Five siblings, having lived through horrible situations and heartbreaking separations, have been reunited, adopted, and are living—and thriving—with The Moffitts in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Jared Moffitt and his wife Kayla became a couple in 7th grade. She was a cheerleader, and he was a “band nerd.” Kayla asked Jared if he liked her via a note with a yes and no choice. Like the crushing kids in George Strait’s 1995 hit “Check Yes or No.”
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The two grew up in a “one-stoplight” town in Arkansas and married in 2011. They worked as youth pastors for approximately a decade before deciding to foster and adopt. And, while they imagined bringing only one or two children into their home, God had much bigger plans for this very special couple.
Jared and Kayla adopted five siblings four years ago, and life has never been the same.
Lashay, Arya, Willow, Mia, and Drew—four girls and one boy—are 17, 13, 10, 7, and 6, respectively. Removed from their biological home when their mother could not care for them, the siblings lived apart for three years. That was perhaps one of the most challenging things about being in foster care, particularly for Lashay, who had become a mother figure for the younger children.
Lashay shared the horror of losing her baby brother. She was only seven and recalls doing CPR in an effort to save him. “That's when I started becoming a parent for them. I was 7 years old making bottles. We didn't have baby milk. I mixed it with water,” she told Kens5 News.
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The children remained in the home for two more years before Social Services removed them after another sibling was exposed to crystal meth and nearly died. Though initially placed in a foster home together, Lashay continued to provide a lot of caregiving to her siblings, and tragically, she was sexually abused by the foster parents’ son. She was twelve at the time.
This time, all five were sent to different homes. Lashay said, “It was so hard for me. I was all they knew. Our biological mom wasn't around, so I was their mom. I thought I lost my children.”
It was three years before Lashay and her siblings met Jared and Kayla. Though Kayla and Jared had planned on fostering just two, the couple decided they couldn't split them up after being shown a sibling group of five and seeing how close the kids appeared in photos.
The children were scheduled to move in just as Kayla’s father died from COVID at 55 years old. Now, the support system they’d counted on was lost, and they were hurting. As Kayla began her parenting journey from a state of “brokenness,” she and Jared recognized that the children had experienced far more than their share of trauma.
Several of the children have been treated for mental health diagnoses like Bipolar Disorder, RAD, Childhood Schizophrenia, and more. Kayla educated herself on how best to support her children and build healthy family relationships. She became a Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) Practitioner, which she says has made all the difference.
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Kayla shared on the AdoptUsKids blog, “I have learned so much about trauma and attachment, and about how much we must extend grace to one another. For one of our daughters, we were her 31st home. That meant we were her 31st set of caretakers, her 31st room, her 31st set of rules and morals and ways to live. How do you encourage a child to trust you and learn to love you when they’ve been told ‘goodbye’ 30 times before?”
Jared said “The trauma they've endured, it doesn't just go away, it manifests in unique ways every single day. From our youngest, who's 6 now, and our oldest, who's 17, that trauma from their past life shows up, and when it shows up, we're their parents. It's our job to take care of them.”
Despite the challenges, though, the Moffitt Family of seven is doing well and thriving. In addition to learning how best to care for their children and loving them every single day, Jared and Kayla are sensitive to the cultural needs of their African-American children. Recognizing that their hometown in Arkansas was very white and lacked the diversity and opportunity for the children to interact with people with black and brown skin, they searched for a community that would offer their family more diversity.
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They settled in Charlotte, and that move has contributed to the healing and happiness of the family, too. Charlotte has become the family’s true home. And, regarding her brood, Kayla said, “You hear that kids are resilient; that's very true for ours. We have five of the most joyful babies I've ever met. I don't know how you can go through what they went through and still smile, but they do.”
While Mom and Dad are still figuring it out as they go, they do it with love. “Just like they didn't know how to be together, live in a house, we didn't know how to be parents and becoming parents to five overnight proved to be challenging,” Kayla said. “But we constantly give grace, have conversations about all the hard things, the scary things, cheer each other on and forgive. Every day is a new day.”
“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” James 1:27
h/t: Kens5
Featured Image Credit: YouTube/WCNC
Hally is a freelance writer, blogger, and mental health advocate. A former school counselor, Hally works for a nonprofit that distributes tax dollars to mental health and prevention education providers that serve her county's kids and families. She's a contributor to a devotional and two essay collectives, and she shares resources and wisdom regarding parenting teens, mental health, faith, adoption, and more at http://www.hallyjwells.com where she strives to "Dig Deep and Reach High." She and her husband have three adult children and one rascally beagle pup. Hally loves travel, her book club sisters, personality tests, and a great glass of iced tea.