I feel sick

If you’ve met me you’ll know I’m not the most reliable person in the world, in fact if you’ve been reading this for any time, you will have reached the same conclusion.

I’m not. I’m a bit of a gad fly. I have friends when I want them and ignore them when I don’t, apart form the dogs I come and go pretty much as I please. I’m not well off by any means, but there’s sufficient income to allow me to indulge myself in whim and folly to keep me happy and all in all it’s a comfortable, happily selfish lifestyle.

Except that there’s one thing I miss, a part of me that isn’t fulfilled, at all. I miss children. I’m broody.

I always thought that I would have children, actually I thought I’d have lots of them.

This isn’t an option for me as I understand the process. It is apparent that you need a significant other to make children, which quite clearly doesn’t appear to be on the cards. And I’m not so self absorbed as to wish to adopt, although it is an alternative, because I’d prefer to think that for every child in need of adoption there must be better prepared parents than the single parent alternative that I could offer.

So the route that I took was that of fostering. Short term fostering for children that come from a single parent family say, who’s parent needs a break, or is perhaps hospitalized or simply transient short term care for children with difficulties or special needs. It gives me the opportunity to be with a child, to share a big, unused bubble of love with somebody who may need a feeling of security.

I’ve worked on this for some two years now. I’ve worked with my coach and mentor, been to the meetings, had all of the gory details the what ifs and why you should nots explained to me without any lingering doubt. But as yet I’ve never been offered the opportunity, even though I know (though I was disbelieving at first) they need people exactly like me.

And so I called my mentor, as I do regularly to simply chat, but this time with a question, “why?”.

And she shouldn’t under any circumstances tell me but she did. Somebody has said something. Someone has said that I’m not reliable, that I keep late hours and I come and go irregularly, that I drink, that I have people round to my house and we are rowdy, and that , most awfully, perhaps I like children but for the wrong reason.

She can not ignore this information, it’s said, it can’t be unsaid and is now a matter of record.

Only my ‘friends’ know about my wanting to foster, and you of course.

Who would do that, and why?