Fall or Fly. Wendy Welch
had returned kids to bad situations in the past, amid prayers and tears, but this time they sought legal help. When every avenue and their bank account were exhausted, they tried to explain to the girls that this return was neither their idea nor their fault. But what the sisters heard was that they were going to live with Mom again—even though they did not want to. As foster kids often do, these girls, particularly the older one, knew that if they went back, it was just a matter of time until they would leave again.
“‘And the next place might not be like you. Please don’t let them take us back.’” Abby’s voice takes on a childlike pleading and a shaky edge as she quotes the older girl. “You don’t know heartbreak until you look into innocent blue eyes like that and say, ‘I’m sorry; we did everything we could, but we can’t keep you.’ And they heard everything you said, but they’re just babies, and they ask why you don’t want them anymore; did they do something wrong?”
When she says, “Everything we could,” Abby means it. The couple considered legal and illegal plans, yet in the end there was nothing plausible to do but to obey the law and return the red-haired sisters they had hoped would be their daughters.
It is not uncommon for birth parents to swing into action when notification of a pending adoption—which perforce includes termination of both parents’ rights—reaches them, says Dale, a social worker with forty-two years of experience.
“The act of adopting disturbs the status quo and moves people in strange ways—birth moms, grandparents, everybody. They come out swinging at the last minute over children who have been floating through the system for years. You can see them holding onto their last chance to get their kids back, or trying to extort a better deal, or maybe exerting that contrary side of human nature we all have. Whatever the reason, it’s common.”
“Get used to it,” Abby advises foster parents seeking to adopt. “There aren’t any rules in this game of human hearts. If we could have adopted those girls right then and there, the first time I saw them, I would have. If we could have made it to Canada, we might be living there now.”2
Heartbroken, the couple took a hiatus, then returned to fostering. Following seven months of bed rest, with “the congregations of three churches holding me up with their prayers,” Abby also gave birth to a healthy baby boy. He has an older and younger sibling by adoption.
“God’s timing is perfect. He brought me the right children at the right time,” Abby says, cuddling her youngest in my bookstore’s armchair as he plays with a pop-up book. Born with developmental delays and lifelong medical fragility because of his birth mother’s drug habit, he fostered with Abby and John from the age of six months. Again, the social worker placing him told them that he would be adoptable within the year.
Abby snorts, then sighs. “The whole time, I was on tenterhooks inside. Would they let it go through? Would the birth father appear from nowhere? Would it really happen this time?”
It did. At the age of two, he became theirs.
The birth parents’ substance abuse is the primary reason most children are in Coalton’s foster care system; substance addiction is also the biggest source of that push-me/pull-me stress as to whether children will become adoptable. Before adoption can occur, the birth parents’ parental rights need to be terminated. But though they are addicts, they do love their children and often go through multiple cycles of getting “clean,” petitioning for the return of their children, staying sober for a time, relapsing into addiction, and losing their children again. Termination of parental rights is meant to be a process of months, but it can actually take years.3
Voluntary termination is, of course, faster than involuntary. In his late twenties when interviewed, Hutton was adopted in infancy because he was in the right place—his mother’s womb—at the wrong time—her sophomore year of university in Coalton’s largest city. Hutton’s bio mom got in touch with DSS, and soon after his birth, a couple who’d been on the waiting list for an infant (and had checked the box “either” rather than “boy” or “girl”) became his foster parents. Even with Birth Mom on board for a swift, formal termination of her parental rights, the process still took six months.
An older couple with a comfortable income and a suburban home, Hutton’s parents weren’t interested in fostering; uppermost in their minds were tales from friends who’d fostered, horror stories similar to Abby and John’s, of court-ordered returns halfway to adoption or midnight pickups of frightened children. Hutton’s mom and dad had also had friends take in kids with special needs that the new parents felt insufficiently trained to meet. As Dale often says, such tales are rampant in the public’s perception of fostering, with or without good reason.
Hutton’s mom and dad wanted to start clean with an infant who would have no chance of being yanked from their home, so they waited for a baby whose mother was ready to sign off then and there; they were not interested in whether they’d receive a stipend for their newborn because he’d been their foster child first. Most healthy infants don’t receive state support, at least not for long; drug-free babies available for immediate adoption are rare, yet what most childless couples start off wanting. Private agencies charge fees just to let parents know such an infant has become available. (When anyone contracted with a state agency or working for DSS does so and gets caught, that’s a different matter.)
Hutton’s mom, a teacher, and dad, a lab technician, jumped to the head of a queue because money changed hands. This fast track is not open to everyone in Coalton. Would-be parents in Coalton who can find a way to be first when a baby is up for immediate adoption will do so; often this involves personal connections rather than money, as was the case in the story that opens this chapter. Those who can’t get to the top of the list by using these means can do so by fostering, while praying for adoption to become a quick option.
Hutton’s delighted parents conceived four years later, presenting him with a little brother. The boys grew up on the outskirts of the city where Hutton’s mom graduated from university, surrounded by brick houses and professional families who knew Hutton was adopted. Did that affect the family dynamic, internally or in the minds of the community? Hutton considers the question carefully before answering.
“Not the community, no. I mean, our church, our neighbors, everybody knew I was adopted. We lived in the suburbs, so it was no big deal. There were several other kids around me who were adopted. I wasn’t some anomaly challenging the social order, so to speak.”
Internal to the family, it wasn’t so much that being adopted didn’t make a difference as that the brothers didn’t care that it did, or allow it to. Dad was Dad. Mom found it harder not to favor the bio brother, but now that the boys are fathers to their own families, “We laugh about it when it’s just us. Yes, there’s a difference; we just don’t care that there’s a difference.”
As Hutton comments about growing up in the suburbs, he nods to his wife, Kim, who is sitting next to him in the bookstore while he tells his story. Kim is also adopted, but her childhood spent growing up in a back hollow of Coalton was very different from Hutton’s—and the next chapter in the larger story of adoptions in Coalfields Appalachia.
2
A Different Kind of Love Than I Wanted
Deep down, part of me always wanted to adopt. Watching my son grow up alone because we couldn’t have any more, it crossed my mind a lot. One day my wife said, “A friend is looking for someone to adopt her grandbaby because her son is in prison for fifteen years and the baby’s mom doesn’t want him at all.”
In my mind were fears like: Oh, they will get our hopes up and then change their minds, and there will be nothing but trouble the whole eighteen years from the biological parents, and I guess there’s no such scenario as a normal couple just wanting to give up a baby from an accidental pregnancy.
But word came that the dad wanted us to have this baby because he couldn’t take care of it, and the mom was a wild child living the fast life. She used drugs, and she just didn’t want the baby. It was Super Bowl night when we