The short walk down Yvette Collier’s path to the front door of her modern terraced house is unremarkable, but for the new mothers who make it with their babies, accompanied by one, sometimes two, social workers, it’s a profound one. Yvette’s job is to put them through a crash course in parenting. Pass, and they will leave together to start a new life as an independent family unit. Fail and the child will be taken away – into care or put up for adoption.
“When a new mum and baby arrive to stay with me it might be with a few minutes’ notice, or it might be a day, but either way when they arrive it’s the same,” says Yvette. A paediatric nurse by training, she has a kind, calm, no-nonsense attitude. “They come with a social worker – often straight from the maternity unit – bewildered, with a small bag of belongings and at a profound crossroads in their life. They might have a history of drug abuse, have had previous children taken away, be in an abusive relationship or any number of other difficult things.”
Despite ushering dozens of mothers and newborns through her front door, Yvette still feels slight apprehension before each placement arrives. “I’m anticipating those often difficult first few minutes of meeting, settling them in. This is their chance to leave behind whatever has caused them to come here, and turn everything around, but they often haven’t had a clue they were going to come to me. Many are antagonistic, even if they try to hide it. They are anxious, antisocial, anti-everyone, in bits and arriving somewhere strange instead of taking their baby home.
“The youngest was 16 and the eldest 38, but most have no idea how to look after themselves, never mind a baby. My role is not to do it for them, but to help them to do it themselves. Some are positive – they really want to do it and you can see the determination in their eyes to get it right, to go forwards.
“With others, it’s the anger you can see, mainly. Around half the mums who come through my door will leave with their baby. I’ve learned that neither attitude is a sign this placement will go one way or the other.”
Either way, Yvette puts them in at the deep end even while she’s filling in the paperwork with the social worker before they leave. “Usually I have to try and cut through their daze and just get them going, start that routine the second they walk in the door.
“When most mums have a baby, she goes home and her own mum comes, or her partner takes over and does a lot so she can rest. But I can’t leave these mums alone with their children for even a second in the daytime for the first few weeks.
“They are here because that’s not a safe option because of risk from the mum herself, her partner or the home environment she has left. There might be a court order, strong urging from social services. Sometimes it’s actually voluntary as the mum has nowhere else to go, but all I care about right there and then is settling the baby in, so off we go together to the shops to get what’s needed for that first night.
“It’s the same the next morning, when my dogs need walking or I need to pop to the shops, anything at all – we all go. It’s fair to say that it’s hard work for both of us.”
Yvette has to monitor every moment of the new mother’s interaction with her baby and keep a detailed log, for social workers and for the evidence she is often required to give at court hearings about a mother’s progress. The mothers know this and it can make for a challenging dynamic.
“I always tell them what I’m writing so there’s no surprises for them at the formal assessment meetings with their social worker. I’m weighing up everything they do: are they changing them enough, picking up on cues to cuddle, feed or comfort their baby? Are they keeping their room tidy, how is their personal hygiene? Can they budget, are they planning where to live after this?
“It’s intense and they are sleep-deprived and so are you, but you’re trying to build a rapport.”
At night, mum and baby have a small bedroom next to Yvette’s and she hears every sound. “When the baby cries in the night for the first month or so I wake up instantly and I’m in there immediately. As the weeks go on and if it feels safe, I’ll stay in bed, waiting to see how quickly mum responds, what does she do when I don’t go in? But I can’t do anything for her. She’s going to be on her own with her child if she leaves with it – there’s no partner waiting to help and she’s got to learn to be independent and strong enough to do it all, alone.”
Once the tension of being watched has eased, the mothers often start to reveal their story and how they came to be at Yvette’s, filling in often harrowing details absent from the paperwork. “Needy, drug-addict parents who the mum has cared for all her life and who are now pressuring her to put them before her child; abusive, manipulative boyfriends saying it’s the baby or them; psychological disorders; a background of homelessness – I’ve dealt with it all. It’s not just mums from deprived social backgrounds that need help either. I’ve had daughters of wealthy high-fliers who have gone off the rails too.”
As time goes on, Yvette will venture out in public more often with her charges for coffee or a trip to a toddler group. “Often they have zero social skills. Maybe they have never been in a cafe or for a walk in the park. They have to learn from scratch how to be out and about with their child.”
If the placement goes well and it looks as if mother and baby will leave together for a new life, Yvette won’t always join them on these trips. “Seeing a mum’s relationship with her child blossom, watching her learn to love and care for it, and seeing that baby thrive in return, makes it all worthwhile,” she says.
A standard placement is 12 weeks but the period can be extended if it’s felt it will be effective. As we talk, a gorgeous blond, blue-eyed six-month-old baby plays at our feet. There’s no mother in sight, though. Picking him up, Yvette introduces Dylan. He beams at me and puts his arms out. My heart melts. He still has the toasty biscuit smell of a newborn and in his striped babygrow he is the picture of bouncing, beautiful, babyhood. I don’t want to put him back down.
