Megan & Sarah's Story

If all you've known is abandonment, how do you know anything else?

I met Megan and Sarah when their foster mom brought them to Kinship House. Although I've provided adoption transition counseling for many years, these sad little girls had already experienced a lifetime of abandonment, and they were only 7 and 9 years old.

Having lost their parents as babies, they were adopted into an Oregon home when they were 2 and 4. After several months the adoptive parents labeled Sarah, the older daughter, as "a difficult kid" and wanted to send her back to the state. The caseworkers believed that the sisters should stay together, and both girls were disrupted from that first adoptive placement.

The girls were then placed in a foster home with other young children and experienced foster parents. Both girls seemed to thrive, and they started coming to therapy at Kinship House to deal with their emotions and help them prepare for a "new growing up family."

Through play- and art-therapy over the next few months, Kinship House was able to help the girls talk about their feelings of family and love. Sarah was old enough to remember both her birth mother and her first adoptive mother, and she felt like they had given her away because she was a bad girl. She was both sad and mad about her memories, and at Kinship, we let her know that those feelings were OK. She tried hard to be perfect in her new foster home and was obviously always insecure about being loved. In one of our art therapy sessions, the girls made photo albums about themselves as babies and all the people who had loved them. Megan had been very young when she was removed from both homes, and we were able to understand that Megan was confused about who her mom was and what a family meant.

Kinship's therapists worked with the girls for well over a year to help prepare them for their new family, and when the time came, it was hard to say good-bye to them. In partnership with the caseworkers, we helped prepare a strong transition plan for the girls and their new family.

During their good-bye session with Kinship therapists and their foster parents, we all planted flowers together in the Kinship House garden and I told them that one day, the plants would grow up tall and strong just like Megan and Sarah.