The Rewards of Reaching
   Out To a Child in Need

By Emily Horton

“It’s often three years before families actually begin the adoption process after they start thinking about it,” said Melissa Clause, executive director of Partners in Adoption. After 30 years of working with adoptive parents, she knows that for most people, adoption, like pregnancy, can be a terrifying process, loaded with questions and uncertainty. Those who commit to adopting a child, however, know that it’s also an experience filled with trust, love and profound gratification.
     Today’s adoption programs enable prospective parents to consider more than just the conventional domestic adoptions. Programs now specialize in placing international children from countless countries across the globe, children who fall into categories in less demand with waiting parents, and children in fragile medical conditions or with special needs. Always, according to Clause, the aim is to find the right child for the right family.
     Frustrating problems with infertility often drive the majority of parents to consider adoption; still others view adoption purely as a gift — providing a child in need with a loving, caring environment he or she may otherwise have been denied. Invariably, it’s a gift that returns the favor tenfold.

Open Arms and Open Hearts
In Morrow, Ga., Jeannette and John Murphy have made adopting special-needs children their way of life. Their 4,000-square-foot home houses a clan of 23, and though the space is tight, close quarters don’t seem to dampen the prevailing high spirits.
     Eighteen of the Murphy’s brood were adopted, ranging in age from 3 to 36. Most suffer from Down syndrome, while a handful of the others have substantial neurological damage and a few of them live with both. Three of the family members in the house are the Murphy’s biological children (they have a total of four), and John and Jeannette are proud parents of them all.
    
Adopting so many children wasn’t always the plan. By 1983, when the couple adopted their first child, they already had two biological boys at home. It was after failing to find jobs in their preferred fields working with special-needs children, that the Murphys decided to adopt one.
     “At the agency, they asked us which disabilities we wouldn’t accept,” Jeannette Murphy remembered. “John and I looked at each other and said, ‘We can’t turn down any of them.’ ”
     Their daughter Shannon, now 28, had severe brain damage. Over the years, the Murphys took 22 more special-needs children under their wing; five have since passed away. “Those have been the absolute only times in my life that I doubted what I’d chosen to do,” she said somberly.
     The Murphys don’t pretend the path they’ve chosen is easy; they’ve watched their children undergo heart surgeries, colostomies and tracheotomies; they’ve seen some of them suffer and live in heartbreaking pain. Yet every day is proof that the hardship is worth it. Jeannette, who now home schools all of her children, wakes up every morning to kids who shower her with hugs, and who file into the kitchen bound and eager to make their own eggs and toast. (Breakfast can last two to three hours this way, as all the kids take their turns at the stove.) She watches one fall down and the rest clamor to bring him to his feet; she watches them solve problems with the kind of creativity and interest that would melt any mom’s heart.
     “Our goal was to help them have as many experiences that every other child would have, and strive to do as much as any other child could do,” she explained. “To watch these kids grow and see them use the potential they have, I’m constantly amazed at how capable they are, even the severely handicapped ones. We had high expectations, but they’ve gone way beyond what we thought they would ever do.”
     Eventually, Murphy said, she and John hope to build an additional house on the property, close by but sufficiently distant so that three to four of the older kids can live independently among themselves. “If you give them wings to fly, they’ll fly,” she added.
     Her words apply to adopting on any scale — adopting even one special-needs child can yield a lifetime of rewards for the right family. Some private agencies, in fact, have created specialized programs that match adoptive parents with special-needs or medically fragile children. Partners in Adoption’s Dare to Love program, for instance, has placed close to 200 children since 1996 at a minimal cost to the adoptive parents. Although the agency places mentally and physically disabled children with adoptive families, its definition of special needs also extends to include older school-age children, those of minority races and sibling groups. “Most of our ‘special-needs’ kids aren’t what people think of as having special needs at all,” Clause noted.
     Two-year-old William Watkins doesn’t seem an obvious candidate for the Dare to Love program. When his adoptive mother Camille, who had been planning to adopt another child, got a call from Clause looking for willing parents, she wasn’t sure what to expect. She already had 1-year-old Michael, a Native American-Hispanic baby she had adopted at 2 weeks of age. The 6-week-old baby that Clause described had microtia and a polyp on his bladder. The polyp has since disappeared, and though he has experienced minor hearing loss, William’s ear can be surgically repaired when he’s older.
     The brothers, now 2 and 3, are inseparable, Watkins said. “They’ve given us overwhelming joy and happiness, and a love and bond we never imagined.”