But Dylan’s mother walked out on him in the middle of the night three weeks ago and left a note to say she wasn’t coming back. “Her boyfriend won,” says Yvette flatly. “So often the choice mums here struggle with is not whether or not they can learn to care for the baby – that’s relatively straightforward to teach – it’s whether they love their baby or their boyfriend more. It’s heartbreaking. Dylan will never see her again and he doesn’t even know it.”
Another mother was on the verge of “passing” and social services had arranged for her to move into a flat with her baby when she had a wobble. “We were helping her move in in stages. She was at the point of staying the night there alone with her child when she went awol. We were frantic with worry until we had a call from a cinema. She had left the baby outside in its buggy, asleep, to watch a film with her boyfriend, then simply abandoned it for good afterwards. She wanted nothing more to do with it, she couldn’t make the emotional break from her boyfriend, even though he was a nasty piece of work.”
While it’s hard for Yvette to cope with picking up the pieces of these sudden, fatal fractures in maternal love, it’s even harder when she has seen the moment coming and tried and failed to persuade the mother to do the right thing.
She tells me about one troubled woman with a long-term abusive partner who arrived with a toddler, newly pregnant with twins, having had two children taken into care previously.
“She was desperate to make it work, really wanted to understand what had gone wrong and make big changes. She stayed throughout her pregnancy and when her twin girls arrived she was fantastic, despite having three to juggle. But as time went on she started talking about her man again, saying she missed him. We talked into the night for weeks. She knew he was no good for her and what the consequences of going back to him would be but she went in the end. I stood there, holding her twin girls – as she walked down the path and out of their lives with a small wave – thinking, how can you do this?”
At times the boundary between the life a mother is trying to leave behind and Yvette’s life is breached. “I had one mum who was so angry and disturbed she simply wasn’t safe to be with her child, even with me here, and the child was taken into care. She threatened to come back and shoot me. I have a police marker on my house, as a precaution, but my nursing background gives me the pragmatic determination to carry on. My friends, and even my husband, wonder how I find the strength sometimes but I can make a real, life-long difference to these mums and break a cycle of bad parenting that stretches back generations. That hope keeps me going through the long, dark nights.”
Sasha’s story: How one young mother’s life changed
Sasha, 18, and her daughter Meghan, now two, arrived at Yvette’s home straight from the maternity ward
“My dad died in a work accident when I was 10, just before my younger twin sisters were born, and my mum turned to drink. I have two brothers who are quite a bit older than me and as Mum deteriorated it was them that worked hard to provide for us all, but she’d steal whatever money they didn’t give her.
“As I got older I’d go to the local park and just hang around there for hours to get away from the house. I met Carl there when I was 15, truanting. I knew he was no good, but he always seemed up for a laugh, lively, quite a character.
When I turned 17 we started dating, at first he was really nice to me, always sweet. But the second time I slept with him I got pregnant and that’s when he changed, started being violent. My mum was furious I was pregnant, but she was the last person I’d tell that Carl had turned nasty. I wanted the baby and I was sure he’d change when he saw his own child born.
“Social services were coming to our house regularly because of the situation there and they kept asking me who the dad was. I wouldn’t tell them. But in the end, one of my brothers told them and when Meghan was born the first visitors to the hospital were my mum, Carl – and social services.
“They waited till Mum and Carl had gone, then told me there was a place for me with a mum-and-baby foster carer and that it was best if we went straight there. They didn’t actually say that Meghan would be taken away, but it didn’t feel like an option to say no either.
“I don’t remember much about arriving at Yvette’s house. I remember her showing me the right way to take Meghan out of the car seat, carrying her into the house because I was too scared to hold her and helping me to change a nappy and express milk – I didn’t have a clue. Meghan was so tiny and I was terrified I’d hurt her. I honestly wondered why I’d had her, the responsibility seemed so overwhelming.
“The first month was a blur. We’d only ever eaten takeaways and ready meals at home but Yvette taught me how to shop and cook for myself, how to make a routine.
“Yvette’s house was warm, clean and tidy, no one screamed or got drunk. I had no idea real people lived like that. But Carl was still texting me all the time, saying he loved me and I should go back to him, and I was torn.
“Yvette kept listening to me, encouraging me to try a complete break from Carl to see how that felt, but never judging. She helped me to figure out and make sense of stuff, saying that I still had the chance to do something I wanted to with my life, to make a life for Meghan and me.
“Then the social workers in charge of my case told me that Carl had two previous convictions for sexually abusing young children, that he’d groomed me to get me pregnant so he’d have a child living with him. It was the last bit helping me see everything, and I felt sick.
“Now I live in my own flat and he has no idea where we are.
“Meghan is two now and last Christmas Day I had my brothers over. We all cooked a proper roast lunch for everyone, with crackers to pull, and presents wrapped under the tree. It might seem ordinary to most people, but to me it’s a life I never dreamed I’d live – and it’s Yvette who made it possible.”
• Names have been changed
If you think you could give a child or young person the security of family life, contact Compass Fostering on 0800 566 8317 or visit compassfostering.com. You will receive full training and a team of professionals will support you. You will also receive an allowance of £20,000 to £40,000 a year, depending on circumstances
