May is National Foster Care Month. For my family, it’s also the month that senselessly added yet another layer of trauma to our daughter’s story.
On May 12, 2020, my heart dropped when “Department of Child and Family Services” appeared on my caller ID. We had finalized adoption just months earlier. My first thought was, “They are calling to say they made a mistake and this adoption isn’t real.” I answered with enormous trepidation.
Instead, we learned our daughter had a newborn sibling, found on the sidewalk by a bystander. The placement social worker rattled off a list of medical care the baby boy had been receiving and asked, since we adopted his close-in-age sibling, if we would be willing to break the stay-at-home order and drive across the state to pick him up at the hospital. We did not hesitate. We knew how critical it is to keep siblings together.
Our previous social workers sped into action with all the paperwork, and in 24 hours, all seemed set. The placement worker told us to pick him up from the NICU on Thursday and to prepare everything for a new baby boy. Getting a new nursery together three months into lockdown was no small feat, but we did it. Everything was ready overnight for this surprise baby boy, and we even worked with our daughter’s psychologist to get her prepared for this unexpected arrival. By Thursday morning, we had a brand new nursery with cute matchy-matchy newborn baby and big sister clothes, a full stockpile of diapers, formula, a bassinet, and a two-year-old already proudly holding her hand to her chest and proclaiming “big sister!”
My husband was installing the new car seat when the placement worker told us it would be Friday now. Our daughter spent the rest of the day asking, “Where little brother?” We told her it would just be another day. The next morning, she was leaping all over the place, ecstatic that it was baby brother time again. Another phone call came, saying that he needed to be kept over the weekend “for observation.”
But then, the placement worker stopped answering our calls. That weekend was long, stressful, and confusing for our daughter. We finally reached staff at the hospital NICU on Monday, who shockingly told us that the baby’s new foster mother had already picked him up the prior week.
Everything worsened from there. The county that he was in said that they “did not have the discretion” to move him to a sibling home or seek a transfer from the judge, and that “in the interest of stability,” he would have to remain with that foster mother. Being with his sister was in the interest of stability, too, so we asked for virtual visits — the only opportunity available with the stay-at-home order — and were denied.
We found the attorney assigned to his case who had not been informed that there was a sibling or that our home was approved and ready to go. The attorney’s file was even missing any mention of our daughter’s case. We rushed to get a hearing the next day. The judge asked why she had the “extraordinary circumstance” of an adoptive sibling family taking part in legal proceedings but not having placement of the child. We found out that sibling separations in foster care weren’t “extraordinary.” It wasn’t extraordinary for foster-adoptive families to fight tooth and nail to keep siblings together, either. Children sobbing for months because they can’t see their siblings wasn’t extraordinary. But it felt extraordinary when the court declared “sibling placement is not a priority.”
We fought so hard to unite our daughter and her brother because we know siblings belong together. We had thought this was clearly expressed in the law as well. We were wrong. All we have to show our daughter is one very blurry hospital photo of her brother and our promises that we tried everything — filed every form, petitioned for every hearing, and sent every document — over the course of a year. I think about her brother all the time, wondering about the joys they could have shared together and the support they could have given each other as they navigated their deeply painful, traumatic, and complicated histories. It’s the greatest regret in my life that we did not find some way to fight even harder.
