I had barely finished holding my son's newborn baby when a nurse pulled me aside and whispered, "That isn't the child he left with."
I had barely finished holding my son's newborn baby when a nurse pulled me aside and whispered, "That isn't the child he left with."
My grandson's birth was supposed to be one of the best days of my life.
Ellis and Paloma moved four hundred miles away in 2021.
So when they rang to say they were expecting, I could not sit down for about an hour.
And all the way through that pregnancy I offered to come.
January. March. May. July.
And every time, my son turned me down, very gently.
"Mum, wait till he's here. We'll have proper time then."
And looking back I wish I had trusted the feeling in my chest instead of the reasonableness in his voice.
He rang me at twenty past six on the morning of the ninth of September.
"Mum. He's here."
And I was crying before we hung up and I was in the car within forty minutes.
When I got into that room Ellis was standing by the bed with his eyes going, and Paloma looked destroyed and better than I have ever seen her.
And he put my grandson in my arms.
And he was beautiful.
Tiny fingers hooked into the blanket. A lot of dark hair. A face doing absolutely nothing at all.
And I said: "Hello, sweetheart. Grandma got here."
And I cried so much that everybody in that room started laughing at me.
And a bit later Ellis put his arm round my shoulders and said: "Thanks for driving all that way, Mum. I know you've been waiting."
And I kissed his cheek and said I had never been happier, and I meant it entirely.
And then I went out into the corridor to give them ten minutes.
And there was a nurse at the station, and I thought I would say thank you, because somebody should.
And she smiled properly when I said his name.
"Oh — Ellis? Yes. I remember him."
And I said thank you for everything you've done today.
And her face changed.
She looked down the corridor at his door and then back at me and she dropped her voice to almost nothing.
"That isn't the baby your son left with."
And I genuinely thought I had misheard her.
I did a little laugh. "Sorry — what did you say?"
And she went white.
She looked at me the way you look at somebody when you have just said a thing out loud that was never yours to say.
And then, very quietly: "You… don't know?"
And somebody called her name from the other end of that corridor, and she said sorry, and she went.
And I stood in a hospital corridor holding a paper cup of tea.
And I told myself she had him confused with another patient. It was a busy ward. They were short. That was all it was.
And I went back in and held my grandson again for another hour, and I drove four hundred miles home, and I did not say a word about it to anybody, and I did not sleep for nine days.
I did not ask Ellis.
I want to explain that, because it is the thing everybody asks me.
I could have gone back into that room and said it. He was ten feet away.
And I did not, because in that corridor, in about four seconds, I understood two things.
One, that the nurse had not made a mistake.
And two, that whatever it was, my son had decided not to tell me, and he had been deciding it for some time, and walking into that room and demanding it out of him in front of his wife the day she gave birth was going to cost me something I could not get back.
And I want to put down what those nine days were, because "I waited" makes it sound calm and it was not.
I did not sleep past four in the morning on any of them.
And what I did instead of sleeping was build versions.
By the Wednesday I had decided the baby had been swapped. Genuinely. I am a sixty-two-year-old woman who has never believed a conspiracy in her life and by the Wednesday I had a full theory about wristbands.
By the Friday I had decided Paloma had lost a baby before and they had kept it from me, which is the one I still feel worst about, because I spent two days grieving a grandchild who had never existed and being angry at my son for it.
By the Sunday I had got to something with another woman in it.
And on the Monday I sat in my own kitchen and made myself write the three versions down on the back of an envelope, and looked at them, and understood that not one of them had come from the nurse.
Every single one of them had come out of me.
She had given me nine words and I had built three catastrophes on top of them in six days, and none of them were anywhere near what had actually happened.
Which I would like to say taught me something permanent. It did not. It took about four hours off my next panic and that is all.
So I waited nine days, and then I rang Paloma.
Not Ellis. Paloma.
Because I have known that girl for eleven years and she cannot do it. She has never once been able to sit on a thing when she is asked straight.
