Foster Care magazine editor, Sophia Bell, met writer and broadcaster Lemn Sissay to explore family, forgiveness and the power of finding what you love.
For much of his life, writer Lemn Sissay has been trying to understand what family means.
Placed in foster care as a baby, he spent the first 12 years of his life with the same foster family before moving into residential care, where he remained for the rest of his childhood. Questions of family, identity and belonging have shaped much of his writing, from My Name Is Why to his latest project, Tell Me Something About Family - an online collection of stories in which people from all walks of life reflect on what family means to them.
I ask what he hopes people will take from the project.
"I think a lot of our problems regarding family surround this questionable idea about what family is or should be.
"The reality of family, as I see it, is that there's as much dysfunction as there is function. There'll always be loss as well as community. There'll always be pain as well as love.
"What I wanted to show is how diverse families really are.
"There are people on the project who've lost all their family and found another family they love. There are people who've been betrayed by their family but learned to live with that betrayal.
"To me, the greatest example of the power of family is fostering and adoption. Because that's where you prove that the nature of family stretches beyond what people have falsely assumed is the only way in. Which is blood.
"What the project shows me – and anybody who spends time with it – is that there's not one idea of what a family is."
Reading the stories on the website, I was struck by how often similar themes surfaced: traditions, shared memories, everyday rituals and acts of kindness. I wondered whether those recurring themes were, in some way, the ingredients of family.
"Well... your ritual might be different to my ritual...
"My ritual for family might be that I see a friend once a year and phone two friends five times a year...
"Somebody else might say, 'My God, Lemn, that's not family.'
"And I'd say, 'Actually, for me, it is.'
"I don't hold any resentment towards anybody who has a different family structure.
"Familial fascism is when you say, 'We do it this way. If you don't do it this way, you're outside the idea of family.’ One of the problems with family is assuming that because it works for you, it's going to work for everybody. And that's just not how it is."
Yet one thing still intrigued me. Again and again, people seemed to remember the smallest moments. Not life-changing events, but small, everyday details that had stayed with them for decades.
"I remember there was a girl in the children’s home who, every breakfast, used to say, 'My grandma butters the toast right to the edge on all four corners.'
"A memory ties you to family, and you hold onto it for dear life."
But is it really family we need?
Or is it something even more fundamental?
"Relationships," he says.
"Like it or not, it's relationships.
"We are brought up as care leavers to feel independence is the greatest form of existence. Actually, it isn't. Interdependence and relationships are the height of what it is to be a functioning adult and a functioning human being.
"The primary place where human beings make and break relationships is family. That's all. And the making of those relationships does not have to be blood. It never did. We tell ourselves it has to be because we're protecting an idea of family that allows us to function within it.
"The truth is, you don't have to be blood related to have a relationship that's every bit as strong as any family."
For Lemn, those relationships broke down early. Placed with a foster family as a baby, he believed they would always be his mum and dad. At 12, he was moved into a children's home and they never came to visit.
So what sustained him?
"Poetry," he says.
"It gave me a sense of place. When I felt displaced, it gave me a place, and that was a very big deal. Emotionally, I could feel that I could be in the present. I could think, 'This is really happening.'
"If something traumatic is happening, people around you often say, 'Don't worry about it. You'll get through it.'
"The poem didn't do that. It said, 'Look. This is how it is. This is how you're feeling. This is where you are. Imagine who you are. Imagine who you could be if this wasn't here. Maybe you can get there.'
"All of the possibilities came from the truth. If it was not imagined, it could not be made. Therefore imagination must not be afraid.
"To imagine that, in the absence of people who loved me enough to tell me, "No, you shouldn't be here...” That was everything. That was my sense of place. My sense of purpose. My truth. Everything that you would want from family."
What might childhood have looked like without it?
"Horrendous.
"I would quite possibly have become an addict. I might have taken my own life."
He pauses.
"But it wasn't that I found poetry.
"It was that I found what I loved."
Every parent, he says, wants their child to find the thing that makes them feel most fully themselves.
"Okay, the child may become a doctor, a lawyer, whatever parents want for their children to be financially secure. But actually, the question you'll be asking when you're old is, 'Are you doing what you love?'"
A few moments later, he circles back to the idea.
"Can I just add to that?"
As somebody who's spent his life in the creative industries, he says, there's something he wants foster carers to understand.
"It's really important – especially for foster parents, but actually for anybody – to know that creativity is not the monopoly of artists, and that creativity is not restricted to what artists do as art.
"Creativity is in motherhood. Creativity is in how you solve a problem that seems unsolvable. Creativity is in how you navigate a relationship with your partner. Creativity is in how you fall asleep and what you dreamt. It's in how you hear or see something that a child does and think, 'Wow.' It's in everything.
"And if we see that, we start to see our own power. There's a vested interest in society convincing people that they're not creative. Because if they realised they were, they might say, 'Well... what if? What if? What if?'"
