Love is someone ready to shelter you from the chaos

Lanai Scarr knows the security a good foster carer can provide when you can’t live with your mum.

Lanai Scarr with daughter Edith.

There are some lovely phrases in the English language. I love you, for example. String three words together, change somebody’s life.

Would you hold that thought for a moment?

Two months ago this newspaper launched a new podcast series, Nowhere Child, about the disappearance of a foster child, William Tyrrell.

It’s a baffling case.

William was a boisterous kid. He’d cheekily refused to put on regular clothes on the day of his disappearance, and so when he went missing he was wearing a fire-engine-red Spider-Man suit.

No trace of him has been found. Not a shoe, not a tuft, nothing.

The podcast examines some miscalculations in the police investigation and the maddening secrecy that surrounds the case but, as soon as the first episode went to air, we were contacted by people who wanted us to look beyond William’s disappearance. They hoped that we might also examine foster care.

Nowhere Child: Podcast episodes | Bonus episodes

Now, if the police are right, the fact William was a foster child doesn’t explain anything about why he’s missing. It’s a coincidence. But we took the time to listen to people, mainly because they were so passionate, and we also sought interviews from people who experienced the system. In Canberra, for example, we interviewed The West Australian newspaper’s political editor, Lanai Scarr, who is working on a memoir about her time in foster care.

She doesn’t come at her story with any particular agenda: she understands that you can’t always live with your mum; that good carers are important; and that ownership of your earliest memories is important, too.

Lanai says her parents were young and in love when they decided to have a baby, but then her mother developed post-partum psychosis and Lanai got “removed” — that’s the term they use — for the first time when she was just two weeks old.

So began a chaotic childhood, some snippets of which follow:

“Once, when I was three, I got up in the middle of the night to ask Mum for a glass of water,” Lanai says. “She was drowsy because she was dosed up on sleeping pills. I didn’t know this, but she had decided to end her life that night. But when I asked her to get up, she did, and ended up smashing her head into the glass door of the oven, and she was bleeding out all over the kitchen.” Lanai, dressed only in her pyjamas, had to find her way out of the house, and this was in Maroochydore on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, where the blocks are big. She had to head up the long driveway to the neighbour’s place so they could call the ambulance, and she was little, and afraid of the dark, and she can still remember shying from shadows of the enormous trees as she hurried towards the door.

Another time, she says: “We were living in Darwin, in a house with other people, but we walked home from school, and all of our stuff was out on the front lawn. Because maybe she didn’t pay the rent. Maybe she had a disagreement with the person we were living with. I just remember us grabbing all of our stuff and wandering the streets, with Mum trying to figure out what to do. And I remember that I really wanted an orange juice — it was hot, and I was thirsty — and she went into a shop, and she didn’t have any money to pay for it, and she threw the glass bottle at the shopkeeper.”

Who called the police, who put Lanai’s mum into the back of the paddy wagon, and Lanai into foster care.

Lanai does not remember feeling afraid that day, “probably because I was so used to a level of chaos and disruption in our lives by then”.

“The foster carer was really kind to me. I had a shower, and there was shampoo that smelled like strawberry. And the next morning she asked me what I wanted for breakfast, and I said porridge, and I remember another little girl saying porridge is for babies, and I was really upset about that because I didn’t think that I was a baby.”

No, because she was five. Five, and already so wise.

Lanai’s mother died two years later. The cause was mental illness, and suicide. Lanai moved to Sydney, where her paternal grandmother put her in Stella Maris College, a school founded by the Sisters of the Good Samaritan, and didn’t they live up to their name?

“I had to go back into foster care, but the school principal let me stay there for free,” Lanai says. “There was a discussion, and they just let me stay, and I was never treated any differently from the other students.”

Lanai thrived, and she is now a top reporter. She is also the mother of four children, including triplets.

The eldest, Molly, was born on Lanai’s birthday, and that was, she says, a surreal and emotionally draining experience, labouring on the same day as her mother had laboured all those years earlier. And then having Molly latch on, just as Lanai had latched on, before she was taken away.

We talk to Lanai for a long time, making good use of a plush meeting room at Parliament House, and then, oh no, it’s time for the school run, and we might be late.

That journey, with Lanai behind the wheel, anxiously watching the clock, is quite something.

“You know, the most important thing for me with my children is: I want them to feel loved, but also secure,” she says, as she grips the wheel, and curses before one in a series of interminable red lights.

“I don’t want them to feel that I’m going to go anywhere, or that my husband is going to go anywhere. They are always going to have us. So, being late is …”

She chews her lip.

“It’s all I really want, for them to know I love them,” she continues, fingers now tapping.

“I tell them all the time because I don’t want them to ever wonder. And … look, I just I don’t want her to feel that I’m maybe not coming? And it’s because there probably were times in my childhood where I wasn’t picked up, so I do get very anxious when I’m late … and that’s just normal because of how I grew up, and who I am.

“I overcompensate. I shouldn’t. I just don’t want her to have the experiences that I had, you know? And in this case, that would be …”

That Molly might be sitting there thinking: where is my mum?

“Yes! Where’s my mum! I don’t want her thinking that. And, look, I know, I try so hard to be a perfect parent,” she says as the lights change, and she skids off.

“And I know you can’t be perfect. But it’s OK because look, we’re here now.”

And so we were, but then Lanai was gone, having pulled up the handbrake, and yanked out the keys, and bolted for Molly’s classroom, pretty much all at once.

And you know, we weren’t late. We were last but it wasn’t like Molly had noticed.

She had been perfectly content and also it wasn’t like she didn’t know her mum was coming. Of course she was coming! But still, there was that lovely moment when they caught sight of each other, and nobody had to say anything because both of them, they just knew.

I love you.

I love you, too.