For Samantha, a home at last for the holiday season

SALISBURY — On Dec. 9, Samantha Granbery celebrated her 16th birthday. She also celebrated her one-year anniversary as the daughter of Serena Granbery.

It’s been a long haul, but mother and daughter are doing fine.

Since age 7, Samantha had been a foster child, in and out of homes and finally at Brightside, a residential institution for girls in West Springfield, Mass. It wasn’t a pretty place—a cross between a jail, a mental institution and a boarding school, both mother and daughter agree. "I don’t know how you stood it," says Serena now to her daughter.

Serena and Samantha are sitting in their livingroom at Moore Brook Farm in Salisbury, where Serena raises alpacas.They’re telling me how their union came about.

"I’d been thinking about adopting for many years," said Serena. "All my life I thought I’d want two or more children."

Circumstances, including several miscarriages and then a divorce, left her with one child, Adrian, now a student at Hampshire College. But the idea of adopting didn’t go away. A good friend, Cricket Brazee, who has fostered many teenage girls, got Serena thinking about taking in a foster child, then about adopting a teen.

Most everyone knows your "own" teen can be hard enough to handle.Taking on a teen you haven’t raised and whose background of serial homes and hard-knock institutions just about guarantees extra behavior and emotional problems is a daunting notion. Particularly without an adult partner.

But anyone who knows Serena Granbery knows she has backbone. She went through a year of training with the state Department of Children and Families, which included not only general parenting information but also delved into the specific problems most foster kids share: attachment issues, trouble making friends, lack of empathy, to name a few. Samantha, it turned out, had them all.

She is, however, in her mother’s words, "an amazing kid. To have come through the things she has and have this capacity for joy and happy energy is amazing."

Samantha, who has leapt up to make coffee, chimes in that she plays volleyball and swims. "But it’s your attitude toward life that I find so amazing," said her mother, who added, "that was always there." And added again: "Along with a lot of anger. That can get in the way, sometimes."

Samantha agrees. At first, she didn’t know how to live in a family environment, mostly because she’d never learned how to.

"Her responses were like a 2-year-old’s," said Serena, "because no one had ever taught her how to behave."

Tantrums, crying, yelling and even cursing were the order of the day.

"We’ve had our ups and downs," said Serena in what is surely a major understatement.

Back to how it all began. After Serena finished her year of training, DCF matched her with Samantha and gave them each a week’s notice before their first meeting, long enough for both of them to get very, very nervous. They met. They talked. Sam remembers thinking, "she certainly looked like she was a really sweet lady."

Serena remembers that when Samantha took her for a tour of Brightside, she walked very quickly and it was hard to keep up. "I liked that," she said. "I’m a fast walker, too." Sam liked it that Serena knows how to ice skate; she thought she might want to learn, too.

The next time they met, Adrian came along. At the end of the visit, Serena remembers, Sam looked at Adrian and said, "Well, whaddaya think?" Adrian, they say, was a little taken aback and rather noncommittal.

Samantha remembers asking if Serena believed in restraining children for bad behavior. She was relieved when Serena said no.

Normally, an adoptive family has a "pre-adoptive" period of a year before deciding whether to make it formal. Typically, there’s a honeymoon period when the adoptee is on her best behavior; equally typically, when that wears off, other behavior begins to show. Samantha didn’t disappoint in the bad behavior department. However, what she found, much to her amazement, was that "She [Serena] did not give up no matter what I did."

In fact, because they both felt it was important to have the support and the resources of DCF, which typically drops out of the picture after formal adoption, Serena and Sam opted for a second pre-adoptive year.

Before she came to live with Serena, Samantha was literally never alone. She still has a hard time being alone. But she will spend hours in the barn with the gentle alpacas, which have been an enormous aid in her healing.

"One thing Samantha had to learn was empathy," said Serena. "When she first came, she sort of thought they were like stuffed animals. I warned her that if she hurt them or teased them they’d spit." Did Samantha get spit at? "Oh, yeah," she laughs.

But she also learned to love and care for them and is also working with one, Sir Gallahad, in agility training. Within two weeks of arrival, she had learned the names of all the alpacas. as well as their birthdates and their dams and sires. Sam earns money by mucking out the pen and sometimes uses that money to pay off being fined for using bad words.

Samantha agrees that Serena’s rules for behavior are firm but reasonable—although, like any teen, she pushes the boundaries. When her birthday was approaching on Dec. 9, the gift of an iPod was in the offing, contingent on good behavior. Bad behavior extended the time when the gift would be hers. "At one point I think we were up to Dec. 15," laughed Serena. "But I got it back with good behavior," said Sam with a little smile.

"One rule I absolutely hate," said Samantha. That is? "I can’t chew gum."

There have been many little miracles along the way of the bigger one. When Samantha first arrived, at age 13, she didn’t know how to swim. Serena took her to the YMCA at Geer Village in North Canaan, where a swimming coach, Fred Brenker, saw her first lesson and told Serena, "She’s a natural." When he heard Sam’s story, he offered to coach her for free. Now she’s on the swim team at Housatonic Valley Regional High School.

At school, Sam is also in the agriculture education program; she was the volleyball team manager and score keeper, and hopes to play tennis in the spring. Her favorite class has been painting; she also loves photography. A really good digital camera is on her Christmas list.

Life isn’t perfect. Samantha has four younger siblings, two brothers and two sisters, all of whom are in pre-adoptive foster care and none of whom she has seen in years. She doesn’t really know where they are, but hopes that DCF might help reconnect them. And things with Adrian are... evolving. "There are jealousy issues," notes Serena. Adrian has learned to behave more as a father figure than a big brother, which seems to be working.

When Serena formally adopted Sam, on Nov. 30, 2006, Sam received a brand new birth certificate, with Serena listed as her mother. ("Which makes you an unwed mother," Samantha said slyly.)

Asked to talk about the difference between life then and now, Sam answers simply, with a shy smile in Serena’s direction, "Life is different because now I have a mom."