Stand on their own legs
When Lea was about two years old, Nina moved into their own apartment with her. Lara also lives in her own apartment. Lara and Nina are influencers and spend almost the whole day together. You have more than 400,000 followers on Instagram. “We only turn off the camera when Lara goes home in the evening,” says Nina. The two post stories from their everyday lives almost every day. “It’s annoying when many of our followers think we hardly work, because we actually work non-stop,” says Lara. “We don’t even have a weekend off, let alone a two-week vacation,” adds Nina. “It’s really exhausting in the long run.” Daughter Lea is a natural part of everyday family life, but is only rarely present in the stories, neither of them shows their face.
kids, kids
As if her life wasn’t turbulent enough, Lara was a stand-in foster mom for about two years. This means that the youth welfare office calls spontaneously whether they can take in a child who is not sure how long it will stay. There are problems in the family of origin, due to which the child must be taken out of the family quickly. Lara and thus Nina have had a temporary foster child eleven times. The longest stay lasted about three months, the shortest 30 hours. The children were all between the ages of zero and one year. How did Lea feel about it? “She always handled it really well,” says Lara. “Of course we didn’t tell her the true story of why the baby couldn’t be with his mom, but a child-friendly version.” For example, that the mother has to go to the hospital and that there are no other family members who can take care of her.
But that the baby can go back to her when the mother is healthy again. “We celebrated that every time because we wanted to convey to Lea that it’s great when the child comes home,” Lara continues. It was emotionally up and down, as Lara and Nina often did not share the decision of the youth welfare office to return the child to its original family. The circumstances there were sometimes not satisfactorily clarified there, so that the two often worried about their foster children when they had to go back.
