Sally Donovan and Lisa Cherry in conversation.

Sally:  So Lisa, you talked on Woman’s Hour recently about the importance of food and taste to children in care, for those who didn’t hear the programme could you just explain?

Lisa:   Yes. I explored food in my book The Brightness of Stars as for me, it seemed to define each placement I had during my time in residential units and foster placements. What has emerged is that whenever I write or talk about food in relation to children in care it excites a lot of interest and knowing looks.  I know that you, as an adopter of two children, have written about food and had a similar reaction. So when we chatted on twitter it made sense that we had a conversation about it.

Sally: Food has been a major part of our lives since we adopted. I’ve experienced food being eaten out of the bin, it being a constant pre-occupation, consumed at a huge speed and food being taken and consumed in secret.

Lisa: It makes absolute sense of course that when food has been in ‘lack’ and/ or prolonged feelings of hunger have been endured, that the relationship with food is going to be tricky. Food becomes only about survival in those circumstances. For me it was more about it being cultural, socio-economic and filled with an agenda. Having had what I would call ‘loving’ food as a young child (my Gran was French so cooked beautifully) I moved in between daily roast dinners to cabbage and sausages to large canteen style cooking through to locked larders filled with row after row of cheap food. This makes the food a defining feature.

Sally: Anxieties around the availability of food seem to over-ride smell and other sensations in our house. Food is something of great concern and worry. ‘When is tea?’ and ‘What’s for tea?’ are questions I get asked many times a day. Meals are eaten extremely quickly, food disappears and is hoarded and there is a tendency to over eat. The impacts of early experiences of hunger seem to be difficult to shift.

Lisa: What strategies have you tried in terms of shifting early experiences if hunger? What have brought the most success and have any caused more distress?

Sally: The most effective strategy has been regular meal times and simple food. They find a help yourself’ buffet style meal difficult so we manage these carefully. Now that the children are older we try to help them understand why they experience anxiety over food and to reassure them there will always be enough for them.  I wonder how long these issues will persist for? It’s been ten years now. Anything that adds emotion and shame to food and mealtimes is detrimental.

Lisa: Do you have any ‘top tips’ for other foster parents or adopters around food?

Sally: I can explain what has worked for us. It has been about trying things out and seeing what works and always testing strategies against a knowledge of early trauma and therapeutic parenting.

• Regular meals as they provide a strong structure to the day
• Not persisting with foods they don’t like – taking away opportunities for failure at the dinner table – taking the emotion and shame out
• Providing foods that they ate and enjoyed in care – even now, ten years in
• Planning meals that don’t take long to prepare so that more time is available for one to one parenting and close supervision  – meal prep doesn’t become something that takes away mum’s attention – and the more time between the start of prep and the food arriving, the greater the stress
• Lots of fruit available to satisfy the constant desire for food
• Verbal reassurance – ‘there will always be enough food for you’ ‘ I will not let you go hungry’
• Cooking and baking – preparing food, learning about it, shopping together
• Some choice – would you like x or y for tea
• Being tuned in to what they like and providing these foods frequently

Thanks Sally. For more information it’s worth checking out:

Surveillance and Food Practises Within Residential Care For Young People

Recipes For Fostering by Andrea Warman

The Importance Of Food in Relation To The Treatment of Deprived and Disturbed Children in Care

On Sunday evening The Guardian broke the chilling news story of the mother who bullied her daughter into inseminating herself with semen which she had bought over the internet.  What this particular headline does not mention, but others do, is that the girl, who gave birth at the age of 16,  had been adopted from overseas by her mother, along with two other younger and unrelated children.  Occasionally a news story will emerge where the matter of adoption is mentioned despite being irrelevant, but that is not the case here.  The adoption by the mother of the three children is central to the criminal act and the damage done (she was jailed for five years for this wrongdoing plus cruelty to a younger child).

