Does anyone else wonder about babies they’ve met?

[LadyOdd]

When I had DD I ended up being induced by drip 11 months ago and was in hospital for 6 days no real complications just a very busy time.

The woman across from me had her baby taken into care this was arranged when she was 6 months pregnant (I heard all about it from the gossiping ladies, I didn’t have much to say about it) on the first day her family brought her lots of flowers her DP? I assume got very drunk and had to extorted out, the mother didn’t spend a night there as she wanted her own bed.

I often saw him at night when I was feeding DD and during the day as the nursery nurses mostly looked after him, on the day they did his exit check over her sister was there alone with him she had bought him a suit, she was weeping and saying to the doctor how she wished she could care for him 😢 the baby cried so much when the doctor checked him over.

He was taken into care shortly after, I wept so much for this poor boy that day and if I could have I would have taken him myself (ridiculous hormonal me! I struggle with one) but I find myself occasionally looking at my beautiful DD and thinking about that little boy hoping he is in a loving home.

Sorry about the long winded message currently got the flu and feeling a bit emotional. Does anyone else think about babies they’ve met?

These stories have had me in tears.

Not as extreme but when DD was in NICU the families of the two babies near her weren't local and had to leave to travel home in the early evening, I felt so sorry for the parents having to go home without their babies.

When I was on the ward after having my DS, six years ago, the woman next to me had just had her eighth baby. She didn't speak much English and from hearing the midwives talking it seemed they had concerns about her home life and possibly whether she was going to be able to cope and didn't want to discharge her until they had looked into it properly. Her DH brought the other children in one day and they were all a bit bedraggled and the midwife was asking him why he had kept them off school. I hoped everything was ok and that it was really just concern over the family size and her managing it all.

@fleshmarketclose how could they have told her she was having a girl? Back then ultrasounds barely even showed if you were having twins!

No idea although my son is 31 and I was told he was a boy and my niece is 33 so not incredible that she wasn't told either.

Over 30 years ago is still late 80s, so defo possible to tell sex but not very accurate I don't think, and I know it always used to be said that it was more common to be told "girl" and be found wrong than vice versa. Whereas today's scans are incredibly accurate.

May have depended on the state of the machinery/training of staff in the individual hospital as well. Of course it wasn't as commonplace to find out the sex but it did happen. My husband had a genetic anomaly discovered before he was born even though it has no physical markers and he is just 30, I think that was quite unusual at the time.

I worked at a nursery years ago and wonder about the child who would be around 18 or 19 years old now.
As a direct result of me pointing out marks on the child, more investigating was done by the nursery and then SS and the child eventually ended up being removed from their Mother and placed with another family member.

I hope it all turned out well and they're either at or about to start uni somewhere.......

It is indeed a bittersweet thread I do hope that all these children went on to have happy lives, it’s so nice to see such caring thoughtful woman on this site x

I’m welling up, just so sad to think of babies being all alone in some of the settings you’ve all described...

A big thank you and to all those who foster/adopt these poor little ones xx

Not babies but I have wondered often about kids I taught in the1990s, who'd now be adults in their 30s.

One of my favourite kids ever - he was so intelligent, and kindhearted - had a prostitute mum, no dad around, and mum was always shoplifting etc and involving him in it. He was incredible bright - maybe one of the most brainy kids I ever taught.
I taught kids I still think about to this day, and wonder where they are and hope they're OK. He was one of my alltime favourites though and colleagues used to joke that with his brains he'd be a master criminal one day. I knew that with a better parent and the right background and support he could have been anything.

I used to share my lunch with him. His mum had a baby when I was teaching him and he was so excited and tried to get his mum to bring baby to show me - it meant so much to him. But his mum didn't give two flying fecks. His big brother who wasn't even in my class used to visit me to chat as well, because he knew I cared. Colleagues who taught him before and after me found him hard to control but I never had a moment's trouble.

He had an unusual name. Out of curiosity I looked him up a couple of years back (well, Googled) only to find someone of his name, from the place where he lived, had been arrested for being part of an armed robbery a few years back. He got a shorter sentence - essentially for coming across as polite and concerned about a victim during the crime!

Nothing wrong with him when he was 9 or 10 - but I knew that uninvolved parent would do the damage. He used to tell me about her making him steal things - he wasn't comfortable with it. At all.

