Crocodile has two older sisters, who are still quite young kids. They are in a foster home together with a foster mom acquaintance of mine. As soon as I found out who it was, I made contact with her and we decided to do a sibling visit right away. We especially wanted to do this because there are no parental visits scheduled yet, so sibling visits are the only way they'd see each other. Crocodile had not mentioned them in any way like "sissy" or by name that I could understand, but he is just 2 years old. When we got in the car to go to the sibling visit, I said his sisters' names and he lit up and shouted out his way of saying one of the sister's names. I think he's consolidated them into one name, actually. He lights up in the same way when I show him pictures from the visit. It's very sweet.
But with the sweetness comes sadness. Neither we nor the other foster mom can take all three kids. And conversations with kids this age about foster care are just so sad. They're young enough that they'll just talk about it uninhibited but old enough to have the language that breaks your heart. It reminds me of Caterpillar's sister and Pterodactyl's oldest brother. Big sister asked about her mom when she first saw Crocodile. I told her that she wasn't coming, that this was just to see Crocodile. She said, "They took us away from her. They took us away." Little sister pipes up: "Crying." That's all she said, crying.
The sisters comments are heart breaking :( Sibling sadness is a good summary of the siblings I've seen in foster care.
ReplyDelete1.) Had two older siblings that are in an adoptive placement together, she's never met them, and I don't know if they/their adoptive family know that Baby 1 and her younger sibling exist.
2.) Had and has no siblings, but has an older cousin and a cousin who is a couple weeks younger than her who she saw occassionaly at family visits while she was with us, and she now lives with them, so they're very much like siblings to her now.
3.) Had a few older siblings who all lived with their dad. They came to a few family visits, and you could tell it was hard on them that baby was in care, but they were with their dad and saw their mom.
4.) Had/has no siblings.
5.) Haven't revealed this on the blog but was planning to soon- our Baby 2 and Baby 5 are cousins. 5 is a younger sibling to the cousins I just mentioned under Baby 2. Baby 5 has never met her older siblings/cousin. Closed adoption, so she's unlikely to meet them anytime soon, and this breaks my heart. I don't know that the older kids even know about her. Biomom is pregnant again, and I suspect that the adoptive family will hope to adopt new baby as well (there's no way biomom can parent at this point). Breaks my heart that the adoptive family would likely hate the thought of new baby not joining their family and being raised by another adoptive family and will want to keep the younger siblings together, but yet don't seem to see it as important to maintain sibling contact with the older siblings..why, just because this new one will be a baby? Lots of emotions, just recently found out about the pregnancy ;) Have to get myself in check before I blog about it :)
6.) Has 3 older (like, in their 30s-40s) siblings on dads side, has seen one of them a few times while in care and the others she's seen once since in care- they live farther away. Has 6 or 7 siblings on mom's side, to the best of our knowledge she's never met most of them as they live with their dads or an adoptive family.
So yeah...sibling relationships get majorly impacted in heartbreaking ways by foster care. And yet, there's other circumstances that can lead to the separation, it's not always the system's fault. We only have one bed open at a time, but NONE of our babies would have been able to be reunited with a sibling by them moving in...the others haven't been in foster care at the same time. It's a broken world.
It has been very hard to know that if we would just say yes to more kids, there was a case we could have kept siblings together. But at least some of them ended up together in the end. The others were out of our control as far as keeping them together, similar to stories you shared.
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