It sounds stupid to say this, but it felt like a body blow to the brotherhood and sisterhood of adopters who parent damaged and vulnerable children.  I like to think we are all in it for the greater good, learning to parent therapeutically as we must, and with great respect for our children’s origins.  Simplistic, I know.

Adopters must be able to tap into vast amounts of empathy to do the very different type of parenting that they do.  Empathy was vacant from this drama.  This woman wanted another baby and would sell her soul and use her child like a breeding machine to get what she wanted. This blind, all-consuming madness is Shakespearian in both its nature and the tragedy it has delivered upon the innocent.  What she did is barely recognisable as fact.

Having gone through the adoption approval process myself and become an adoptive parent I am astonished that she was ever approved to adopt.  Easy for me to say perhaps, I don’t know her, didn’t interview her, but she doesn’t sound like a safe bet.  She adopted the children from overseas.  Whether that is easier to achieve, whether there are loopholes, I don’t know, but it feels like that may be part of the story.  Overseas and domestic adoption are certainly separated bureaucratically in this country and I’m not sure why, although I suspect that an agenda to encourage adopters to look to the UK care system and not overseas may be part of it.  A kind of first and second division of adoption perhaps, which doesn’t sound like it passes the ‘best interests of the child’ test to me.

After being able to adopt three children, the woman was able to isolate herself and them from anyone who may have been able to spot that things weren’t right.  There are the usual stories of alarms being sounded and no one following these up with sufficient rigour.  Evidently she talked a good talk (how often do we hear that one?).

Serious questions are posed by this case and there are uncomfortable truths to face too.  Not everyone is capable of parenting vulnerable children, much as we would wish it otherwise.  Children can slip under the radar if someone wants them to and be in significant risk of harm as a result.  And in efforts to reduce the numbers of children awaiting adoption in the UK alongside poor funding of adoption support, are we overlooking some clear issues around overseas adoption?

At the heart of it are three vulnerable children, dislocated from their countries of birth, who found themselves not only parented by someone who was unfit to do so, but cut off from any form of reliable help and rescue. And now there is a vulnerable baby to be considered too. The damage wrought is deep and widespread and will echo down through the generations to come.  We can only hope that all four of the children will find the support, nurture and therapy that they will need to  make sense of what has happened to them.

‘Don’t sweat the small stuff’ people will say as I recount the frustrations of a shoe lost in a tall tree, or a precious thing gouged by something sharp, as though these incidences are one-offs and I have got things madly out of perspective.  When life revolves around traumatised and attachment-damaged children, the small stuff comes in vast quantities, there are lorry loads of the stuff.  Sometimes I look out over acres of it, with crazed eyes and a crack in my sanity.

Over the past ten years I have become your worst nightmare.  I am the parent whose child turns up to school without a pen and only one trainer in their PE bag.  I am the parent who cannot find gloves in cold weather, or a matching pair of socks, or something nice to put in a lunchbox.  I am the one who never got the school note (or the second one either) and I rarely fill out my child’s reading log.  If your child comes to play I won’t have a nice treat for pudding or a plaster to stick on their grazed knee.  But please try to be patient with me and mine, because the Matterhorn of small stuff looks something like this, and sometimes it’s a wonder any of us even leave the house in the morning.

… the drawing on the school t-shirt … the soap cut into small pieces … the lunch not eaten … the toilet not flushed … the missing packet of penguins …the fingerprints in the newly iced cake … the toothpaste squeezed around the taps … the whole cut in the centre of the towel … the box of printer paper folded into airplanes … the torch left on … the lost glove … the only remaining pair of shoes lost … the swimming goggles left at the swimming pool … the metres of selotape on the kitchen floor … the writing on the table … the snot wipe on the fridge … the school planner dismembered … the flowers picked … the opened cut leaking blood on the sheets … the wee needed just after lights out … the bite in the ruler …the cat locked in the room … the paint picked off the walls … the television settings changed …

Of course the fidgetty fingers and the anxious minds can’t control a lot of this activity, which renders me unable to guarantee that anything I need will be where I left it and intact.  But it does go towards explaining why I am not the person I was ten years ago and not the well-organised haven of calm and lovely motherliness that you wish I was.