And I said: "Love. Who was the baby Ellis carried out of that hospital?"
And she did not say anything for about seven seconds.
And then she said: "Right. Okay. Can I ring you back in an hour."
And she did, from her car, in a supermarket car park, and she told me the whole of it and it took fifty minutes.
Ellis and Paloma have been foster carers since 2021.
Five years.
I did not know.
In the November of 2023 they took an emergency placement. A boy, four days old, straight off the maternity ward at St Wenna's.
And my son carried that baby out of that building himself, in a car seat, at nine o'clock on a Tuesday night.
And the nurse who put him in the car seat was the same woman who stopped me in that corridor.
He was with them for ten months.
And in the September of 2024 he went back to his mother, which is what is supposed to happen, and which is a success, and which is the entire point of the thing they were doing.
And it nearly finished the pair of them.
And then in the March of 2025, with Paloma four months pregnant, they took a little girl of two.
She was with them until the July.
Which is why I could not come in the January, or the March, or the May, or the July.
There was a child in that house for the whole of that pregnancy.
And there is something about the November of 2023 that Paloma told me in that car park which I have not been able to put down since.
They got the call at half four in the afternoon.
A newborn, four days old, on the ward, needing to go that night. They had eleven hours' notice and no clothes and no cot and no bottles, because you do not keep a newborn kit standing by for two years on the off-chance.
And Paloma went to the twenty-four-hour place at nine o'clock at night and bought everything.
And she told me that while she was standing in that aisle with a trolley, she rang her own mother.
Her mother lives in Dorrance and she is seventy and she came on the train the next morning and stayed nine days.
And I was four hundred miles away at a quiz night.
That is the sentence that goes through me. Not the five years. Not the corridor.
That there was a night when my son and his wife needed a mother in a supermarket at nine o'clock, and there was one available, and it was not me, and it was never going to be me, because of something I said at a table in 2019 that I cannot remember saying.
And the reason they never told me.
This is the part I have had to carry and it is not the nice part.
Christmas of 2019.
My sister's girl Wendy had been fostering for about two years by then and she was at that table, and she was talking about it, and it had been a hard year for her.
And I said something.
I have no memory of saying it. None. I have gone looking for it in my own head for about a year now and there is nothing there.
And Ellis can quote it.
He gave it to me word for word in the January, in his kitchen, with his back to me, making tea.
***"I couldn't do it. Get attached to somebody else's and then hand it back. You'd have to be a bit cold, wouldn't you."***
***A bit cold.***
My son was twenty-eight years old and he was sitting four chairs down.
And eighteen months later he and his wife went and got themselves approved, and they did five years of it, and two children came through that house, and I found out from a stranger in a corridor.
What Paloma said about it, in that car park, which I am going to put down exactly because I have thought about it every day since:
"He didn't decide not to tell you. He kept deciding to tell you later. Every single time. There's a difference and I know it doesn't help."
And then: "Colleen, he was going to tell you at the hospital. That's why he wanted you to come after. He had it worked out. He was going to do it with the baby in your arms because he thought you'd be soft."
Nine days before I rang her, my son stood in a room with his arm round my shoulders, planning to tell me that afternoon.
And a nurse got to me first by about twenty minutes.
And the three hours with Ellis in the January, which I have summarised in one line above and which deserves better.
I drove down on the Friday and we did it on the Saturday morning while Paloma took the baby out, which they had arranged between them.
And he did not apologise for the first ninety minutes.
He explained. Which is different, and which I did not understand until about the third hour.
He told me about the approval process and the training and what the first night was like and what the ninth of September of 2024 was like, and I sat there and let him, because I worked out somewhere around the forty-minute mark that he had been waiting five years to describe it to me and had never been able to.
And at about the two-hour mark I said: "Ellis. Why didn't you just tell me I was wrong?"
And he said: "Because you weren't wrong. You were describing yourself and you didn't know it. And I wasn't going to be the one to point that out to my own mother."
