“I can’t leave these mothers alone with their babies for even a second”
When social workers can’t decide whether to remove a baby from a risky family, they turn to Yvette Collier – a former nurse who takes new mothers into her home and teaches them how to be a loving parent. Nicola Gill went to meet her
The short walk down Yvette Collier’s path to the front door of her modern terraced house is unremarkable, but for the new mothers who make it with their babies, accompanied by one, sometimes two, social workers, it’s a profound one. Collier’s job is to put them through a crash course in parenting. Pass, and they will leave together to start a new life as an independent family unit. Fail, and the child will be taken away – into care or put up for adoption.
“When a new mum and baby arrive to stay with me, it might be with a few minutes’ notice, or it might be a day, but either way when they arrive it’s the same,” says Collier. A paediatric nurse by training, she has a kind, calm, no-nonsense attitude. “They come with a social worker – often straight from the maternity unit – bewildered, with a small bag of belongings and at a profound crossroads in their life. They might have a history of drug abuse, have had previous children taken away, be in an abusive relationship, or any number of other difficult things.”
Despite ushering dozens of mothers and newborns through her front door, Collier still feels slight apprehension before each placement arrives. “I’m anticipating those often difficult first few minutes of meeting, settling them in. This is their chance to leave behind whatever has caused them to come here, and turn everything around, but they often haven’t had a clue they were going to come to me. Many are antagonistic, even if they try to hide it. They are anxious, antisocial, anti-everyone, in bits, and arriving somewhere strange instead of taking their baby home. The youngest was 16 and the oldest 38, but most have no idea how to look after themselves, never mind a baby. My role is not to do it for them but to help them to do it themselves. Some are positive – they really want to do it, and you can see the determination in their eyes to get it right, to go forwards. With others, it’s the anger you can see, mainly. Around half the mums who come through my door will leave with their baby. I’ve learnt that neither attitude is a sign this placement will go one way or the other.”
Either way, Collier puts them in at the deep end. “Usually I have to try and cut through their daze and just get them going, start that routine the second they walk in the door. When most mums have a baby, she goes home and her own mum comes, or her partner takes over and does a lot so she can rest. But I can’t leave
these mums alone with their children for even a second in the daytime for the first few weeks. They are here because that’s not a safe option, because of risk from the mum herself, her partner or the home environment she has left. There might be a court order, or strong urging from social services. Sometimes it’s actually voluntary as the mum has nowhere else to go, but all I care about right there and then is settling the baby in, so off we go together to the shops to get what’s needed for that first night. It’s the same the next morning, when my dogs need walking or I need to pop to the shops, anything at all – we all go. It’s fair to say that it’s hard work for both of us.”
Collier has to monitor every moment of the new mother’s interaction with her baby and keep a detailed log, for social workers and for the evidence she is often required to give at court hearings about a mother’s progress. The mothers know this, and it can make for a challenging dynamic. “I always tell them what I’m writing so there’s no surprises for them at the formal assessment meetings with their social worker. I’m weighing up everything they do: are they changing them enough, picking up on cues to cuddle, feed or comfort their baby? Are they keeping their room tidy, how is their personal hygiene? Can they budget, are they planning where to live after this?” At night, mum and baby have a small bedroom next to Collier’s and she hears every sound. “When the baby cries in the night for the first month or so, I wake up instantly and I’m in there immediately. As the weeks go on and if it feels safe, I’ll stay in bed, waiting to see how quickly mum responds, what does she do when I don’t go in? But I can’t do anything for her. She’s going to be on her own with her child if she leaves with it – there’s no partner waiting to help and she’s got to learn to be independent and strong enough to do it all, alone.”
Once the tension of being watched has eased, the mothers often start to reveal their story and how they came to be at Collier’s, filling in often harrowing details absent from the social workers’ paperwork. “Needy, drug-addict parents who the mum has cared for all her life and who are now pressuring her to put them before her child; abusive, manipulative boyfriends saying it’s the baby or them; psychological disorders; a background of homelessness – I’ve dealt with it all. It’s not just mums from deprived social backgrounds who need help either. I’ve had daughters of wealthy high-fliers who have gone off the rails, too.”
“I stood there, holding her twin girls – as she walked down the path and out of their lives with a small wave”
As time goes on, Collier will venture out in public more often with her charges, for coffee, or a trip to a toddler group. “Often they have zero social skills. Maybe they have never been in a cafe or for a walk in the park. They have to learn from scratch how to be out and about with their child.” If the placement goes well and it looks as if mother and baby will leave together for a new life, Collier won’t always join them on these trips. “Seeing a mum’s relationship with her child blossom, watching her learn to love and care for it, and seeing that baby thrive in return, makes it all worthwhile,” she says.
A standard placement is 12 weeks but the period can be extended if it’s felt it will be effective. As we talk, a gorgeous blond, blue-eyed six-month-old baby plays at our feet. There’s no mother in sight, though. Picking him up, Collier introduces Dylan. He beams at me and puts his arms out. My heart melts. He still has the toasty biscuit smell of a newborn, and in his striped Babygro he is the picture of bouncing, beautiful, babyhood. I don’t want to put him back down. But Dylan’s mother walked out on him in the middle of the night three weeks ago and left a note to say she wasn’t coming back. “Her boyfriend won,” says Collier flatly. “So often the choice mums here struggle with is not whether or not they can learn to care for the baby – that’s relatively straightforward to teach – it’s whether they love their baby or their boyfriend more. It’s heartbreaking. Dylan will never see her again and he doesn’t even know it.”
Another mother was on the verge of “passing”, and social services had arranged for her to move into a flat with her baby, when she had a wobble. “We were helping her move in in stages. She was at the point of staying the night there alone with her child when she went awol. We were frantic with worry until we had a call from a cinema. She had left the baby outside in its buggy, asleep, to watch a film with her boyfriend, then simply abandoned it for good afterwards. She wanted nothing more to do with it; she couldn’t make the emotional break from her boyfriend, even though he was a nasty piece of work.”
While it’s hard for Collier to cope with picking up the pieces of these sudden, fatal fractures in maternal love, it’s even harder when she has seen the moment coming and tried and failed to persuade the mother to do the right thing. She tells me about one troubled woman with a longterm abusive partner who arrived with a toddler, newly pregnant with twins, having had two children taken into care previously. “She was desperate to make it work, really wanted to understand what had gone wrong and make big changes. She stayed throughout her pregnancy, and when her twin girls arrived she was fantastic, despite having three to juggle. But as time went on she started talking about her man again, saying she missed him. We talked into the night for weeks. She knew he was no good for her and what the consequences of going back to him would be, but she went in the end. I stood there, holding her twin girls – as she walked down the path and out of their lives with a small wave – thinking, how can you do this?”
At times, the boundary between the life a mother is trying to leave behind and Collier’s life is breached. “I had one mum who was so angry and disturbed she simply wasn’t safe to be with her child, even with me here, and the child was taken into care. She threatened to come back and shoot me. I have a police marker on my house, as a precaution, but my nursing background gives me the pragmatic determination to carry on. My friends, and even my husband, wonder how I find the strength sometimes, but I can make a real, life-long difference to these mums and break a cycle of bad parenting that stretches back generations. That hope keeps me going through the long, dark nights.”