Georgia became a subscriber after
seeing one of our, very few, adverts. She sent us a short
introductory email - prominently labelled “Not for publication” - giving us
some background about her time in foster care. Then there was a lengthy silence. This
didn't particularly worry us as new subscribers sometimes used to sign
up on a whim but then don't bother to unsubscribe when they found
out that what we offered wasn't what they needed.
Eventually we unsubscribed her but about two
months later she phoned us when we were both out. Mark took a long and fairly
desperate message with a number to call. Over the next few months we tried
phoning her loads of times but her (landline) phone just rang and rang without
ever being picked up.
Mark is mega reliable so when he said that he
was certain that he had taken the number down correctly we knew that he had.
So, unsurprisingly, we ended up feeling rather worried. Should we have
done something then? Perhaps we should have but our own lives were going
through a complicated phase around that time and we didn't have any mental
energy to spare.
And
there the matter rested until March 2015
We have a wide circle
of adopted/fostered/Children's Home friends, who all have equally wide
friendship networks, so we are in second or third hand contact with
shedloads of people. We heard about a former foster child with a similar story
to Georgia's but she was using a different name. Our husbands are very IT savvy
so by comparing the headers on the email she sent to us with the headers on a email
she sent to a distant acquaintance of ours the two of them managed, via the IP
Address, to discover that the two emails were sent from the same small
town.
This gave us the
confidence to send her an email to her newer address explaining that we
had been a bit worried about her and we just asked her to confirm that she was
the former subscriber and that she was safe and well.
She wrote back, "Yes
I am and yes I am." and nothing else!
And there the story ends as
far as we are concerned. Clearly something has been going on, who knows what? Mildly upsetting but all too typical of the rather murky world of former foster children!
Yikes! I hope everything is okay. Keeping her in my thoughts.
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