Staying Close to Home
Adopting domestically, as Watkins did, is still one of the most popular options in America, and there are waiting lists to prove it. Yet, in recent years, horror stories (most bearing a few grains of truth) about adopting domestically have led many families to consider options elsewhere. Extensive wait times are one reason, as the average wait is one year, sometimes even less, though some adoptive parents may wait several years. Watkins waited 10 months for her son Michael and two weeks for William.
    “I tell everyone it’s a misnomer that you can’t get a baby quickly domestically,” Clause said. “You can adopt an out-of-state infant in three to six months.”
     Others oppose the open format of most domestic adoptions, fearing that after months of paperwork and waiting, the birth mother will decide, in fact, that she wants to keep her baby. Still others dread looking over their shoulders for years, hoping birth parents won’t decide to reclaim their child. In reality, the birth mother has a 10-day span after the birth in which she may decide to keep her child, but no longer than that. It’s a fear Clause said that is very real for many adoptive parents, though she has seen it materialize only rarely, in part because Partners in Adoption avoids working with birth mothers who don’t exhibit a strong commitment to adoption initially. “If their plan doesn’t seem clear, we’re not going to get involved,” she asserted.
     Many parents enjoy the accessibility an open adoption provides. When Watkins adopted her first son, she went through an open format. Since then she has kept the lines of communication open, in great part so that her son will have a grasp on his heritage when he gets older. “The disadvantages [of open adoption] are that you take on the trials and troubles of the birth family, because you feel so obligated and in debt to them for giving you this huge blessing and miracle of life,” Watkins admitted. “But we’re happy knowing she’s doing well, she’s happy knowing he’s happy, and we’re hoping that this will give Michael a connection.”

Long Distance Love
“I’m from China!” Julia Mathis’ perky little voice chimed from the background. Outgoing and energetic, she’s come a long way from almost three years ago when Susan Mathis and her husband brought their tiny, reserved daughter home from an orphanage thousands of miles away. They are just one adoptive couple among a rapidly growing number who are looking outside the United States for a child in need of a loving family.
     “Adoption was always something we wanted to do,” Mathis said. “We had trouble getting pregnant, but then we had two boys back to back. Life got busy, and we forgot about adoption for a while. Then I got to 40, and my doctor asked if we wanted to do something a little more permanent about birth control.” Mathis laughed, remembering, “I burst into tears and said, ‘I want another baby!’ ”
     Rather than have another biological child, they opted to go the adoption route. “We knew we had enough family to go around,” she said.
     She could have chosen to adopt domestically, a choice some would certainly deem less complicated, both in the short and long term. Instead, Mathis and her husband considered how incredibly in-demand Caucasian children were and how many international children were starving for families.
     “My husband’s heart went out to China,” Mathis said. “There are thousands of orphans over there who have been abandoned and have no family connections at all. We wanted a child who wasn’t guaranteed to be adopted.”
     The cost of international adoption — approximately $20,000 plus travel expenses — put them off only temporarily. China, incidentally, is generally the least expensive country from which to adopt a child, while Eastern European adoptions may enter the $30,000 to $35,000 range. Still, Mathis recalled, “It was very overwhelming for me.”
     Mathis found a substantial source of aid from her family church, the first place most adoptive parents turn to for fundraising. Others apply for grants or benevolence funds, and with the application of the recently passed Hope for Children Act, all adoptive families are eligible for
     a $10,000 tax credit during the year of adoption, with the option of spreading it out over the next five years. “I’ve never known a family who has really wanted to adopt who hasn’t been able to come up with the money,” Mathis noted.
     Like many internationally adopted children, Julia was initially withdrawn on her new soil, emotionally that is. Physically, she was behind for her age, as well, significantly underweight and barely walking at 19 months of age.
     “Studies show that children are physically and developmentally behind one month for every three months they spend in an orphanage,” explained Mathis, now an advocate for the private adoption agency Hope for Children.
     This statistic is, unfortunately, one of the obstacles preventing potential adoptive parents from adopting internationally. Children who spend their early, formative years in an orphanage often fall behind the rate of development of their peers — stunted by limited interpersonal interaction and physical exercise, they have comparatively little opportunity to grow. Many experience speech and language delays; others, denied of conventional parental attention, may become emotionally detached. And because of the lengthy adoption process, which typically lasts somewhere between nine and 15 months, most internationally adopted children are no younger than that, Clause said.
     “Infants are in constant communication with the mom; they’re soothed, and then they’re fine,” Mathis said. “Lots of times in an orphanage, there may be no one to respond. Some children keep crying; others get angry; others become more withdrawn. But there’s a missing link because their needs aren’t being met.”
     The fear for many adoptive parents, that their newly adopted child could have difficulty establishing an emotional bond with them, isn’t an irrational one. More unreasonable, Mathis said, is to ignore the possibility of having attachment issues with an internationally adopted child at all.
     The good news is that young children are resilient, and while there is no guarantee that these children will rebound and adjust thoroughly, many do.
     Julia began taking giant steps almost immediately. At 4 years old, she’s freshly graduated from speech therapy school and primed for kindergarten in the fall. “She was walking all over the place within two weeks,” Mathis recalled fondly. “She caught up so quickly, every month it seemed like we had a different child than the last month.”
     Emotionally, Julia has adjusted in her new home as if she’d never known another. “She did very well attaching to me,” Mathis said. “And she loved the boys immediately,” alluding to her biological sons Austin, 9, and Alex, 11. “It wasn’t as easy when she found out she had to share mama with them!”
     The fact that Julia doesn’t have her mother’s eyes or her dad’s smile matters little to her parents, but, as any parents considering international adoptions should do, they entered the process aware of a number of issues that could rock the boat in the future.
     Though the option of adopting from Eastern Europe now makes it possible to raise Caucasian children, most international adoptions will result in biracial families. “If you’re adopting transracially, you have to be OK with the fact that your child will always look different from you. You may not care, but she may have problems with it when she gets older. It’s definitely something every adopting family should be aware of,” Mathis noted.
     International adoptions are also closed, meaning that the adoptive parents’ contact with the birth parents is nonexistent. In many cases, the birth parents’ identities are not even known, and unless the infant is found with a note left by the birth parents or guardian, all traces of the baby’s history may be lost. The no-strings-attached format may be a boon for many adoptive parents, but it also carries a negative aspect.
     “Especially with girls from China, there’s no connection anywhere,” Mathis explained. “They’ll never know their moms’ stories; there are huge unanswered questions they’ll never have answers for.”
     Mathis knows Julia will have questions eventually that she won’t be able to answer, but she’ll try to fill as many holes as she can. Mathis and her husband hope to take Julia to China before she enters the awkward middle school years, which can help children like Julia tackle any adoption issues they may have before puberty makes life even more challenging.
     For now, Julia crawls into her mom’s lap, one of her favorite seats in the house. “Julia’s definitely as much a part of the family as if we’d given birth to her,” Mathis said. “We really feel like we’re the lucky ones. She brings so much joy and love into this family. I think that’s the miracle of adoption.”