Must admit I can't help feeling being adopted is not sad for these kids at all. I've posted here before about my neighbours who scream abuse at their kids, kicked a dog in front of one of the kids, and we've heard the bloke threatening to "belt" the kids - both parents speak to them like they're shit. The kids are now around 5 and 7 (hard to tell - they are both very undersized) - their vile parents have lived here 4 years now and the younger child was a baby when this started. We have reported to SS, NSPCC, you name it. Nothing ever gets done. I think they hardly ever want to split up families now. Or else it's cheaper/less paperwork just to simply ignore it and risk the collateral damage they might get if something terrible happens.

We have given up. There's nothing we can do. So I can't feel sad about kids whisked into care at birth. It is not only the best placefor them but would be the best place for many, many more kids - who should be got away from abusive parents. But aren't, any more.

I remember the mums more than the babies:

S, who had had two children removed previously due to drug abuse, but had got herself clean & was allowed to keep this baby. I saw her again a few years later in having another child & she was doing really well

N who had catastrophic complications in pregnancy resulting in her daughter being stillborn & very nearly her own death, she had a complicated life & was a long way from home. I saw her too a few years later, on postnatal ward with her new baby boy.

R, a recent immigrant who spoke very little English & lived literally in someone’s garden store with a bed, fridge & microwave and precious little else. She’d had a stillborn baby & her husband wasn’t allowed any time off work. We visited her a few days after the birth and I’ll never forget this poor lost soul sat in a shed a thousand miles from home, all alone. I think about her a lot and really hope she’s ok.

My son is 16 months old now and when he was born, had to be taken to SCBU for a few days. In comparison to the other babies, he was fine (8lb 4oz but had a chest infection so needed strong antibiotics and help with his oxygen saturation levels). The other babies were all premature and so tiny. The baby next to me had been born in the Jan (last year) and wasn't due until April. he'd doubled his birth weight but still only 4lb odd when we were there!

There was one baby, a girl, who only one visitor in the 5 days we were there. She was clearly a bit older so I can only presume grandmother, she doted on the girl when she was there and full of cuddles but she was only there twice for an hour each time.

One day, I had to wait outside the main doors for SCBU with another couple. We got talking and she said her daughter has been born at 27 weeks and only weighed just over 1lb. :(

I often wonder how those babies are doing, especially when I'm cuddling my little boy. I hope they're all little toddlers now, healthy, thriving and being cute little terrors for their parents

There was a boy at our primary school who had a very bad reputation. Looking back now, it is so sad to think of a child being written off before the age of 10, but in the eyes of many of the parents at the school and regrettably some of the staff too, this kid had been, because of a few incidents where he'd lost his temper and lashed out.

I don't know what had happened to his dad, but he wasn't on the scene. His mum was a very angry woman indeed. Only R was left with his mum. Her eldest child, young teens, had got into trouble and was in a social services secure unit. Her youngest child had gone to live with an aunt. She came back to her mum at one point and I saw R with her. He was so proud and protective of her, it broke my heart, but sadly she was soon gone again.

He had a hair trigger temper, just like his mum, but one to one he was a lovely boy. I was involved with the PTA at the time and I remember he was sent over to help us out one day when we were setting up a cake sale. One of the other mothers could scarcely conceal her astonishment when somebody finally mentioned his name and she realised that the notorious R was this polite lad who'd been running errands for us.

I often wonder what happened to him.

Just remembered my teacher friend in her first year of teaching had a lad in year 7 who was in a care home. They were doing some class project and all the kids were asked to bring in photos of themselves as babies, he confided in my friend that he didn’t have any photos of himself as a baby so his care workers had found him a photo of some random baby to bring in. It still makes me achingly sad that he didn’t have any family with treasured photos to share with him, it really emphasised how alone in the world he was. He was still desperately hoping he’d get adopted too; at 12 it must be vanishingly unlikely. He would be twenty-odd by now & I hope he’s found some love.

I was at a family bbq last week and got chatting to my in laws best friends. i knew that they'd adopted their son he's in his 30s now, but I'd never heard her talk about it really. She told me she had ivf 9 times and they were on their last go, which also failed. Someone suggested adoption, so they signed up. After a long wait going through the process they adopted a 6 day old baby. I cried so much when she told me the story, I imagined how the birth mum felt and then also how she must have felt. She's also terminally ill with cancer so I think some of my tears were for that too!

