Anyway, I filled out all the forms and set about clearing up the house, and we had what they call a ‘home visit’, where the social workers came around and looked at the house. I remember thinking it was just as well that Mark had done the deck because there was no way we would have been approved with that hazard in the backyard. But we did get approved and it was in 2003, I think, that we got our first kid, a boy. I think his name was Brian. The parents dropped him off at around eight o’clock in the morning and he got picked up eight hours later. I can tell you, it wasn’t as easy as I’d thought it was going to be because he was an Asperger’s kid or something, and he screamed from the minute they took him out of the car until the minute they came and took him away again. And when he wasn’t screaming he was being violent, and throwing his food around.

An hour into it, Mark went to Star City and didn’t come back all day, but then, ping, two days later the Department put $150 into our bank account, and Mark said, ‘So that’s it, one hundred and fifty bucks, and they don’t tax you?’

I said, ‘It’s an allowance, so no tax and it doesn’t affect the dole.’

He said, ‘So, if we’d taken two of them they’d have given us three hundred bucks?’

I said yes and so that was it, we were in business, and before long we had half a dozen kids coming for a day here and a day there, and it was actually pretty good in terms of the money we were making. But then it wasn’t great, because we never knew how many kids we were going to get, and we had no say over the kind of kids that were coming, so we didn’t know if they’d be what Mark called ‘screamers’ or good, quiet kids.

I rang the Department and said, ‘Can’t you give me a few more Category Two kids?’ because Category Two is the worst kind of disability, like kids who are just vegetables. They’re easier to look after because they don’t do anything, but you get more money for them because they’re so disabled.

The Department said sure but most of those kids have been relinquished by their parents so you’d have to take them full-time not part-time. I thought about that, and I said, ‘Okay, fine, let me know when one comes up,’ and I was waiting for that to happen when they rang one day and said, ‘Snow, that boy you have with you today, we’re wondering if he might be able to stay overnight. His mother’s refusing to collect him.’ I said, ‘What do you mean she’s refusing to collect him?’ They said the mother phoned up and basically said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do it any more,’ meaning she was sick of the way he’d thrash around and kick and swear, and sick of never being able to leave him unattended, sick of not being able to go to work, sick of lifting him everywhere, in and out of bed, in and out of the bath, in and out of the car, sick of changing his nappies, sick of turning him in his bed three times or else he’d get bedsores. She’d been saying ‘I need some respite’ for about three years, and getting maybe four hours a week.