From the moment I was born, there were Mr and Mrs Blank. That is genuinely what I have to call them because their names are redacted in my files. They were my first foster carers when I was a baby, through a private arrangement. From what little I have been able to piece together, they seemed to care deeply about me.
I often wonder whether they are still alive. Whether they ever wondered what happened to the baby they once cared for. Whether somewhere in their house there might still be a photograph of me that I have never seen.
Then I remember Angie. I think she was a lollipop lady. One of the very few photographs I own from my entire childhood in care was taken while I was living with her. Then there were Maureen and George, just after my sister was born and Mum experienced postnatal depression again. Then Pat, who I think was a family friend before becoming our foster carer for a while.
We moved to Leeds, and for a moment, everything appeared normal.
Then everything went Pete Tong again.
Addiction did not just follow Mum metaphorically. Two people from Liverpool literally followed Mum and Dad to Leeds, found them, and after nine months of being clean, they were hooked again. And so, the cycle began again.
I remember some of the social workers. One may have been called Karen, who used to take me out. I remember somebody’s boss being called Pat. Then there was Carmel. I was not her biggest fan at the time, to put it politely, but I often wonder what would come out of a conversation with her now that I am an adult.
What did she know? What did she see? What decisions were being made about my life while I was busy just trying to survive being a child?
Then there were Jean and John. There was also a woman I stayed with for respite who lived on Easterly Road. I cannot remember her name, no matter how hard I try. And last, but never least, there was Miggy. The one who remains in my life and in my heart.
Those are only the people I can remember. I know there were others. Maybe another four or five whose names have disappeared somewhere between trauma, time and a childhood that moved faster than my brain could safely process. How mad is it to say that I lived inside all those different families? I slept under their roofs. I ate at their tables. They washed my clothes, comforted me, told me what time to go to bed and probably told me off when I was being a pain in the backside. For a period of time, I belonged inside their everyday lives.
Yet, apart from Miggy, I have no contact with any of them now. Hardly any photographs. Only fragments of memories. No collection of adults who can sit around a table and tell me who I was before I learned how to tell my own story. At one point, each of these people held some form of responsibility for me. Some may have genuinely loved me. Yet when each placement or arrangement ended, the relationship ended too.
That is one of the strangest things about growing up in care. Adults can become incredibly important to you very quickly. They can bathe you, feed you, soothe you and learn your routines. Then one decision is made, one placement ends, one car pulls away, and you may never see them again.
The system creates relationships intense enough to feel like family, but often treats them as temporary enough to be erased by the next piece of paperwork.
And now, decades later, the Government has introduced a Lifelong Guardianship Ceremony. The idea is to allow a care experienced adult and a significant person, family or community to publicly recognise an enduring relationship. It can be faith based, secular or community led. However, it is entirely symbolic. It creates no legal guardianship, rights, duties or formal obligations.
I understand the thinking behind it. Of course I do. Care experienced people deserve belonging. We deserve relationships that are publicly valued and celebrated. We deserve to hear somebody say, “I choose to remain in your life, and you will not have to walk through it alone.” For some people, that ceremony could be deeply beautiful and meaningful.
But I cannot help wondering whether we are attempting to create a ceremony for something the care system should have been protecting all along. Before we create new promises, should we not ask why so many old relationships were allowed to disappear? Why was nobody helping former carers stay connected to us? Why were photographs, memories and information not preserved? Why did the end of a placement so often have to mean the end of the relationship? Why was nobody recording who mattered to us, not just who was being paid or professionally allocated to us? Why am I now an adult trying to retrieve my childhood through half remembered first names, blank spaces and redacted documents? And what about the care experienced adults who do not currently have somebody to stand beside them at one of these ceremonies? Does the ceremony create belonging, or could it make the absence of belonging even louder?
To its credit, the published framework acknowledges this risk. It says the initiative should not reinforce exclusion, comparison or disappointment for people who do not have enduring adults in their lives. It also says the framework emerged through collaboration involving care experienced people, but remains a foundation for further co design, development and testing. What it does not explain in the published document is how many care experienced people were involved, how they were selected, what ages they were or how conflicting views shaped the proposal.
That matters. Because the majority of care experienced adults I speak to do not yet seem to understand what this ceremony is, why it has been created or what it is realistically supposed to change.
Were we meaningfully consulted? Were older care experienced adults included? Were people consulted whose placements repeatedly ended with complete relationship loss? Were people with no current support network asked how it might feel to watch others publicly celebrate the very thing they have spent their lives without? And were faith organisations asked only how to conduct the ceremony, or what practical responsibility they would carry after everyone had gone home, the photographs had been posted and the symbolic candle had been blown out?
Because “lifelong” is a very big word. It cannot simply mean a ceremony, a certificate and a nice cup of tea afterwards. Lifelong means remembering the birthday. Answering the phone during a crisis. Keeping the photographs. Showing up at graduations, weddings, births, funerals and all the completely ordinary Tuesdays in between. It means remaining when there is no professional role, payment, case number or statutory obligation keeping you there.
I am not against the ceremony. I am against symbolism being mistaken for substance. A ceremony could be incredibly meaningful when it honours a relationship that has already survived time, distance and the end of professional involvement. But no ceremony can make a relationship lifelong if nobody is prepared to keep turning up.
Before we celebrate enduring relationships, we must be brave enough to ask why the care system allowed so many of ours to disappear in the first place.
Terri Anne Hamer – CLA Project Worker