Reflections of an Adoptive Parent

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What My Children Taught Me, Some of which I Didn’t Want to Know!

When my husband and I were discussing marriage and children, we naively thought we would have two children biologically and adopt two children. He had worked with inner city children and I had read articles about Dale Evans and Roy Rogers adopting children from around the world (now you can probably guess how old I am). It never occurred to us that life would not work out as we had planned.

Both of us were in our 20’s and had grown up with only one sibling, but our parents came from large families. We knew that we wanted more than one child and I started reading about adoption and in particular about international adoption. Back in the early 60’s adopting internationally was not widely practiced nor was adopting children of a different racial background. Families were still mostly adopting children that "matched". Older children or children with disabilities were not even considered adoptable by social workers and families. Fortunately that attitude has for the most part changed.

The families I had read about were exceptions. They had adopted large numbers of children (often more than 20) and they all appeared to be happy and successful. Some did later divorce. My husband began to get nervous as my definition of a "large" family grew from 4 children to 12 children with the specification that they come from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. It should be noted that this was difficult for some of our extended family to accept. I am not sure what they were most nervous about, the number of children we hoped to adopt or the fact that they would bring different ethnic backgrounds into the family or both.

I thought we would be one big happy family and the more children the merrier. Well, we did become a relatively large family with seven children, a mixture of biological and adopted children from different ethnic backgrounds. We have been blessed with wonderful memories, but we were not always happy and there were times when we despaired. I think our most difficult challenge was not parenting physically disabled children, after all, we always knew where they were as teenagers, but parenting a son who has Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. We never knew where he was as a teenager or what he was doing except that it was probably illegal. The police came to my door so often they started calling me "Nance", a nickname I have always hated. This son taught me the joy of denial.

When our youngest son Tam arrived from Vietnam in 1975, at approximately one year of age, he weighed nine pounds, and he was our sixth child under ten. Our oldest child announced that if one more child came in the front door, she would walk out the back door! There was also a lot of muttering about the growing quantity of dishes to be washed. Our beloved son Tam died this spring following major surgery. This same daughter, as well as our oldest son and three other daughters, gave eulogies and tributes to their brother that will be forever etched in my heart! Adoption works!!

A few weeks after we moved to Ottawa in 1980, Tam suffered a massive stroke that paralysed the left side of his body. We were told he might live two weeks, then two months and finally, if he was lucky, maybe two years. Tam died two weeks before his 30th birthday. His illness very abruptly moved us into the world of the disabled. When I asked the neurosurgeon how other families coped, he commented that the father usually left and the mother had a nervous breakdown. This was not encouraging news.

Entering the world of the disabled was like moving to another country, where we had to learn another culture and language. Because our son came from Vietnam we had no biological background history on him. His condition remained undiagnosed during his lifetime, although I have always been convinced, especially after travelling to Vietnam, that the chemical Agent Orange was a contributing factor.

We had to learn to be strong advocates for our son and to never take no for an answer when requesting treatment and services. We learned the necessity of getting answers in writing. We also had to learn, after much trial and error, to give our non-disabled children the time and attention they required especially when they were teenagers. We were not always successful, particularly the year Tam was in the hospital and we were with him daily, often returning home exhausted and impatient. It was very difficult, when we were dealing with death and dying, to care whether or not someone’s lipstick went with her new outfit. However, this was important to a 14-year old girl entering high school.

Shortly after Tam was discharged from the hospital, we were approached by Naomi Bronstein to join her and a few others to start a program to bring children from developing countries to Canada for life saving surgeries, mostly open-heart surgeries. We commented that we did not know anything about heart surgery, but we sure knew hospitals. Naomi had helped start "Healing the Children" in the United States when she was living in Guatemala. After moving her family to Ottawa, she wanted to start a similar program in Canada. "Heal the Children Canada" was born, and we eagerly awaited our first child from Korea, a seven year old boy.

Jin Soo was a delight and quickly settled into our family. His only English word when he came was "Spiderman". However, with the help of a Korean dictionary and our dear Korean friend John Kim, we were soon able to communicate. The first morning, I prepared rice and gave him chopsticks. He looked puzzled and demanded a bowl of cereal and a spoon, while the rest of the family ate the rice with chopsticks. Our children quickly took over the "Canadianization" of Jin Soo, although I don’t think he ever really understood why the little red radio he brought from Korea only broadcast in English and French in Ottawa.

Jin Soo had successful heart surgery, but unfortunately suffered a stroke during surgery. Jin Soo spent a month in the hospital and then two months in our home before he was well enough to go back to his family in Korea. He is now a young man in his twenties.