But they adopted their son and he's had the most wonderful and loving upbringing. I just hope that some of the babies/children mentioned here have had the same. It upsets me so much to think of children and babies unloved and uncared for.

Chocoholicsasylum I used to babysit for a woman who'd had three sons removed from her but then later had two daughters that she was allowed to keep

This thread really helped me I am thinking about that little boy more positively x it was very interesting hearing all your stories x

All the time. Midwife here.

A few years ago I did some volunteering in an orphanage abroad. (In retrospect I don’t think I agree with “voluntourism” and wouldn’t do it again, but that’s another story.)

I got very attached to the babies, particularly a little four month old baby boy who I wanted to adopt and bring home with me. I have no idea what happened to any of them and it doesn’t really bear thinking about.

As the mum of a 26 weeker who spent 10 odd weeks in NICU I saw many sad stories.
The parents of the four full term babies who lost their lives.
The twins whose parents never ever came to see them.
The little boy who was born with heroin addiction and then in the 6 weeks we were in that Hospital had not a single visitor.

For what it’s worth my 26 weeker is 20 months old (born weighing 2lb) and is fully caught up size wise and developmentally.

Exdp and his brother and 3 sisters are all adopted (not biologically related). I won't go into the reasons why, as that's their stories. Just wanted to say they are all now grown up, university educated, have good careers and children of their own.

They all know as much as their is to know about their birth parents, however as far as they are concerned their adopted parents are their parents, full stop. The same as they are grandparents to my child, and their families are aunts, uncles, cousins etc. No one even thinks about them being adopted, because there is no need too. They are just one big happy family (well most of the time😉).

I just wanted to share the positives that can come out of adoption. It's highly unlikely if they had not been adopted they would be in the positions they are now.

Adoption on the one hand is heartbreaking, however on the other hand it's a blessing.

When DC2 was in year one there were two little girls in his class with troubled backgrounds. One (Kate) was in foster care (I think her bio mum was involved in the drug lifestyle). The other girl (Cathy) would have been better off in foster care than staying with her bio family.

Cathy and her brother were living with their father, who was a complete and utter arsehole. This was my first encounter with a shit parent (I think I'd led a sheltered life up until then), and I really wanted to smack his face with a brick on the very rare occasions he bothered to show up at school. The mother wasn't on the scene as scoring her next heroin hit was more important, plus I think her parental rights may have been terminated. The maternal grandfather had also sexually abused Cathy, starting when she was a toddler. I cried when I found that out.

I also discovered that Cathy and her brother were the same children who had been on the front page of the newspaper a couple of years before, sitting on the curb in dirty nappies beside the body of their "mother" as she was passed out after a heroin overdose. Not surprisingly, she was a very angry child, but she adored the very motherly female teacher the class had that year. She and Kate used to fight for the teacher's attention.

Suddenly, in year two the family disappeared. I suspect it was because the school and SS were about to come down very heavily on them and so the "father" and his new gf just upped stakes and took the kids away. 11 years later I still wonder what happened to her.

Kate had a happier ending. She left the school at the end of year two, for a new foster placement (the family she was with in year one didn't seem to have any interest in her whatsoever). A few years later I happened to mention something about Kate offhandly to a friend of mine. It turned out that a couple from my friend's church had actually adopted Kate when she was around eight or nine years old. By all accounts she was/is thriving with her new family and the set up (only child, slightly older, financially stable parents who could give her lots of attention) sounded perfect.

I can only hope Cathy has a happy ending too.

*Not their real names.

My baby was born at 32weeks, 4lb and spent a few weeks in neonatal and I often wonder about the other babies we met whilst there.

When Laddo was a month old he had a seizure and whilst we were in hospital, there were 2 baby boys in the rooms either side, one in double traction, who cried constantly (hardly surprising!) and who I didn't see anyone (other than the nurses) spending time with - no visitors. I found out later from a friend who worked in a&e that his injuries were non-accidental and his parents had been arrested and he would be discharged into local authority care.
The other baby was one who'd been on nicu with laddo, had made it home for a month and was seriously ill again - I don't think he left hospital again.
I can't be sure what the future held for either baby, but it made me realise that, despite the rocky start, I was lucky that laddo would be ok.