Blog: When a grandparent becomes a parent

This is a blog by a grandparent carer from Birmingham.

Christmas is full on and now Our Boy is at Big School, we have the Nativity. Sixty sheep. Yes, a flock of sixty sheep. Every child in Reception in rugs, though Our Boy tries to convince us that he is the sheep dog.

Our Boy has been with us for three and a half years, since he was eighteen months old. His mum is an alcoholic. It has been very difficult to try and supervise some sort of access. He hasn’t seen his birth mother now for six months.

New note in reading book bag -

‘Can you bring in enough cucumber sticks for sixty for the Christmas party on Thursday?’

We are luckier than many other grandparent kinship carers. There are two of us, we have enough from our pensions to cope financially and we have support from the family.

But, we are expecting our eleventh grandchild this January. We have to be Nanny and Poppa to them, from the babies to the 16-year-old who looks 27 and plays rugby.

Grandparents to all of them, but with extra levels of responsibility and a regular routine for the one we are raising. We have to forge a parental relationship with Our Boy.

It has been a challenge and not one we were expecting in our sixties.

All is good (most of the time), but the one thing we can’t offer Our Boy is a mummy for Christmas.

30,000 children in the West Midlands are being raised by grandparents or close family, rather than birth parents and we are invisible. All the children have been traumatised and many have special needs, for instance fetal alcohol syndrome.

My husband is the lead of a group of kinship carers in Birmingham. So we are a busy household.

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