A seemingly happy family play cricket on the beach but very quickly things become sinister. The father shouts loudly and menacingly at his son and on the return home takes his son upstairs and beats him with a cricket bat.  The physical abuse takes place off-camera but the screaming is heard as the mother cries ineffectually downstairs.  There is a further abuse scene and a glimpse of the boys bruised and shattered back.

‘It’s what my father taught me’ says the father, ‘the stump for disobedience, the bat for insolence’.

The same boy is attacked in the street by a bully, with bruises on his arms.

‘Did your dad do that?’ the bully is asked.

‘It’s passed on,’ says another child.

‘I’m never having kids then,’ says the boy.

Whenever the boy is in difficulty an imaginary friend appears to support him.  At the end it is revealed that she the ghost of a child who was killed by her parent, one of fifty children murdered by a parent every year in the UK.

By way of some resolution, the mother finally gets the courage to report the abuse to a teacher and social services and the police get involved.  The voice-over tells us that the police will ‘think about prosecuting him’ but he will be offered counselling and this may help him to escape prosecution.

This short film is called ‘Beyond the Boundary’ and was made by the BBC and shown to my son as part of a Year 8 PHSE lesson, which was given by a cover teacher.  He is twelve and before being taken into care was physically abused; abuse which has left him with deep and long-lasting trauma.

When he came home on the day of the lesson I immediately knew that something was wrong.  His eyes flicked around the kitchen, he paced like a caged animal and kept picking up objects and putting them down.  Then he said with dramatic force ‘the bat for insolence’ before picking up a serrated knife ‘no this would be better, because this would cut as well as bruise.’  I managed to calm him enough to cook with me, an activity which usually gives him some peace.  He told me about the film, as it turns out, almost word for word. As he talked, every cooking utensil we used was assessed for the pain it could cause.

The remainder of the evening was very difficult.  His distress turned to anger and we narrowly avoided a complete loss of control.  He talked about never being able to have children because if he did he would hurt them.  The following evening was much the same and even yesterday, three days after seeing it he said ‘I still don’t feel like myself’.  He seems listless and sad.

His reactions will be recognisable to many who work with or parent traumatised children. The film projected him straight back into a place of deep, crippling fear, helplessness and physical pain.  The feelings are real and overwhelming and as they were not experienced in a place that feels safe (school) they were bottled and discharged somewhere he does feel safe (home).

Jamie’s school have mostly been supportive and understanding of his needs and have gone the extra mile.  However this one lesson was a small disaster, for Jamie at least, and who knows for how many other children effected by abuse who may or may not have parents who can speak out for them.  The school have been quick to apologise and have leant me the DVD.  I watched it wondering how much of it Jamie had imagined. As it happened he was pretty much spot on, apart from the subtle message which was delivered at the end.  Apparently the abused don’t necessarily have to go on to abuse, if they decide not to.  Well before the time that simplistic message was cackhandedly delivered Jamie was perceiving the drama, not in the cognitive parts of his brain, but deep down where trauma is stored.

I don’t know what the intention of the film was.  I don’t understand why it had to depict the abuse, why it was so woolly about the criminality of what was clear physical assault, why it didn’t inform children what to do if they are suffering abuse when aside from the abuser all the adults seemed flaky and ineffectual.  It was crass, confused and badly scripted.  In showing it to a class of thirty 12 and 13 year olds, two popular but damaging misconceptions were demonstrated; the first is that children ‘bounce back’ from abuse and can therefore take such material and the second is that abuse happens to those outside of our realm of experience.  Neither are true.

Trying not to Sweat the Small Stuff is an ongoing personal battle of mine.  I am reformed to the extent that I can button it when a packet of Penguins disappear from the cupboard, or the remains of a minor amateur haircut lie on the bathroom floor and even when a game of noughts and crosses has been played out in felt tip on the knee of a pair of jeans, but there is one group of items which I cannot bear to see abused: stationery.

