Barbara Stewart's story
 Barbara Stewart, 69, is raising her grandchildren, Dylan, 10, and Rebecca, seven
Former school library assistant Barbara Stewart and her husband Gordon, also 69, were looking forward to a relaxed retirement. Instead, they found themselves with a brand-new family. Their youngest daughter, Rachel, now 33, suffers from a mild intellectual disability, meaning she is unable to care for her two children, Dylan and Rebecca. In 2000, the children became the legal responsibility of their grandparents’.
Our daughter Rachel is the youngest of six children. She has special needs but she can read, write, tell the time, that sort of thing. She’s pretty self-sufficient – we worked very hard to make sure she would be able to cope in the world if anything happened to us.
In 1995, Rachel’s son, Dylan, was born, and the next year Rachel married his father, who also has the same sort of disability. They had a lovely wedding, but we worried about them. At first, it seemed that things weren’t going too badly, but by the time Dylan was about a year old, you could see they weren’t coping very well. Things went from bad to worse after Rebecca was born – Rachel was fighting with her husband and they both lacked the capacity to properly look after their children. We took Dylan and Rebecca to our house most weekends, but that was really all we could do – you can’t just walk in and take a child away from its parents.
To read Barbara's full story click here |