“Two weeks ago was my niece’s 16th birthday. She was getting ready to go out with her friends for dinner, I was helping with her makeup, and I just broke down in tears. It’s not like me, really, but I couldn’t help thinking about how much my sister would have loved it. She would have loved seeing her daughter growing up and becoming a woman.”
When Nash’s sister was diagnosed with bowel and liver cancer in January 2024, her family’s world was thrown off its axis. Nash, now 47, was a married mother-of-four with her two youngest still living at home in Chelmsford – but when she got that call, she immediately invited her sister and her three children to move in, too. They were incredibly close, and she wanted to share the load of school runs and emotional support while her sibling underwent intensive treatment, including chemotherapy.
“We were taking each day as it comes, but we did have some conversations about what her wishes were if the worst were to happen,” Nash says. “My sister was a single parent and she made it clear that she wanted her children to stay together, no matter what. It was a no-brainer for me: they would stay with us. I didn’t want them to end up being fostered, adopted or far away from their family.”
Her sister died in May 2024 at the age of 44, and though the heartbreak was palpable, there was so much to do. Nash and her husband now found themselves alone with five children under their roof, three of whom were grieving the inconceivable loss of their mother. “I barely had a moment to think, I was just trying to hold it all together. We bought bunk beds and sofa beds; our children now had to share rooms with their cousins. We needed to get rid of our car and finance a new seven-seater. We had to settle the kids into new schools and new routines. And through it all, we were regularly attending the family courts to fight for official custody of my nieces and nephew, which was a really stressful process,” she says. It would be March 2025 by the time their Special Guardianship Order was awarded.
As a midwife of 16 years, caring for others runs through Nash’s veins, but the job she loved was stretching her thin. “I could feel myself getting overwhelmed and anxious. I was trying to be there for these children who I had come to love as unconditionally as my own; to advocate for them, make them feel safe and help them navigate their grief. But my work on top of all that was getting to be too much, mentally and emotionally,” she says. “When you’re caring for pregnant women and delivering babies, you have to be totally plugged in. I am a person who gives things my all, but suddenly I just didn’t have the capacity.”
Something had to give, but when she approached her employer to discuss extended time off, they said it would have to be unpaid. “I was flabbergasted, but when I looked through the maternity and adoption leave policies, I saw that kinship and Special Guardianship carers were not included,” she says. “I thought, ‘What’s the difference? I’ve become primary carer to three more children overnight, and I will be raising them until they’re 18 just like any other parent’.” In the end, she felt she had no choice but to leave her job in July and become a stay-at-home mum.
Nash had never heard of the term ‘kinship carer’ until she became one, but the more she dug into it, the more she realised how little support there is for those who step up to look after the child of a friend or family member in crisis. “As much as it has put a strain on my marriage, in the sense that we’re very child-focused and don’t have much time for each other right now, I am privileged that I have a supportive husband who is in a position to take the lead financially,” says Nash. “But many other women – and I say women because it is predominantly us who take on the lion’s share of caring responsibilities – just don't have that, and yet there is no assistance from social services. You’re left to your own devices in every respect. The charity Kinship has been an absolute lifeline for me, but it shouldn’t just be down to them.”
With the help of campaigners with lived experience like Nash, Kinship has long been calling for better financial support for carers, and last month the government announced an allowance-based pilot scheme across seven local authorities. This will provide financial support to around 5,000 eligible kinship children and their families, testing how to improve support for kinship carers.
Despite the intense turmoil of the past two years, though, Nash is quick to acknowledge the very real joys of being a kinship parent. She mentions that her sister never got the chance to go on a holiday abroad with her children, and had decided to apply for their passports when she was undergoing treatment. “The passports arrived a week before she passed, and she knew she wasn’t going to make it,” Nash says. “She said, ‘Please take the kids on their first holiday, for me.’ She wanted them to have that experience.”
With the help of her mum and her husband, Nash quietly planned a beach holiday, bundling the children into a big taxi early one morning under the guise of a trip to Birmingham. “When I told them we were actually getting on an aeroplane, their excitement was crazy,” she says. “Seeing their little faces when we got up into the air, watching them play on the beach and in the pool, it was all just so special. It’s moments like that which have warmed my heart and made me think, ‘They’re going to be OK. We are going to be OK.’”
She doesn’t downplay what an adjustment it’s been, but Nash is gifted at seeing the good in even the most difficult circumstances. “Yes, I lost my work. I lost my sense of identity. And worst of all, I lost my sister. I am having to navigate a new me, and that’s taking some time,” she says. “But I also wouldn’t change this decision for the world. There are these little moments of love, all the time, and that’s what I’ve realised life is about. It’s about being totally present with the people who mean the most.”
Kinship is the leading kinship care charity in England and Wales, offering one-to-one support, free training sessions, peer support groups and an expert advice line. To find out more about their campaigns and how they can help, visit kinship.org.uk.