Now I love stationery.  I love pens and pencils, rubbers and pencil sharpeners, paper and rulers.  The sight of a new bic biro (has to be black) or a V7 Hi-Tecpoint (red or green) warms my heart and for me the excitement of a French hypermarket lies not in the wine aisle but in the vast choice of Oxford notebooks, with their elaborate lining and grid patterns and covers and superior bindings.  The French know a thing or two about good quality notebooks.

A little part of the joy of getting to the end of the summer holidays is the opportunity to procure stationery for the new school year.  I take care in choosing geometry sets, calculators, the softest coloured pencils, a packet of bic biros, pencils with rubbers on the end and just the right pencil-case.  And then I label everything and feel joyous.

After a week, no less, three days, most of the perfect contents of the carefully chosen pencil-case will have been almost entirely lost or disfigured and there will be a note in the school planner saying ‘J did not have anything to write with today’ or ‘R does not appear to have a pencil-case’ and I will literally shout until I am hoarse.  I will shout because someone has sharpened an entire pencil into their pencil case, I will shout because a rubber has been bitten into tiny pieces and I will shout because the bic biro has been sharpened, the top lost and the end crushed into pointy shards.  On Sunday evening I will fume whilst trying to gather some semblance of a replacement pencil case together and contemplate writing to school to explain that I am not a some dope-smoking sofa mother who would send her child to school without something to write with, much as the evidence might say otherwise.  I know, it’s not all about me and both children bite and and snap and chew because they are anxious at school. I know all the reasons and I know that shouting will not improve matters.  But pencil case destruction REALLY PISSES ME OFF.

This has been going on for months and months now and to avoid the helpless shouting and nagging I have devised a system which I know will not work, but I am enjoying the execution of it nevertheless.  Here is is.

It is the stationery draw of sanity.  It is mainly supplied from the pound shop or Morrisons and the Crayola pencils are for homework only.  If anyone has lost or destroyed an item then they must kneel before me and buy a replacement with their hard-earned pocket money.  Then they must sit in shame whilst I label the item and deliver a sermon about the eternal wonderment of the brand new pen.  I know, you won’t read anything like this by experts in child trauma, but I bet they’ve never had to clean up after all the ink has been sucked out of a biro.

I am trying, hopelessly perhaps, to try and build a connection between earning money, buying something, breaking that something, and the natural consequence to that.  I expect to be blogging about how consequences don’t work soon enough, but for now, just indulge me a little and let me enjoy my stationery draw of sanity.

The retired judge, Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss is in my opinion, a brick.  I have long admired her for her no nonsense, common sense approach to complex problems, her humanity and her sharp intelligence. She is never mealy-mouthed, but straight as a die, and posh, in a good way.

Despite retirement, she clearly keeps busy and has been chairing the Lords Committee on the government’s adoption legislation.  This morning, as I hounded children through our morning routine, her well-bred, sensible tones cut through the chaos and rode the airwaves.  Adoption is not right for all children she explained and many of the 60,000 in care have very complex needs.  I needed more from her so later I braved the tobacco queue in Morrisons and bought some newspapers in the hope that some column inches had been allocated to her. I found her article in The Guardian, subtitled ‘The government fails to realise that post-adoption support is as important as finding families quickly‘ and was not disappointed.  In it she points out the ‘nonsense’ that is the obligation on Local Authorities to assess adoptive families for support alongside the lack of obligation upon them to provide any.  The draft bill still does not give adopters any right to support and is a glaring omission.  To combat the ‘but there’s no money’ shrugging and helplessness, she sensibly points out how much the state saves by placing a child for adoption: around £25,000 per child, per year.  On adoption breakdown, she says,

‘We do not know how many adopted children this affects, but it’s unacceptable that there is no robust data collection to support it.’