An Emotional Journey
Just around the corner in Dacula, Laurel and Tim Kinsey followed a similar path that began nearly five years ago. With two biological sons, Landon and Evan, now 9 and 11, the Kinseys weren’t initially in the market for another child. “We thought we were done with two,” Laurel Kinsey remembered.
     Then she picked up Colin Dye’s “Hope for a Hurting World” and perused the chapter on adoption. “I started to realize how many kids were out there without a mom, or a family or a home. I had a close friend who adopted a child from China, and ever since they got back, I wanted to be around her.”
     China was high on the Kinseys’ list since most orphaned children there are female and getting a referral for a baby girl is a reasonably sure bet. So in April 2001, the Kinseys consulted their adoption agency, paid their application fee, underwent four home studies, and started compiling papers, documents and completing form after form for their dossier — INS documents, health reports, FBI and local fingerprints among them — that, upon completion, would be translated and sent to China. Kinsey doesn’t recall the process fondly. “It is so time consuming,” she said.
     But generating the paper trail, which typically takes three to six months to compile, wasn’t the most agonizing step. “The waiting time was really tough,” Kinsey recalled. Though the process is gradually becoming more streamlined — the waiting time between sending a dossier to the Chinese government and receiving a referral for a child now varies between eight to 10 months — the Kinseys waited it out for 14.
     In December of 2002, they met the arrival of the referral packet from China with euphoria and then whisked their sons out of school early. The boys excitedly stared at the photo of their new sister Emerson, and the family celebrated later that night with Chinese food, ecstatic that, finally, they had a face to pair with this baby they’d already begun to love. Two months later, on Valentine’s Day, Tim and Laurel boarded a jet for China. Accompanying them was their travel group from Hope for Children; greeting them was a Hope for Children representative who would guide them through the country for the next two weeks.
     In a bustling hotel lobby in Changsha, the Kinseys met their new daughter; her tiny,
     10-month-old body bundled in five layers of clothing and sporting a rather serious countenance, as interpreted by her dad. After nearly two years, she was in their arms.
     “A lot of people say that it’s not the same as giving birth, but I think it is, now that I’ve done both,” Kinsey said. “They’re still total strangers when they come out. The second I met my daughter, I felt the same way.”
     The remainder of the trip was an emotional ride. The Kinseys’ guide drove them into Zhozhou City, where Emerson had been abandoned on a Bank of China sidewalk. Then they visited Emerson’s bright, well-kept orphanage, and later translated the note that had accompanied her when she had been found. Tim and Laurel listened achingly to the translation, which included Emerson’s date of birth and offered thanks to the gracious parents who would provide her with a home.
     Once home, Tim chronicled his and Laurel’s experience, pouring their collective emotions onto paper. Closing, he noted, “During our trip, so many of the Chinese people would see her with us and say, ‘Lucky baby.’ While I’m grateful for the compliment from our daughter’s fellow countrymen, I know in my heart of hearts that we’re the lucky ones.”
     International adoption still has its obstacles, and it’s certainly not for everyone. The piles of paperwork, the waiting, the cost, and the uncertainty are enough to dissuade a number of families from adopting their child from overseas. The uncertainty of adoption as a whole is even enough to deter some couples from bringing a child into their lives at all. The ones who made the jump would argue, though, that every bit of frustration and anxiety they encountered on the journey was a small sacrifice for the joy they’ve received in return.
     “It’s not risk-free by any means, but neither is having your own child,” Mathis said. “When you adopt, there’s a lot of fear involved. It’s definitely a step of faith. I think having fear is normal, though, and you get the love of your life [in return].”