Homes of Hope
Good afternoon. Thank you, Hilary, for asking me to share a little bit about my story with 50-plus people and 10 minutes to fill. Not at all daunting.
So, as Hilary has said already, my name is Melanie Sio, and I have six kids.
There’s a statement that often causes eyebrows to lift.
Six kids.
I often feel like I am speaking up at an anonymous alcoholics meeting or something; only the crowd aren’t in the same position as me and aren’t part of the support group to help me recover from my problem.
I meet judgement and assumptions about my lack of birth control or how feral my kids must be because, let's face it, who can manage six children? Or maybe I am just plain crazy. Probably some truth to all of those assumptions.
I am here today to tell all of you that this is the life I chose, and while it is challenging and constantly changing, it is a life based on love and commitment.
How did I get here with a van load of kids? All noise and action.
Like many good NZ stories, it started with rugby. April 2017 was the beginning of the rugby season.
My son was excited to play his first year with Greerton Marist rugby club in the U6 Black team and my husband Chris, even more, excited to be the team coach.
I was the manager of this rugby team, too, so rugby was a real family affair for us.
At this point, Chris and I had three children together, two girls and the youngest being our rugby playing son. I was also expecting the birth of our fourth child, another boy, who came in May 2017.
With three kids, I was always one of those mums that struggled to manage 3, especially my son who like many boys is quite full-on, loud, physically active and often cheeky and rebellious.
The birth of our second son, making four kids in total, seemed to calm me.
Four kids seemed more manageable than three. No clue why.
Once you’ve got four, what’s two more hey.
Our rugby-mad son hit it off with one of the other boys in the team. They quickly became great mates. Not unlike double trouble.
This great mate was living at Homes of Hope.
Towards the end of the rugby season, we asked the Homes of Hope caregiver if we could have Aiden’s mate over for a play date.
In hindsight, of course, it isn’t that easy. You can’t just have kids over for playdates when they are living within the care system.
At the time, I thought this was a little sad. While sleepovers are something I avoid, they are a regular thing for kids to do. Stay with mates, have mates to stay.
So I made contact with Homes of Hope and arranged a meeting with their social worker. We talked through how to get this boy over for a play date.
After the initial meeting and learning his story, we found out he had already been in care for a couple of years. He had no suitable family to go to or recent contact with his birth family.
He had no visitors at all except social workers.
We were already aware and had identified some pretty challenging behaviours through our interactions at rugby.
This boy had a brother that is a year older than him, also living at homes of hope. As Hilary has mentioned already, Homes of Hope specialise in keeping siblings together.
It pulls on your heartstrings.
Here were two boys in the care system that we felt we could do something to help.
We wanted to help.
My husband spent his childhood in and out of foster care, so this wasn’t a foreign concept for us.
Over the next year, the police vetted us, and we underwent medicals, training courses, a house inspection, reference checks and interviews.
Finally, we became the home for life, permanent caregivers / additional parents to two boys in June 2018.
We started with having a boy over for playdates, which led to visiting him at The Home every weekend until we got permission to take him out. Then we moved from day trips to sleepovers in the weekends.
Spend every weekend for six months with a boy, and before you know it, you are in love with them warts and all, or at least we were, and we still are.
We started to include the elder brother in every second visit. Building relationships and trust and showing commitment to both boys. Consistency is vital to all kids but more critical to kids living in care.
This love Chris and I developed for these boys would turn out to be necessary and crucial to keep us focused and our determination strong to overcome some pretty stressful obstacles, in meeting all the requirements to become their forever home.
During this stressful and intrusive process of becoming home for life caregivers, we worked very closely with the team at Homes of Hope.
Because of the relationship Chris had built within the rugby team, Chris was often working closely with the live-in caregivers at Homes of Hope and school staff to help manage challenging behaviour. This boy listened to Chris. On reflection, I think they are like each other, having similarities in traumatic childhood experiences and how they manage their emotions.
Homes of Hope provided our boys with a clean house to live in, routine and regular meals, clean clothes, role models, healthy relationships and ways to communicate with others. They were safe, both physically and emotionally safe from harm.
Things that most people take for granted. I will be forever grateful to Homes of Hope for the care my boys received before moving in with us.
It also prepared my boys for some of those things that ordinary families do, making the transition to our home more comfortable.
While we were parents to four kids already, so not without experience, nothing prepares you for living full time with kids from care. For several months after the boys moved in permanently, Homes of Hope supported us.
Even though we were officially working under Oranga Tamariki, Homes of Hope supported us through gifts of food, clothes and play therapy for the boys. Still, probably the most valuable was a listening ear.
My boys do some quirky things sometimes, and I find myself asking why they did that and what was the motivation behind the behaviour?
The team at Homes of Hope got it and were able to listen and provide suggestions, understanding and sharing similar experiences and all this without judgement.
Sometimes when I am with workmates or in social groups, I might talk about something one of the boys did that was frustrating or weird or damaging, and I often get the response, my kids do that too, or that’s normal, every kid does that. Nope, they don’t. Trust me.
My birth children have been amazing through this journey so far. My son has his best mate living with him. They are still double trouble together. Our kids have to share their parents, house and belongings which have often been broken or damaged without remorse. Not without its challenges but the Sio kids have been amazing.
So now Chris and I have a 2-year-old, two 7-year-olds, two 9-year-olds and an 11-year-old. We are a family of 8. There it is.
Six kids.
We fondly refer to them as ‘the horde’.
This is the life we have chosen.
It isn’t a comfortable life. It is really, really hard.
As we navigate visits with the birth family, challenging behaviours from our birth kids now as an effect of the boys joining us as well as our additional boys and their challenging behaviours they are still learning and working hard to overcome.
But it is a life based on love and commitment.
Thank you for listening to my story.
My name is Melanie Sio, and I have six kids.