And then he did apologise, once, properly, and then he said the other thing.
"And I liked having it. That's the bit I'm not proud of. For about the first two years I liked that you didn't know."
And the nurse.
Her name is Kenna Voll and she is forty-four and she had been on that ward for eleven years.
And she should not have said it. I want that in plainly, because I have had four people tell me she is a hero and she is not, she made an error.
She saw a man she had handed a baby to in 2023 and she saw a grandmother she had never met, and she put those two things together and got a completely wrong answer, and she said something she had no business saying to anybody.
There was a complaint. Not from me.
I do not know who made it and I have decided I do not want to. Somebody on that ward heard some of it and did the correct thing, and Kenna Voll was in a formal meeting about it in the October.
I wrote to that hospital.
Two pages, saying that I did not wish to complain, that no harm had come to me, that I considered the matter closed as far as I was concerned.
It made no difference at all and I am told it was never going to, and she got a written warning, and it is on her record for twelve months.
I have met her twice.
The first time was in the November, in a café near that hospital, and it was extremely awkward for about twenty minutes and then it was not.
And she told me she has thought about that corridor every day since, and that she still does not know why she said it, except that she had assumed — and this is exactly how she put it —
"I thought you'd been there in 2023. I thought you were the grandmother who'd been there. I've had four years of families where everybody knows everything and I forgot that isn't how it is."
And Wendy, who started all of it by being at a table in 2019 and who I had not spoken to properly since about 2021.
I rang her in the February.
And I said I owed her an apology and I did not entirely know what for, and she laughed and said "oh God, Christmas," and that was that, in about four seconds, because she had already forgiven it years ago and had never thought about it again.
She is fifty-one. She has been doing it for nine years. She has had, by her count, thirty-one children through that house.
And when I asked her what she had thought at that table, she said: "I thought, there's another one."
Another one.
She said she gets it about twice a month, from strangers and from family, and that it is always some version of I couldn't do it, and that the person saying it always thinks they are paying you a compliment.
"They think they're saying you're stronger than them," she said. "They're not. They're saying there's something wrong with you that lets you do it."
And I said I had not meant that.
And she said: "I know. Nobody does."
And the second time I met Kenna Voll, which was in the March and which I have not described.
She had had her meeting by then. The warning was on her record and she had four months of it left to run.
And I said the thing I had been rehearsing for a month, which was that I was sorry, and that if I had not thanked her in that corridor she would never have said it.
And she stopped me about six words in.
She said: "Don't. Please. I've had that from my husband for five months and I can't have it off you as well."
And then she told me the part I had not worked out.
She had not been on the ward the night my grandson was born. She had swapped on. She was covering somebody's shift and she was eleven hours into thirteen.
"If I'd been on my own unit," she said, "I'd never have seen him. I'd never have recognised him. You'd have gone home and had a lovely day."
And I said that I was glad she was there.
And she said: "I know you are. That's the bit I can't get round."
Because it is true for me and it is not true for her, and both of those are permanent, and there is no arrangement of that Tuesday in which everybody comes out of it all right.
Where things are.
My grandson is fourteen months old. He is called Wilder and he is enormous and he has his mother's hands.
I see him about every six weeks and I have him for a weekend in the spring.
Ellis and I had one conversation about it in the January and it lasted about three hours and we have not really had another one.
We are all right. We are not what we were and I do not think we are going to be, and the thing that is different is that I am now a person he has to think about before he says things to, and I did that, and he did not.
Paloma and I are closer than we have ever been, which is a strange outcome and which I am not going to question.
The little boy went back to his mother in the September of 2024 and it has held. That is two years now.
She sends a photograph at Christmas. Two so far. Ellis showed me them in the January, on his phone, without saying anything, and then put it back in his pocket.
The little girl went to her aunt in the July of 2025 and it is permanent.
I have never met either of those children and I am never going to, and that is correct, and I have had to get that into my chest and leave it there.
They were in my son's house for fourteen months between them and I did not know they existed.