At one point, my husband was with Tam in the emergency ward and I was with Jin Soo in intensive care. I called home and asked our son to take the casserole from the church out of the freezer and put it in the oven for dinner. We came home to discover we had hot carrot cake with icing dripping all over the oven!

We went on to have seven children come to stay with us from Korea, Ethiopia and the Commonwealth of Dominica, usually for about six months. As one of the Directors of Heal the Children, I also escorted children (along with medical supplies) to and from Korea, Thailand and the Commonwealth of Dominica. My first trip with Naomi Bronstein included taking medical supplies to a refugee camp of 50,000 people, many of who had leprosy in Northern Thailand. With the exception of my honeymoon, I never travelled outside of Ontario. All this was done on a volunteer basis. My husband and I spent our 25th wedding anniversary in Dominica, bringing back two young boys, one for kidney surgery and the toddler for genetic testing and surgery. My husband kept assuring everyone on the plane that we were not adopting the boys.

When my husband turned fifty, he announced that he was too old to adopt and that no agency would consider him because of his "advanced" age. However, he forgot about older children. Our youngest daughter was featured as a "waiting child" at an adoption conference in Ottawa. The first time I saw her picture, she was described as a "mildly retarded child with cerebral palsy". She was gorgeous. It turned out that Cassandra’s eyes had never been tested and she was in fact, legally blind. Our oldest daughter saw her picture and commented that she had Cassandra in her day camp and she was a foster child living in a group home and we had better do something about her. After all, we had remodelled our house to be wheelchair assessable, as if it was that simple.

I, of course, got very excited, however, my husband, the voice of reason, was a little more cautious. Just let me inquire about her, I begged. Every time you inquire about a child, he stated, they move in. Nevertheless, I inquired the next day at the CAS and was told her foster parents were going to adopt her, so my husband relaxed. A year later, when we were having dinner with Tam’s teacher, she was describing the new children she would have in her class the following year. I recognized Cassandra from her comments and exclaimed she was a little girl I knew and my husband dryly remarked that he was in trouble. Her foster parents had not adopted her.

My husband tried to convince me that we were too old, (we were turning 50 and he may have been right), that we had three challenging teenagers and three children in college and university and one salary. And then he looked at me and stated that no child should spend his/her life in foster care. That was my green light! It took one year of lobbying to get our daughter legally free, but one week before her tenth birthday, she moved in and became our seventh child.

Cass, who is now 27 years old, went on to graduate from high school with honours and win three scholarships to Algonquin College despite becoming paralysed during a surgery when she was 17 years old.

With Cassandra, we have a totally open adoption; It just made sense to us. At first I was nervous, but my husband had no qualms. I have to admit I was even jealous at times, especially when her birth mother showed up at a Christmas concert and Cassandra was so excited to see her, that I could have been wallpaper. However, these feelings quickly passed. Once Cass figured out what to call everyone, having foster parents, birth parents and adoptive parents in her life was not confusing to her at all. We did not have shared parenting.

I believe strongly in open adoption and wish we had been able to have had a relationship with the birth families of all our adoptive children. I do believe that each situation is unique and openness should be flexible and assessed on an individual basis. We must always keep the best interest of the child front and centre. The reality is that our children’s birth family, although now part of our extended family, often have different life styles and values than our own.

So here we are 41 years later, having raised seven children, who are now 27-40 years old and fostered seven children through Heal the Children Canada. Because of our children, we have made wonderful, lifelong friends from all over the world, especially through sponsoring refugees for the past 25 years. We have travelled extensively in South-east Asia taking supplies to orphanages and refugee camps. We have become advocates for children waiting for permanency, for the disabled and for chaplains who work in prisons worldwide. We have watched some of our children carry on our legacy of helping and working with people in difficult circumstances and watched with sadness as one son continues a lifestyle outside of the law.

Do I have any advice to give? Surround yourself with sympathetic, supportive people, laugh and pray a lot. Many situations are not funny at the time, but if you can find some humour in them later, it makes life more bearable. Would I do it all again. You Bet!!!

About the Author: Nancy lives peacefully (most of the time) in Ottawa with her husband Douglas. At the moment they have no adult children or pets living at home, but that could change tomorrow. Although working full time between the Ottawa CAS in Adoption Disclosure and the Adoption Council of Canada where she manages the Canada's Waiting Children Program, they try to escape to their cottage on Georgian Bay as often as possible. Nancy is on the Board of the International Prison Chaplains' Association Worldwide and serves on various committees at her church. She and her husband sing in their church choir as well as the Christian Chorale, a multi ethnic (mostly Chinese) choir that performs Christian music. They both continue their work with refugees and will visit East Timor in 2005 where a 50 foot children's peace mural is being painted with the support of the money donated in memory of their son Tam.