Holding Baby is about how a child comes to live with her grandmother in an emergency. 300,000 children are being raised by grandparents or close family members in the UK. The kinship carers looking after them are invisible and often bringing up children in their later years with no or very little support. This story is imagined, but all the characters have a connection with kinship care. They are either carers or cared for in a relationship outside that of their birth parents. These families have always existed, but their numbers have grown recently, because the birth parents have been involved in drugs and/or alcohol. Birth parents maybe in prison or have died.

Kinship care also crosses continents, when parents leave their home countries for economic reasons and their children live with other family members.

So why do I care? We have a large family with 10 grandchildren between us. One of them, a little boy of 4 and a half years old lives with us. We are raising him, because his mother can't. He has been with us for three years now and we love him, but this is not how it is meant to be.

As a writer, I use my words to help make sense of the world around me. It is what I do. So the play has come out of my imagination, but it is informed by the very many stories we have heard from other kinship carers over the past three years.

When we tell people about our home circumstances, people usually haven't heard the term 'kinship care' before. They have no idea that it is affects so many families. Also, of course, everybody knows such families.

This play explores the issues that many people like us face.

Holding Baby is funny (and sad) and has a professional cast of women actors.

Holding Baby is in production with an all female cast and will be part of the University of Birmingham's Book To The Future Festival on Friday 14th October at 7.30 and Saturday 15th October at 2pm. It will also be the foundation of a UK tour in 2017.

Please come.