The seven months I spent hand-rearing Afia fast-tracked me through every stage of parenting: love, laughs and pride, followed by inevitable separation and loss
It was 2016, and I’d been a zookeeper for seven years. I lived with my partner and two stepchildren in a Victorian terrace house in Bristol. We’d met when her kids were four and eight, so I had not experienced the early baby stages, the sleepless nights, nappies and bottle-feeding.
But that was about to change.
