forces you to work to shape it into something. Not a precise, tidy, chocolate-box little picture. Something real.

Fifteen minutes into the session I was back at the table with the sketchbook open, charcoal in one hand, chalk and pastels next to me.

And what came out first was a rabbit. Just a rabbit. Peering out of a deep tunnel. Curious. Like something from Watership Down. I don’t entirely know why. But I drew it, and then I wrote around it, and what came out was honest in a way I hadn’t planned for.

Not the version of this life that gets put on recruitment posters or read out at award ceremonies. The version that lives in the bones of everyone in that room. The waiting. The graft. The slow, patient, sometimes thankless work of standing between a vulnerable child and everything that came before you. The storms you plant your feet against so they don’t reach the ones who are already damaged enough. And in amongst all of it, the moments that crack you open in the best possible way. The belly laugh that comes out of nowhere. The first time they sleep without the light on. The Tuesday afternoon that is just ordinary, just easy, just theirs.

Tough to read. I know that. I wrote them anyway, because the tough version is the true version, and the people who live this life deserve something that tells the truth about it.

They are my kids. That is how I introduce them, that is how I think of them, and that is how it feels on any given Tuesday when the house is loud and chaotic and full. Foster caring does not come with the language to describe what it actually is, so I use the language that fits: they are mine, for as long as they need me to be theirs.

I am proud of them. Ferociously, quietly, permanently proud. Of who they are managing to become in spite of everything life handed them before they got to us.

The poems became a collection. Six of them, with the charcoal drawings alongside. It is called The Underground Sun: In the Wreckage, We Stand Watch. It is for every foster carer, adopter, kinship carer, special guardian, connected persons carer, and anyone else who has ever stood at the threshold and chosen, again, to step forward. Not because they are unbroken. Not because it is easy. Because someone has to.

If that is you, it was written for you.

With thanks to Equipt Therapy Services CIO for the room, the cuppas, and the art therapy supplies I raided.