"Some children come into your life for a moment. Others stay forever. All of them change you."
 
When Sandra Spadanuda and her husband made the conscious choice to foster rather than have biological children, they thought they understood what they were signing up for. They were wrong.
Over more than a decade of opening their home to children in crisis, Sandra has learned that foster care isn't about following a manual or ticking boxes. It's about loving fiercely in a system that wasn't built for love. It's about holding space for trauma while fighting for justice. It's about saying goodbye to children who feel like your own, and sometimes, if you're lucky, watching them come home again.
 
From midnight emergency placements to courtroom battles, from sharing motherhood with birth families to navigating a system that often fails the very children it's meant to protect, Some Stay Forever is an unflinching look at what it really means to foster. Sandra pulls back the curtain on the 2am hospital visits, the complex relationships with biological families, the heartbreak of loving children you may not get to keep, and the unexpected beauty of a family built not from blood, but from choice.
 
This isn't a guidebook or a collection of happy endings. It's the raw, honest truth about foster care—the grief and the glory, the systemic failures and the small victories, the children who pass through like whispers and the ones who never really leave.
 
Written with fierce honesty and deep compassion, this memoir challenges everything you think you know about family, love, and what it means to show up for children who need someone to stay.
Some Stay Forever is essential reading for foster carers, social workers, families touched by the care system, and anyone who believes that love, in all its messy, complicated forms, has the power to change lives.