She has understood, what many adopters have known and lived through for a long time; we are an absolute gift to a society buckling under social breakdown and debt, we offer free, long term stability, repair and love to the benefit not only of emotionally damaged children, but to the benefit of society as a whole and yet we are left begging for scraps of essential therapeutic and support services.  When we buckle under the strain, as some of us do, it can feel as though, the state, which was so keen to recruit us in the first place, now doesn’t give a shit.  If adoptive placements break down, no one seems bothered about trying to repair them, or to learn any lessons which could feed back into improvements.  I have observed adoption breakdown at close quarters and the impact on that child’s life of adoption breakdown, which may well have been prevented if any support at all had been provided, has been catastrophic.  It has also been very costly to the state in cold economic terms.

I have no idea whether the government will see sense and follow the recommendations of  Elizabeth Butler-Sloss and her committee but if they don’t they may be accused of trying to both have their cake and eat it, which is just plain greedy.

I have always written.  As a small child I wrote about everything which happened in my tiny life; the day my parents bought a freezer, how much I enjoyed fish fingers, the fire in the chip shop at the end of our road.  As a teenager I wrote at length about friends and boys and smoking and clothes and won a short story competition. In my twenties I droned on about how awesome the universe was and yet how dull my life.  Then I stopped.

What got me writing again was finding myself on the outside of things.  As I got older, everyone around me had babies.  Everywhere I turned there were babies, everywhere I went people talked about babies, I would turn on the television and yes, you’ve guessed it, babies.  Even ‘Friends’ were having babies, even ‘Sex and the City’ were spawning.  My husband Rob and I, on the other hand, try as we might, did not have any babies.

To cut a long story short, we found ourselves adopting two children from the care system and that’s when life really got interesting. We have grown to love our children very much, but because of the less than ideal early lives they have experienced, parenting them is not like parenting a healthy birth child. Writing became a way of dealing with heaps of challenges, many of which we have had to face alone.

My diaries started to take shape as a book when I came to realise that our lives, in a small way were epic.  We were living family life in full colour, at full volume, at full speed.  I made a few connections with other adopters and their family lives matched ours almost precisely.  I began to hear over and over ‘but no one understands our children’, and ‘we feel so isolated’ and even ‘it’s as though our children are blamed for the way they are’.  Our loud, colourful lives were not reflected in other people’s lives, nor on the television, nor in the newspapers and were often not being given credence by educators and health professionals.

Over two and a half years I wrote an account of our little epic lives; the high points, the struggles, the sadness, the bizarre and the breakthroughs.  Hard work and a bit of serendipity have resulted in the book being brought into reality by Jessica Kingsley Publishers and it will be available in July of this year.  It is called ‘No Matter What: an Adoptive Family’s Story of Hope, Love and Healing’.  This week I have been looking at the cover artwork and talking over the publicity.  It is something I never imagined would happen and every step is a total joy.

More than anything I hope that those struggling with infertility, or those parenting or working with traumatised children, or indeed any children who don’t fit the mould, will read my book and recognise something of their own experiences.   I have worked hard to be truthful and honest, to strip away the gloss, and the sugar coating that adoption can sometimes be smothered in, and also to celebrate the joys and the rewards of parenting differently.  And at the risk of coming over too worthy, I also hope that the book is a rollicking good read.

Blogs can be great shop windows displaying all our best work; a fabulous piece of art, a successful bake, an example of marvellous parenting in the face of extreme challenge.  And try as I might to share my mistakes as well as my triumphs, mine is probably no different. You don’t get to see the loaf which looks like a splat, or hear about my lapses into short fuse parenting.  However, for the greater good, I am about to share a shameful secret with you.

I laugh when people fall over and at other terribly inappropriate moments.  I admit it is childlike and can be irritating.

