E-Magazine
Adoption - The Heart of Family
Karen Z. Petley
Dressed in a powder blue pants suit with matching sandals, Stephanie is a young woman poised on the threshold of her life. As she tentatively leans forward pulling her long blond hair out of the way, she begins telling her story. “I was fourteen when I became pregnant. My parents were supportive of my pregnancy. I really wanted to keep my baby. I named her Amy Lynne and the adoptive parents have kept that name.” From a list of 7 or 8 profiles of adoptive families, Stephanie knew what family she wanted for her baby girl. While Stephanie has never met the adoptive parents, she does have contact through pictures and letters with her daughter. Proudly displaying a photo of the blond haired seven year old, Stephanie tells of how Amy is skiing adding wistfully, “I’ve never been skiing.”
Margaret, looking every inch like the college student that she is, tells of how she became pregnant when she was 17. The baby boy whom she called James is now three and has been renamed Jeffrey by the adoptive family. Margaret has a totally open adoption arrangement and Jeffrey is able to visit at her family’s house. This allows Jeffrey and his maternal birth family to have a special relationship as well as permitting interaction between the two families. This relationship provides a large extended family of support for Jeffrey.
Married with a toddler daughter, Jen, now 32, relates how at 20 she found herself pregnant and unmarried. She was working and really thought up until her eighth month that she would be able to keep her baby. After exhausting all her options, it became painfully clear to her that she would not be able to support herself and her baby. She turned to adoption. Like Stephanie and Margaret, she knew immediately from reading the profiles whom she wanted as the adoptive parents. “It really spoke to me what they had written.”
She did meet Pat and Jim before the adoption. “We talked and cried.” She and Pat made a promise to each other: Pat promised to always allow Matthew to have contact with Jen and Jen promised Pat that once the baby was in their home that she would not try and take him away. The only regret that Jen has is that due to the medication she was given for a Caesarian delivery, she was too woozy to place the baby in Pat’s arms when they came for him. Today, she keeps in contact with Matthew through letters, pictures and videos.
These are the facts of the birth mothers’ stories. What they can only hint at is the pain and tears that are behind the decision to place these children for adoption. There were misty eyes in the relating of these stories. As Carole McMahon, Executive Director of Genesis phrases it, “It is not that these birth mothers don’t want their children; it is that they want something more for them.” Each of these women and the respective adoptive families are pioneers in opening up the adoptive process, enabling the children involved to have a more complete picture of who they are. Sitting in the cozy living room of her present home, the one where she grew up, Pat tells her story of being the mother of two adopted sons.
On the TV cabinet rests a current family picture of Pat, her husband Jim and their two sons, Chris, 16 and Matthew, 10, Jen‘s birth son. Chris was adopted through a private adoption. After ten years of marriage, Pat and Jim were seeking to adopt when they heard of a young unmarried high school couple who were looking to place their baby. Pat describes the pre-adoptive process as a roller coaster of waffling back and forth about whether they wanted to do this or not. Then the birth parents were back and forth about placing the baby for adoption. While adoptive parents are spared the actual physical pain of giving birth, it is Pat’s belief that this emotional pain acts as its own form of initiation into the parenting process. The family portrait shows clearly that the alchemy of family has taken place. These are parents, spouses, children, brothers that stare out of the photo. All four share a German background and Pat says that Chris’s temperament is very much like Jim’s. An interesting thread is that both of the boys’ birth fathers were adopted themselves. In Matthew’s class at school, there are five children who are adopted. It is a part of the natural flow of their life like sports, music, school, church, etc. In fact when given the chance to add their voice to the family story, both boys could not figure what was to be said preferring to let the family picture do the talking.
Echoing Pat’s observation of the similarity between son and husband’s personalities, Joan, another adoptive mother, jokingly says that she sometimes questions her husband’s whereabouts 10 plus years ago, so striking are the shared mannerisms. She and Louis are the parents of a ten-year-old adopted son and are in the process of adopting two more children, a six-year-old girl and a seven year old boy who share the same birth mother. While Joan and Louis are Caucasian, their children are of African-American descent. This trans-racial feature of the adoption has not been a factor.
Joan says, “He fit right in with our family. None of the transitional stuff ever happened.”
Their son who was 6? when he was adopted and is now 10 has been praying for a little brother. It was instant siblings when he connected with the seven year old who is soon to be his brother. Joan said that the biggest threat that could be issued to the boys is that they would have to spend time apart if they did not listen, creating instant compliance. For Joan and Louis, it made sense to adopt rather than to do all the fertility testing. As Joan explained, it was also more age appropriate for them to be parents of an older child as opposed to an infant so they chose to adopt through the child welfare system. They were not having much success until they found JoAnn White, Program Director of the Jewish Family Child Services. Because JoAnn believes that there are children who need families and families who want those children, she facilitated the process for them.
Joan sums up her story, “We are a happy couple, we are good to each other and this has translated into our son’s life. Adoption like marriage requires commitment. If you are inclined to get up and walk out every time that life gets tough then neither marriage nor adoption will work.”
For Diane Klocko and Brad Boone and their two Russian Tzars, Nicholas, almost 8 and Alexander, 4 ?, becoming a family led through Russia. Brad and Diane had been on local adoption agencies’ lists for five years with no response. Discouraged, they heard about Adopt A Child in Shadyside. From the beginning, it was the right venue for them with the whole adoptive process taking nine months. They viewed various videos of different children who were available for adoption and knew from the beginning that Nicholas was their child. To formalize this “knowing” into actuality required two trips to Russia and much paperwork and waiting. Recalling a vivid memory from the first trip to Russia to meet their son, Brad tells of being outside the baby home where Nicholas was being cared for. There was snow on the ground and Diane and Brad were talking to Nicholas in English with very little response from him. When the attendant came for him and began to speak Russian, his little head jerked right around and he brightened up considerably.
