Patti's Story

Hi my name is *Patti. I am married to *James. We have 3 daughters aged 12, 11 and 9 years.

How my children ended up in care

When my youngest was born I had two toddlers aged 2 & 1. We were living in a small, isolated town where there wasn’t many services available. My husband was working away a lot helping his dad. I felt like a single mum.

My place was often a real mess, which I regret now. I had home help about once a week, but I needed more than that. I had depression throughout, and following, each pregnancy. A counsellor was very supportive but she was based in a town 20 minutes away, so I didn’t get to see her often.

When my new baby wasn’t putting on weight someone made a report to Child Protection, but I didn’t know about this. One day some people just turned up and said they were from Child Protection. About a month later they sent us to a residential parenting assessment facility. It was a long, long way from home down in the city. We stayed there for 10 days. At the end of the 10 days they told us my husband was physically incapable of looking after our children because of his weight. They said that I was physically and mentally incapable. This meant we would not be allowed to take our children home with us.

It felt like they were killing me with this decision. I insisted that the children must live with my husband’s father if they couldn’t live with us. They have remained in their grandfather’s care for 10 years now.

After they were taken into care I was assessed and diagnosed with an intellectual disability. I had never known I had an intellectual disability, but it helps explain why I found it so difficult to manage everything on my own.

How things are now

Now we see our children regularly at their grandfather’s. Our bond is really strong, we are very close and have great times together. We’ve learned a lot of new skills from parenting courses and our long involvement with the Parents and Children Together (PACT) Support Group. I don’t yell or scream anymore, I am much more mellow. I have really learned to manage my emotions and now I can help my children do that too.

After years of having only supervised contact with our children we successfully advocated to have unsupervised contact. More recently we have started having our girls stay with us overnight.

Recently I was invited by a support worker to attend some professional training on hoarding and squalor. I was invited because this worker recognised that I had overcome my own challenges in this area and will be an effective mentor for other parents in the same situation. When I received my certificate for the training I cried tears of joy and felt really proud. My husband and I have also recently completed a 5 week healthy eating and cooking course which we really enjoyed.

PACT Support Group

PACT is family and always will be. PACT has done more for us in the past 2 years than Child Protection have done in 10 years. I feel safe to talk, share and cry at group.

*For privacy reasons real names are not used

#parenting #family #childprotection