I laughed uncontrollably all the way through my sister’s wedding because the vicar was amusing.  I was a bridesmaid.  I laughed when my husband Rob fell into an Irish peat bog.  (Extra funny because he was angry.)  I once dropped a bag of vomit between the front seats of our car just as we pulled up to passport control at a ferry terminal.  It covered the hand brake, gear stick, Rob’s Blackberry and worst of all, the passports.  As I wiped them ineffectually with a dissolving piece of kitchen roll and passed them to the immigration officer, I gasped for breath and tears rolled down my face.  Rob looked murderous.  That only made it funnier.

I was reminded of my, let’s call it weakness, this week during a course on therapeutic parenting.  Several delegates explained how their children laugh at inappropriate moments, for example when people fall over and (I’m sorry but I’m laughing even now), hurt themselves.  It was clearly the time to nod seriously in agreement, which I did, but a part of me was thinking ‘but it is quite funny though. Isn’t it?’.  Then I was taken back to the Irish peat bog incident and snorted. Yes, I know.  I am a bad person.

In common with many traumatised children my own can flip between hysterical crying and laughing, which can be disconcerting.  They also laugh when they are in deep trouble, which can be infuriating.  Pain, anxiety and fear catapult them into disregulation, where emotions spin out of control and make little sense to the onlooker.  We may laugh until we cry, they do it the other way around.

Hilarity aside, I’ve been thinking more about empathy. Quite often our children can’t help it, whatever the ‘it’ is, whether that’s singing through a maths lesson or taking the scissors to a bathroom towel or laughing when they’re in trouble. It’s easy as adults, for us to judge their behaviours as purposeful and manipulative, particularly when we are deep into the dark place of parenting amongst the tangles of trauma.  And society has decided that laughing in the face of authority is a heinous and shameful crime. It shows a lack of respect and the miscreants need to be taught a harsh lesson.  We hear about child criminals laughing in the dock, like they just don’t care and moral outrage and cries for harsh sentencing echo across the land.

But back to my own kitchen table as I don’t find that moral outrage gets me anywhere as far as therapeutic parenting goes. Because I do it myself, I get the laughing thing and so it doesn’t bother me as much as it bothers others.  But cutting up towels and singing through maths? I’ve still got some way to go on those.

Fern Britton, an amateur.

We argue over homework, or more precisely, handwriting.  Every Sunday she must copy a long list of words using cursive handwriting.  Her need for control is so great that she employs her own letter formations which renders her writing barely legible.  She refuses even to follow lines and margins.  The words float around the boxes, some large and bubbly, some tight and cramped.  She uses a blunt pencil and a rubber which doesn’t rub.  The page looks awful but I forget that in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t important.

‘Come on, you can do better than that?’ I say unkindly, ‘you’re supposed to copy the words properly. The ‘t’s should have a flick on the end.’

‘That’s not how I do ‘t’s,’ she shouts.

‘Well that’s how you should do them,’ I retort, like a head prefect from an Enid Blyton story.

‘I don’t care.’

And on we go until pencil, rubber and workbook are thrown and child is head in hands, despairing.

‘I am a dummy.  I am a bad girl.

She pinches the back of her hands and slaps her head.  I am stopped in my tracks.  I try to comfort her and tell her everything is alright and I am sorry.  She puts her fingers in her ears and rolls up into a ball.  She is unreachable.

I back off and sit nearby.

She has lived for the most part in the dark shadows of her elder brother’s more obvious trauma.  Where he has shouted and raged, she has hidden behind smiles and compliancy.  After several years of mind-blowing behaviours, her brother has recently calmed and the clouds have parted.  Difficult and frightening as the past few years have been for her, there has been a simplicity to it.  He is the bad one, I am the good one.  The roles have been clear.  And whilst the focus has been on his pain, hers has been buried and protected.  The rug has been pulled from under her and now her pain and shame is out there, and it hurts.

Later that morning I come across a small piece of paper.  On it, scribbled in scratchy green ink is a raggedy face with messy hair, an upturned mouth and big eyes full to overflowing with tears.  Next to the little face is written,

‘I AM STUPID I HATE ME!’

She is telling me it is her turn now and she needs me to be strong enough to journey with her.

