Trista was alone when a stranger spotted her picking through a garbage can in downtown Lewiston.
The man took her to the police station and an officer delivered her to her mother.
The next day, the 2-year-old was seen again, walking by herself downtown. She was filthy, starving and dotted in cigarette burns.
Trista Sibulkin learned those and other details reading police reports and medical records from the first two years of her life, before the state took her away from Lisa Hanson and placed her in foster care.
She wanted to understand.
Lisa was 15 when she had Trista. Lisa’s own childhood was rough. She was poor and hooked on drugs.
But then Trista, a 21-year-old nursing student, had a baby of her own and her mother’s excuses stopped working.
“Once I became a mother, I just couldn’t imagine it,” she said, bouncing her 8-month-old daughter on her knee in the living room of a Fairfield home.
“Who would harm a baby? What kind of mother doesn’t protect their child? I would protect her with my life.”
When Trista got pregnant last year, relatives compared her to her mother. They were both young, both unmarried, and the physical resemblance – long, thick hair, round face, stocky build – was undeniable.
The comparison was the ultimate insult.
Trista has spent her entire life trying not to be like Lisa, a former drug dealer and prostitute currently serving the end of a prison sentence for the latest of many drug-trafficking offenses.
“We may have shared a body for nine months, but that’s it,” Trista said.
Until recently, Trista still believed that her mother, who went on to have seven more kids, could change, get off drugs and stay out of prison.
Any hope left in April when Trista saw a story in the Sun Journal about Lewiston’s history with crack cocaine.
Her mother’s face was plastered across the front page. During a prison interview, Lisa talked about the likelihood that she’ll do drugs again and serve more time.
“She is my mother. She gave me life and I am grateful for that,” Trista said. “But I don’t want anything to do with her. She’s destroyed people’s lives, and I’m glad I didn’t grow up with her.”
Trista was taken from Lisa in January 1987.
For the next three years, she only saw her mom during supervised visits with her foster family.
She was 5 when the Sibulkin family in Phillips adopted her.
Lisa never showed for the last supervised visit. She has since told her daughter that she didn’t go because it would have been too hard to say good-bye. Trista’s theory: Lisa was too stoned.
At her new home, Trista threw rocks on the lawn while her adoptive mother was mowing. She pulled out her own eyelashes and played war with her Barbie dolls.
Her parents sent her to a center in Colorado for troubled kids and had divorced by the time she returned to Maine. When her adopted father was convicted of molesting a child, she was again placed for adoption. Trista ended up with a strict Christian family in Texas.
She remained there – without any contact with Lisa – until she was 17 and ran away to Colorado.
It was there that she did drugs for the first time. She started with pot, then experimented with cocaine and crystal methamphetamine.
“It was the crystal meth that scared me,” she said. “It scared me because I liked it.”
Terrified of ending up like Lisa, she gave up everything but marijuana.
“My whole life, my driving force has been not to be like her,” she said. “Drugs are so important to her, more important than anything else.”
Trista graduated from high school in Colorado. By the time she was 18, she was ready to return to Maine.
“I used to play over and over in my head what it would be like if I saw my mother again,” she said.
When she was younger, she imagined becoming famous, running into Lisa and saying, “Ha, ha, see what you missed.” As she got older, she simply wanted to ask, “Was it worth it?”
Lisa’s stories
A visit to an old foster mother led Trista to her biological grandfather in Turner. She met Lisa there in an unplanned reunion. It was disappointing after so many years of anticipation.
Lisa looked old. She was pregnant with her eighth baby. She had dark circles under her eyes and her skin sagged.
“It was like life had just torn her apart, like she had no soul,” Trista said. “I didn’t feel like I belonged to her in any way.”
Lisa’s stories started that day. There were things Trista didn’t remember, things she wishes she never found out.
Trista claims her mother told her, for instance, that she was conceived in a hallway while Lisa was high.
“That’s stuff I would be ashamed to tell my kids,” Trista said.
She said her mother blamed the cigarette burns on knocked-over ashtrays, and the fact that she was found wandering in the street, twice, on a bad baby sitter.
Trista stopped believing everything Lisa said.
Still, she went back and forth between wanting to be near her mother and wanting to stay away.
“I guess I wanted some sort of acceptance from her, but at the same time, I was struggling with the fact that I totally disapproved of her lifestyle,” she said.
Trista was shocked when nine months after her return to Maine, her mother was back in prison. She had hoped her presence would be enough incentive for her mother to stay out of trouble.
It wasn’t. Lisa has been behind bars ever since.
Homemade cards
Lisa, through her prison caseworker, declined a phone interview for this story.
She is due to be released in September, and she has already asked Trista if she could live with her and the baby when she gets out.
Trista laughed at the idea.
“I was like, I don’t think so,'” she said. “I want people in my daughter’s life who are good examples.”
Trista hasn’t been to the Windham Correctional Center since Christmas. Her mother sends her a letter or a homemade card about once a month. She reads them quickly, then throws them away.
“They have no value to me,” she said.
Trista has met two of Lisa’s other children: a 12-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl who live in Lewiston. Their stories have only made Trista more angry.
She has chosen not to look up the other five. She hopes they’ve moved on, and she doesn’t want to disrupt their lives.
Lisa has given her the name of her father, who she believes lives in Lewiston, but Trista won’t try to find him, either. She isn’t curious. She also isn’t convinced her mother gave her the right name.
For now, Trista is focused on making a good life for her own daughter, Makayla.
Shortly before she found out she was pregnant, Trista was arrested, her one and only time, for driving with a suspended license. She was caught after her boyfriend chucked a potato out their car window and someone called the cops to complain about littering. Trista said she had no one else with a license to drive her around.
The baby’s father recently broke up with her in a letter from the Maine State Prison, where he is serving time for burglary.
She was disappointed for her daughter, but she knows it is probably for the best.
Trista plans to continue working for a mental health rehabilitation agency while taking nursing classes at Kennebec Valley Community College. She hopes to buy a house and graduate in three years.
“Maybe it’s like a fairy tale dream, but I want a family,” she said. “I want my daughter to have a family.”
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