Once-troubled teen blossoms with Knox County adoptive family
If she were to wait for just the right place or occasion, Sariah Brady figures, she might never wear the cherry-red swing coat. So why not grab it for the short walk to the family auto shop? Sariah’s mom smiles as she and her 18-year-old daughter, an aspiring model, stride past modest houses and work trucks along Washington Street. With her dark curls and high heels and bright coat, Sariah is resplendent against the gray November sky.
“Yeah,” Corena Brady says. “She’s beautiful.” Biracial, city-born and adopted from foster care, Sariah stands out in this overwhelmingly white, rural, football-crazy community. And that’s funny, Sariah and her family say, because she has never in her life felt so at home.
“It’s almost like she’s been here all along,”
Brady said.
There were, however, some 15 years of a mostly anguished childhood that preceded Sariah’s arrival in Knox County. Her dad wasn’t a part of her life, and her mother didn’t take care of her. Sariah was deeply troubled and being raised by “a friend of a friend,” the closest she had to family, before Franklin County Children Services took custody.
She then spent 44 days in emergency shelter care at a Columbus mental-health center for youths, and then 232 days in a residential program at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.
“On paper, she was a mess,” Brady said.
But Brady didn’t flinch when Children Services called two years ago and asked if she would open her home to Sariah.
Brady, 44, understands struggle. She started out as a teen mom, had four boys and became a widow at 30 after her husband took his life. She fosters because she likes to stay busy and because family — whether by birth or adoption or even a temporary placement — means everything.
Yes, she told the caseworker. She’d do what she could for this child.
Sariah was relieved to finally pack up and leave the hospital program, but she was anxious about her next steps.
“They told me I was going to Amish country,” she said. “I’d been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, PTSD and something else. They had me on a Ziploc bag of meds so full you could hardly close it.”
She and her book bag seemed to land on the Brady doorstep with a thud. “I wasn’t myself,” Sariah said. “I was a doped-up zombie.”
A challenging population
Once she’s inside Rocky’s Complete Auto Care, the red coat comes off, and the long hair goes up.
Sariah dreams of runways and photo shoots, but she has a distinctly practical side. After learning to help out in the garage, a family business operated by Brady, her son Matt and her fiancé, Troy Gallagher, Sariah enrolled in the automotive-technology program at the Knox County Career Center and graduated from high school early.
“I love it,” Sariah said of the shop.
“She can kick off the heels and get dirty,” Brady said.
Brady and Gallagher aim for a patient hand with the teens they’ve taken in. They try to be generous with attention and new experiences, whether under the hood of a car or on a ball field. “It’s trying at times, but the outcome can be so good,” said Gallagher, a youth-league baseball coach in nearby Mount Vernon.
The couple is fostering two other teens in addition to caring for two of Brady’s grandchildren, a 10-year-old in Brady’s legal custody, a 15-year-old girl whom Brady adopted two years ago, and Brady’s youngest biological son, 16-year-old Tristan. Counting Sariah, whose adoption was just finalized, eight kids live in the tidy Brady house.
“Those are the populations that are challenging to find families for — the sibling groups and the older children,” said Deborrha Armstrong, a spokeswoman for Franklin County Children Services.
Although teens 16 or older are about 15 percent of the county agency’s youths eligible for adoption, they represented just 2 percent of those adopted last year.
Still, child-welfare officials throughout Ohio see some progress on the broader teen front. In 2010, before the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services announced a new partnership with the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption and its Wendy’s Wonderful Kids program, 136 youths ages 13 to 18 were adopted through public agencies. The number of adopted teens was up to 162 last year, an increase of 19 percent.
“We used to be like most everybody else: We wanted to foster the kids zero to 6 or 7,” Brady said. “We did that, and then we got a few teens with them. And we realized that we’re better with the teens.”
The success of Sariah and others like her is “an example of why people should dig deep and try to find a way to open up their homes,” Brady said. “If kids want support, they should be able to get it.”
A nook of her own
It didn’t take Sariah long to perfect an eye roll. Tristan, her 16-year-old brother, provides a wealth of opportunities. On a recent Thursday afternoon, he was pressing for money, or maybe some of Sariah’s jewelry, to add to the pile of gifts he’d amassed for his girlfriend.
Brady isn’t sure whether to laugh or shoo Tristan away or dab at happy tears. She just knows she’s grateful for how normal it all feels.
“She’s been off the meds since about three months after she got here,” Brady said of Sariah. “She plowed right through it, said she wasn’t going back. She felt like she didn’t need anything to sleep at night. She was tired enough from the day.”
But Sariah knows she still has work to do, and she remains in counseling. She’s defensive and not always easy to approach. When a pitcher accidentally hit her with the ball, Gallagher said, “I thought she was going to charge the mound.”
She’s fierce about the love she’s found and is especially protective of Brady’s 1- and 2-year-old grandchildren. “I’d take a bullet for them,” Sariah says.
Matt Brady, Corena Brady’s oldest son, hopes Sariah can trust that the feelings are returned. “She’s good people. Well, not people — she’s our sister now,” he said as Sariah pitched in with a tire job in the garage. “We’ve got her back.”
Although she still helps occasionally with the family business, Sariah now works as a cook at a local restaurant. If the modeling thing doesn’t pan out, she’d love to own a small tavern someday. “A little nook,” she said. “I want my own nook.”
She also writes and paints. Although she’s done both for years, those passions seem fresh. “I wrote, but not like I do now. I painted, but not like I do now.”
So many things feel different when you have a family to lean on, Sariah said. Pieces of life fit, almost as well as the red coat.