Staying In Touch With Siblings
When Valeria Moore wants to hang out with her birth sisters and brothers, it's a play date that involves five sets of parents spread across two continents.
There's sister, Mayra, and brother, Oscar, who live with two different families, not too far from Valeria's home. Then there's brother, Timmy, who was adopted by a Minneapolis couple. Her youngest brother lives with their birth mom in Guatemala.
But Valeria and her adoptive parents wouldn't have it any other way.
"It was so amazing to us that we adopted one girl and we got this enormous family," mom Paula Moore said. "We realize this is her family; it's not just us."
And it's not just the Moores whose extended family is really extended. More and more adopted children are keeping in touch with their birth siblings and other family members as adoption professionals and child welfare agencies promote continued contact.
In fact, the Massachusetts Department of Social Services (DSS) has decided that sibling connections are important enough to warrant a policy of keeping siblings together.
"There is damage done when we're forced to remove children from their homes," explained Geoff Cushner from the state field office in Worcester. "When they come into care that's all they have. If they're split, they're not connected to anyone in their birth family anymore."
The state agency has gotten overwhelming cooperation from family courts and judges, Cushner said, who can make visitations a requirement of custody agreements. Sometimes the visits are arranged between the families and sometimes the court sets supervised visitations. Sometimes distance means fewer visits in person, but the state also helps facilitate phone calls, e-mails and letters. No matter how it's done, the children stay in touch.
For the Moores, the connection came naturally. She learned that Valeria was available for adoption from her coworker, Althea Bertrand. Althea also happens to
be the adoptive mom of Mayra, Valeria's younger sister. The two girls had been living in different orphanages in Guatemala and were reunited when their new families came to bring them home.
While in Guatemala, the Moores and the Bertrands learned that their girls' brother Oscar was also waiting to be adopted. When they got home, Paula mentioned that to another friend and then Oscar had a home here too. All three children were baptized at a local church about eight months after they all settled into their new homes. They now refer to the moms as "aunts" and the dads as "uncles." They are still in contact with their birth mom, stepdad and brother in Guatemala. The three families have a specific Guatemalan restaurant in Waltham where they meet to celebrate birthdays and other milestones.
Sometimes they explain the family connections to others and sometimes they don't. "It's a rich and complex relationship and to tell you the truth it's a lot of work to keep the sibling and the Guatemala connection," Moore said.
That's work that Dr. Joyce Pavao is very familiar with. She has run the nonprofit Center for Family Connections in Cambridge for the past 11 years and has been counseling families involved in adoption for 30 years. For the past four years, Pavao has used a federal grant to run Sibling Kinnections, a program to help families "make connections as positive as possible," she said. The program's goal is to strengthen relationships for siblings separated by adoption from their birth, adoptive, foster, or kinship families.
Pavao, who was adopted in the "Dark Ages" of closed adoption in the 1940s, said maintaining sibling relationships are often crucial to a child's identity and adjustment. "Imagine if you did not know another human being in the world related to you," she said. "Of course there are identity issues."
But for adoptive parents, being in touch with birth parents or other adoptive families can be difficult. In some situations, there are issues where the adults don't get along, or may have different parenting styles and house rules. That's why Pavao and the other staff at the center require the adults to meet before their children do.
"They have to develop an understanding of why their children's visits are important. They have to understand that we're building relationships," Pavao said.
The Guibault family has experience building relationships, since children Tristan and Kaleah have both reunited with families from their past. Eleven-year-old Tristan was reunited with his Columbian birth family in 2004, after mom Leceta wrote a letter to an address she had for his birth mother. She got a letter back from Tristan's grandmother and the two women exchanged pictures and videos for some time. Finally, the Guibaults made the trip from their Montreal home to South America and used translators to ask questions and tell stories.
For Tristan, the language barrier was no problem. "We talked with our hands and we played," he remembers. "It felt like I knew them all my life. It is cool to have two families."
Fifteen-year-old Kaleah has not been able to locate her birth mother, but did reunite with the foster family that cared for her as a baby. During a 2003 trip to Columbia, Kaleah's foster family gave her the booties and a dress she wore as a baby and a rattle she used to play with. She got to see the room she slept in and see the foster brothers and sisters who took care of her.
"I could feel that they loved me and remembered me even though I didn't remember because I was too little," Kaleah said. The connection is so important to her that she has visited Columbia several times and will spend five weeks volunteering in an orphanage there this summer.
Kaleah's positive experience is not unique, Pavao said. "Yes, these relationships are complex, but all relationships are complex," she said. "There are benefits, strengths you gain from dealing with these issues and there are plenty of wonderful relationships and well-adjusted kids."
Kids like 12-year-old Angel, who was adopted out of foster care five years ago by Croan McCormack. Angel is one of nine siblings who came into state custody and were living in separate foster homes.
"He certainly had a bond with his brothers and sisters. That was his life," said Croan, who remembers meeting the crew at a DSS family visit. "They were all great kids." That's why Croan and Angel have kept in touch with them, and Angel's mother, through phone calls, daytrips and sleepovers. Since Angel's siblings are spread in all directions from his Boston home - one sister lives in a foster family in Worcester, a brother is in New Hampshire and the rest of the children live in the Lawrence area - it's sometimes hard to coordinate the visits in everyone's busy schedules. But it pays off.
"I think it's good for him that he has the security of who his family is," Croan said. "Now he's a teenager, so he's finding his own identity, finding his independence. And his family is a part of that."
Sarah MacDonald is a Massachusetts-based
freelance writer.