I ask whether writing, in particular, can help children make sense of difficult experiences.
He laughs.
"No, I'm not having it."
If a child finds themselves through fixing cars, he says, then that's every bit as valuable as writing poetry.
"If you found out that a foster child, or an adopted child, or your own child loved fixing cars – somehow they became themselves when they fixed cars – that's their thing. That's their love language. That's how they express themselves.
"I really do believe that a person finding what they love to do can be their way through childhood and adulthood."
Finding what he loved gave him a way through, but it didn't erase what had happened to him. For years, he says, he believed the defining fact of his life was what had happened to him as a child. It became the lens through which he understood every relationship that followed. To explain it, he reaches for an extraordinary image.
"I thought the thing that hurt me was the pivotal experience of my life. If you went down to my core, you'd find that trauma and say, 'This is the making of him. Everything he does relates back to this moment.'
"So whenever I got close to somebody, I'd think, 'Now we're close enough.' I'd go to the back room, open the door and bring out this dead bear, with his tongue lolloping out, his eyes rolling down and snails coming out of his mouth. Dead. Horrible.
"And I'd say, 'If you've ever smelt anything bad around me, it's from this dead bear. I've been carrying it since childhood. Now that we're close, I think I should explain it to you. It's big. And now you're going to have to love me... and the dead bear. The dead bear comes with me everywhere I go. You've got to live with it.'"
He pauses before smiling.
"But when I forgave my foster parents... the dead bear disappeared.
"If there were problems, they were my responsibility. I couldn't blame my past. I couldn't blame the dead bear. I couldn't blame the smell on something you didn't know about me.
"When I forgave people who hurt me in my childhood, a weight lifted from me that I did not know I was carrying. The dead bear disappeared and I had to take responsibility for my own absence. That's being an adult."
I wonder how much energy it takes to carry that kind of anger through adulthood. He nods.
"The idea of independence – 'I'm not dependent on anybody' – is one of the false things that can come out of growing up in care. When people say, 'You're a great survivor,' it's almost like a punishment to a child.
"If your greatest asset from childhood is the fact that you can survive, it means you'll only see yourself in adulthood if you're surviving something. You'll have to create a problem to be able to survive it... to be able to see yourself."
I ask what stopped his childhood becoming the thing that defined him.
"It can't be the defining moment. Because if it is, then I deserve it. In other words, I'm saying this boy deserved this to happen to him.
“He didn't. It wasn't his fault.
"If you forgive, you're basically taking back your power. You're saying, 'No. This shouldn't have happened to somebody like me.'"
He smiles again.
"When I forgave, I could empathise with the person I used to be most angry with. Oh my God... that was it. I'd lived all my life thinking this person had ruined my childhood and I hated them for it.
"And now I'd forgiven them, I could look at them and think, 'Oh my God... it was difficult for you, wasn't it? Your relationship with your mother. Your family. Your story.'
"It allowed me to see them, meaning it allowed me to see beyond my own story. You know you're getting well when you can get beyond your own story and start to empathise with other people."
I wonder whether that's one of the cruellest things about intergenerational trauma: people can't always model the love they never experienced themselves.
"Yes... but I'm the example of that. So how did I break out of it?
"Well... knowing and doing what you love, that's got to be good for you. Therapy as well. It's definitely something I would hope care leavers could get, although you can only really do it when you want it, and then you've got to be able to afford it.
"Those things can lead you to self-awareness. Self-awareness can lead you to forgiveness. Forgiveness can lead you to empathy."
As our conversation comes to an end, I return to where we began. What would he say to someone who feels they don't really have a family? For the first time that afternoon, he doesn't answer immediately.
"Oh, gosh...
"I think back to all the birthdays, you know. And Christmases... where I didn't have a family. And I still don't...
"I don't know, Sophia."
A few minutes later, almost as an afterthought, he comes back to it.
"If you want something... if you want money... give money away."
I ask if the same is true of love.
"If you want love, give love. If you want kindness, and you feel like you've been hurt, you have to be kind. This is what I've learnt for myself. It feels totally counterintuitive.
"If you don't want to be isolated, then find somebody who is isolated and help them. Don't tell them you're doing it. Just do something."
you don't have to be blood related to have a relationship that's every bit as strong as any family."
"When I forgave people who hurt me in my childhood, a weight lifted from me that I did not know I was carrying
"If you forgive, you're basically taking back your power. You're saying, 'No. This shouldn't have happened to somebody like me.'"
“A memory ties you to family, and you hold onto it for dear life.”
“It wasn't that I found poetry. It was that I found what I loved.”
“If you've ever smelt anything bad around me, it's from this dead bear. I've been carrying it since childhood.”
“If you want love, give love. If you want kindness, and you feel like you've been hurt, you have to be kind.”