If I had to summarise 2012 in a nutshell it would be this: a year of challenge and growth.  Any year in the life of an adoptive family is coloured to some degree by traumas past, but this year, for us has been both difficult and pivotal.  So this post, the last of 2012 is a look back at everything I have learnt this year; the little things which have given a sparkle of pleasure and the big stuff, which has helped keep this giant tanker of ours on the mountain road.

1. Go to every training course, seminar, conference on offer.  If it has ‘attachment’, ‘trauma’ or ‘therapeutic’ in its title and it is within a 45 mile radius, then go.  You will come away refocused and will always learn something new.  This is a profession and requires a professional attitude. Ok so it may not have many of the usual features of a profession such as money and recognition, but it requires ongoing training none the less.

2.  Take a risk and try something new.  Margot Sunderland said ‘try some art therapy with your child’.  I did.  It helped.

3.  Know when to shout ‘ENOUGH’.  Take control.  Do what needs doing to keep family and soul together.  It was Rob who forced us to stay at home one day, cancel school and reorganise life.  I fought against him, but he was right.  The trauma got scared and retreated, for a while.

4.  What suits one child, might not suit another.  They are now both in different schools, in different systems, in different towns.  But it works.

5.  Greasing a baking tray with butter and not oil, is much more effective in preventing the gluing of ones bread rolls to the ‘non stick’ surface.

6.  Seek help.  Take what you can, from wherever you can get it.  Don’t forget that this is the Tour de France and not a time trial and so resting in between stages is allowed and necessary.

7.  In the giant scheme of things, school grades are not important.  Children who are struggling to keep body and soul together at school, do not learn well.  Success may be keeping your family together, not bathing in the glory of your child gaining 9 GCSEs to their musical accompaniment.  N.B.This has been a hard learnt lesson for a head girly type mother like me (now in recovery).

8.  A static caravan holiday in France is just the job.  Take the bikes AND the puncture repair kit.

9.  Don’t overreact when money goes missing.  If you leave it out they will take it.  Get over it.  Lock it away.

10.  They want to play with toys which are for younger children.  Get over it.  Let them.  What would you prefer?  Drug taking and over-sexualised behaviour?

11.  Don’t sweat the small stuff.  I’m sure I learnt this in 2011 as well, but it’s a tricky one as sometimes the small stuff comes dressed in big stuff clothing.  I was proud that  when every window of the advent calendars was opened on December 2nd, I didn’t shout, in fact I didn’t care at all.

12.  Twitter is great.  If you know where to find it, there is some brilliant, humorous, dark and light support out there.  Sometimes one just needs to say to someone ‘I’ve just found three months of mouldy packed lunches under the sofa’ and not have anyone raise an eyebrow, but to laugh with you about it.  You know who you are and I thank you all.

13. Know who you can share the bad news with and who just doesn’t want to hear it.  Life’s little challenges teach us who our rainy day and sunny day friends are.  Just accept it.

14. If you can find someone at your child’s school who understands and gets attachment and developmental trauma then hang on to them, nurture them, lend them books, give them chocolates at christmas.

15.  Yoga.  During that hour and a half of stretching and breathing and lying down you can do precisely nothing else.  You might as well let go of worries big and small.  In fact have a little holiday from worry.

16. Remember to switch off your phone during no. 15 above or a busy day of tweeting will catch up with you in excruciating fashion.

It is common to say ‘I don’t know where this year has gone, it’s flown by.’  I won’t be found reflecting this sentiment.  2012 has been a long, hard slogfest, but the Donovans have all emerged, intact at the end of it.  We are older and wiser, calmer, bendier and less likely to wet our pants on purpose.  I for one will be raising a glass of prosecco with some good friends this evening and welcoming in 2013*.

*  as I will be in bed by midnight, this will take place at the earlier time of 10.30.

And playing out this year one of my TV moments of 2012. It is a musical clip from The Graham Norton Show.  Enjoy, like David Guetta.