Another memory that surfaced for Brad was the vision of the other older children in the baby home gathering around him and Diane desiring to be adopted as well. It is an image that disturbs him today. He wishes that he had the means to gather them all up and find homes for them. He and Diane made good on that desire at least for one more child returning to Russia for a second adoption. In the intervening years between Nicholas’ adoption and Alexander’s, the process had been changed becoming more formalized and bureaucratic. The government had realized what was going on and wanted more control. Still with the agency’s support network, there were no real roadblocks to the adoption. While he and Diane did not have this experience, Brad told the haunting tale of some adoptive families at the airports running into old Russian women who would try to take the children from their arms crying, “our children, our children.” It seems that the government was not the only observer of what was taking place.
Today, the Boone boys are every inch the young American princes involved in baseball and hockey as well as every other aspect that goes into an American childhood. The succession of pictures shows them blossoming into two happy healthy children. The bond between them that was evident in one of the early pictures showing Nicholas with his arm protectively around Alexander remains intact today with enough allowance for typical brotherly exchanges.
Another family that found foreign adoption to be right for them after considering the other options was Jan and Rocky. Jan said that they had considered adoption for awhile but were just uncertain if that is what they wanted to do. Her opinion is “If you are thinking about it at all, then you need to do it. Rocky and I are so blessed to have these two little girls in our lives.” It made sense for them to go the foreign route because the percentage of in vitro fertilization that is successful is so small and for the same amount of money with adoption, there is 100% results. With Pennsylvania’s laws skewed to the rights of birth parents and their ages working against them as far as being selected for a domestic infant, Jan and Rocky turned to Families Across Boundaries to adopt their two daughters from the Ukraine in March 2000. The girls named for their two grandmothers, Rose and Ellen were at the time two and three, ten months apart.
One concern that Jan and Rocky had going into the adoption was the health of the girls. While Rosie and Elly did have minor developmental lags due to having been abandoned, they are fine now and caught up quite quickly. Even though the laws and procedure that govern adoptions in the Ukraine differ from those in Russia, the end results are the same - two healthy happy children at home in America. The words that attach themselves to adoptive parents, Lauren and Greg’s story are instant family. From the beginning of their marriage, Lauren knew that she wanted a large family. The only detail that was fuzzy was how that family was to come about. When the usual method did not result in any children, she and Greg turned to adoption. They were devastated when a baby adoption fell through in California but continued the adoptive process connecting with Genesis. Carole McMahon’s philosophy is “Come volunteer with us. That way, I’ll get to know you - the better to match you with your child.” Lauren followed that advice. At the time, Genesis had a pregnant teenager in residence who had developmental lags that they needed someone to work with. Because of her nursing background, Lauren volunteered. When it came time for this girl to place her baby for adoption, she wanted Greg and Lauren to be the adoptive parents. As desperately as they wanted a child, they knew that this was not the right one for them.
Lauren with two of her now four adopted children sitting on her lap recalls the phone call that changed her life, “It was Friday, January 4th , I was home sick and Carole called. She said, ‘I know that you are waiting for an infant. Let me tell you about three children, ages 4, 3 and 2.’ After I hung up, I laid there and could not get those children out of my mind. I called my sisters and my friends. When Greg came home, I told him about Carole’s phone call and he just looked at me. We went through our normal weekend including going to Mass on Epiphany Sunday. And still those children were on my mind. Sunday, after church, Greg said, ‘You need to call Carole back and get more information.’ And so I did on Monday.” What Lauren found out was that they had one week to get ready for their new family. While they had a nursery ready, they certainly were not prepared for three older children and needed help. That is what their extended families did. They painted, rounded up clothes and furniture. Greg’s mother and her sister stepped in to provide the childcare that would be needed to enable Lauren to continue to work 3 twelve hour shifts a week.
On “Gotcha Day,” the day Lauren and Greg “got their children,” Jordan, Dougie and Alyssa came to their new home. Full siblings, they were reunited after a six week separation in foster care. Shortly, thereafter, the birth father’s parents who had been caring for the older sister, Ashlee released her for adoption. And Greg and Lauren added her to their family. Today, there are reminders all over their house of the lives of four active children ages 7, 5, 4 and 3. Lauren says it is by far the hardest thing they have ever done but it also the very best. One mystery remained in Lauren’s mind as to how this instant family came about. She said to Carole, “You never asked if we wanted to adopt these children.”
Carole replied, “I didn’t have to. I knew they were your children. All I had to do was plant the seed.”
Ensuring that those planted seeds take root and grow is an extensive network of support people from counselors to agency personnel to medical and legal professionals. The concern that Jan and Rocky expressed about the health of a foreign child is a valid one. Sharon Cowden, M.D. who does a number of medical adoption screenings each year explained that alcoholism is prevalent among mothers from the former USSR making fetal alcohol syndrome among the children a real concern. She also talked about the success of foreign adoptions that she has witnessed and the richness that comes from the merger of cultures.
While the legalities of adoption can be hair splitting at times, it is the blessing of being a part of the process that adoption attorney Deborah L. Lesko finds the most rewarding. Having been baptized by the tears of grief of the birth parents, she gently but firmly makes the point that birth parents do not “give their babies up for adoption” instead they unselfishly place them for adoption. Adoption when all is said and done is about all the individuals involved trusting each other enough to do what is best for that particular child. From those tears of joy and grief which are the true currency of adoption, families are forged. Contributed by: Lauren Sabo
