Word: stuart
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...girl clicked right away with her adoptive dad Stuart, now 39 and a Baptist minister. Soon after she moved in, they painted her bedroom her favorite color--sky blue. And after school, Stuart would talk with her about her day. "It was me and Dad all day, every day," says SaBreena, who never met her biological father. Getting along with her new mom Tina, a state clerical worker, also 39, was harder. Says SaBreena: "We didn't have anything to say to each other. The only time we would talk was about chores." Says Tina: "Dad was the friend...
...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 had to sleep on the streets. When she did come home, the Juarezes would talk to her about what happened and either ground...
...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...
...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...