Word: sabreena
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Like most teens, SaBreena didn't enjoy being told to put the dishes away or leave her bedroom door unlocked. But instead of sulking when she got really mad, she would run away--sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for a few days. At first when SaBreena disappeared, the Juarezes would call the police and go looking for her. But "that became very old because we could never find her," says Stuart. Eventually, they began leaving a sleeping bag outside the back door as a reminder that even if she didn't want to come inside, she never...
...then SaBreena got pregnant. "It was very shocking," says Tina. "All the values we tried to instill, for a brief moment in time went out the window." Their disappointment was so intense that they wouldn't even drive her to doctor's appointments. "We stepped back as parents," admits Stuart. When the baby girl died just a few days after she was born, SaBreena felt even more alienated from her adoptive parents and ran away again...
...only when SaBreena left home a few months later to attend Iowa State University, where she is now a senior, that she was able to restore her relationship with Stuart and, for the first time, establish a true bond with Tina. "I missed her more. I used to call her all the time and say, 'Mom, I love you,'" SaBreena recalls. She drew even closer to her parents after she married and became a mother. "I get another shot at SaBreena through her daughter," says Tina. "I can establish a relationship with her on another tone...
...UNLIKE SABREENA, DAN KNAPP NEVER RAN away or openly clashed with his adoptive mother. "He never gave me a problem. He just made me proud," says Jackie Knapp, 53, a single mom who is the education director at a Christian center in Elmira, N.Y. Placed in foster care at age 9 after his father died and his mother was unable to care for him on her own, Dan moved in with Jackie and her parents the next year. Now 24, he still remembers the meeting he attended in which his birth mother told the social worker that she was relinquishing...
...more continuity in their tumultuous lives. "We try to help kids realize that you're not replacing one family with another. You're building on," says Chaffkin, who counsels foster kids who are considering being adopted. Tina Juarez says one of the most important lessons she learned while raising SaBreena and the two younger children whom she and Stuart have also adopted is "Don't try and take their prior life away because they'll resent...