And the photographs, which I have mentioned in one line and which I have looked at about two hundred times since.
There are two. Both taken at Christmas, a year apart, by a woman I have never met and never will.
In the first one he is about fifteen months old and he is in a paper hat that is far too big and he is furious about it.
In the second one he is two and a bit, on a sofa, with a toy he is holding by the wrong end.
And they are ordinary. That is the thing about them. They are exactly the sort of photograph that goes round a family at Christmas and gets three replies and a heart.
And a woman who got her son back after ten months sends two of them every year to the people who had him, and nobody in this story has ever told me whether that is common or whether it is rare, and I have not asked, because I do not want to be told it is rare.
And Ellis keeps them on his phone and not on a wall, and when I asked him why, he said: "Because he's not ours. He was never ours. That's the whole job."
And then he said the other half of it, which took him a minute.
"And because I'd look at it every day."
And what I did about it, which took me until the February to even think of.
I am sixty-two.
I am too old to start fostering and I said so to the first person I rang, and she said "not necessarily," and I said "I am," and I was right.
But there is another thing.
It is called supported care, or short breaks, depending who you ask. You take a foster child for a weekend, or a week, so that the carers can put their heads down and stop for a minute.
You do the training. It is eight sessions. There is a check and there are references and there is a person who comes to your house and looks at your stairs.
And I did it, at sixty-two, over four months, in a room with nine other people, most of whom were younger than my son.
I have done four so far.
Two weekends with the same boy, who is nine. One week in the August with a brother and sister. And one that was arranged for a Friday and cancelled on the Thursday, which I am told is extremely normal and which I took much harder than I expected to.
And I have not told Ellis.
Which is either the funniest or the worst thing in this entire document, and I have not decided which, and my sister says it is both.
I am going to tell him at Christmas. I have been going to tell him at Christmas since about the June.
And the eight sessions of training, which I went into expecting to be the oldest person there and was, and which were not what I thought.
I thought it would be about children.
About half of it is about paperwork and about a third of it is about what to do when a placement ends, and there is one session, the sixth, that is entirely about your own family.
About what your grown children will say. About what your mother will say. About the friend who will ask whether you are doing it for the money.
And the woman running it — she is about forty and she has done it for eleven years — asked us to write down, on a card, the worst thing anybody had ever said to us about fostering.
And I sat there at sixty-two years of age, three sessions in, with a biro, and I could not write anybody else's.
I wrote my own down.
And when she asked whether anybody wanted to read theirs out, I did, and I said it was mine, and that I had said it at a Christmas table in 2019 about my own niece.
And nobody said anything for a second and then a man of about thirty-five two seats down said: "My dad said nearly that. Word for word."
And then somebody else said theirs, and it went round about six of us, and four of them were from a parent.
Four out of nine people in that room had been told some version of it by the person who raised them.
And the last thing.
That sentence.
"You'd have to be a bit cold, wouldn't you."
I said it in about 2019 to a room and I do not remember it, and my son has carried it for six years, and it kept me out of his house and away from two children and made me the last person in that family to know anything.
And here is what I have found out since, which I would have found out in 2019 if I had asked Wendy one question instead of saying a thing.
You do not have to be cold.
It is not coldness. There is no cold in it anywhere.
On the Sunday of my second weekend, that boy of nine left at about four in the afternoon, and I stood on my own front step and waved at a car, and then I came in and stripped the bed and put the sheets on and hoovered the crumbs out of the back seat.
And that is the whole of it. That is the thing.
You have to be able to do the hardest thing there is on a Sunday afternoon, and then get the hoover out, and then do it again in a fortnight.
I called it cold.
What I meant, and what I did not have the honesty to say at that table in front of my niece, was that I did not think I could do it.
May you like
And my son heard a woman say that other people are cold, when what she was actually saying was that she was frightened.
And he was twenty-eight and he believed her, because she was his mother, and he went and did it anyway and did not tell her for five years.
