Families

• Olivia Harris, Grade 5
• Short Story
• 2016

Families, such weird things families. If you look families up in the dictionary it will say “a group of people related by blood”. In the world there are lots of families; healthy ones, fat ones, thin ones, singing ones, but in the end it says they are related by blood but I object to that because that definition is wrong. Lots of families aren’t related by blood. There is adoption, donor eggs and most importantly foster care. If you do not know what foster care is it is when the child’s parents are not capable of looking after their child, for different reasons, so the child is taken away from them and is put up for the first in best dressed who want to look after the child. Now I have reached my point about families. I hope you will enjoy my story on families and foster care and why I think family is the people you love.
In my family there is my Mum, Dad, me and Bonnie. But as you probably don’t know Bonnie isn’t my blood sister but my foster sister. I think she still counts as family though, she is just as annoying as a normal sister I’m told (I guess all sisters are annoying).
My Mum had me when she was 40 and after me she had 3 miscarriages. I didn’t realise but I still wanted a sibling. When we were buying and selling lots of things on eBay I said you can buy and sell anything on eBay so why can’t you buy me a sibling? After that we looked at adoption, but it’s very hard in Australia. So then they had a look at foster care and found out there are 50,000 children in Australia who are in foster care. So we went to lots of meetings and lessons and had lots of interviews. Finally 6 months later we were ready to have our first child. 10 minutes after my parents became legal foster parents we were called up and they said we have a child we want you to take. The day Bonnie came it was sort of a surprise. I imagined her with brown curly hair and blue eye but she ended up having blond hair and brown eyes. I remember when she came she had cut her own hair and seemed very proud of it and so we took her to the hairdressers and she got a certificate saying “my first hair cut”. Even after a year and a half that we’ve had her she still loses her school hat and lunch all the time even though she’s 6 and often eats with her hands but she has improved a great deal. She doesn’t suck up to people as much anymore but she still has a long way to go.
I’ll finish by saying that I still agree that families are not just your Aunts and Uncles and Mum and Dad but are also the people you love.