PLEASANT VIEW, Utah (ABC4) — A Utah woman is searching for her lost siblings, after they were raised in foster care separately. As they become adults, she wants them to know that she is hoping to have a relationship with them if that’s something they want.

Theresa Maldonado spent time in foster care as a child. “My mom did not raise me,” she said in an interview. 10 years ago, her mom lost custody of other her children, who are Theresa’s half-siblings. The state gave their mother chances to reunite with her kids, but ultimately, they went into foster care as well.

When her siblings went into the system, Theresa and other family members attempted to become foster care options for them. “But at the time, I just wasn’t ultimately in a situation to take on four kids,” she said. She has a son of her own, who was eight years old at the time, and her now husband was also recovering from a brain tumor back then.

The attempts from her other family members to house the children also didn’t work out, and so they went into foster care.

“I haven’t seen them since,” Theresa said.

In 2017, she did a DNA test so that her siblings could find her that way if they wanted to, but nothing has come of that.

“As they’re coming to age of being 18, they are older, some of them, I really want to be able to make that contact, and I figured it would be a lot easier at this stage in their life, just with privacy laws,” she said.

On Tuesday, she shared a post on social media, asking for help in looking for her siblings, and someone reached out to tell her that they were adopted by a family in 2020, and that they live in Cache Valley.

“I don’t want to be disrespectful to anybody, and their family– I know, like, the kids have been through a lot of trauma as a child, and I’m sure in the time since then, and there’s probably a lot of emotions, but… I’ve always felt bad that I couldn’t take them in, because I know what it felt like not to have your mom be there for you or pick you,” she said.

Theresa knows she understands only part of what they’ve been through. She said that in her case, her mom chose someone else over taking care of her. “I felt very unloved and unwanted. I wanted people to step up and fight for me, to feel like I mattered. At that time, my grandparents were able to take me in, so in a sense I had that, and they [her siblings] did not. Nobody was able to step in, and so I can’t imagine how that feels.”

Theresa added, “I’ve kind of lived with some guilt that I wasn’t in a place in my life to do that at that time, but I also hear that they’re together, so that really makes me happy, and just knowing that they’re loved and with another family that hopefully makes them feel safe is really what matters.”

Three of her four siblings are legal adults now, Theresa said. She added that she feels like she’s invading their privacy a bit, and if they don’t want a relationship, she understands.

“I just want them to know that if they want a relationship with someone in their biological family, I’m here, my husband and my kids are here… We love them, and we think about them and talk about them and just hope to one day have a relationship if they want it,” she said.