National Adoption Day

For me, today is a bigger holiday than Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter rolled into one. It’s a day to celebrate my four blessings and to express my gratitude to the Edna Gladney Center. My babies are now in their late forties, early fifties, and adoption has changed a lot in those fifty years. Our story would not be possible today.

A confession: I never gave much thought to having children. I just figured it would happen, and when it didn’t, I wasn’t that upset. My ex-husband, now gone from this world, was desperate to be a daddy. So we applied for adoption, and we were an odd couple before we even got there—I was Protestant, not very active, and he a non-practicing Jew. We went to information sessions, etc., filled out the paperwork, and settled in for a long wait.

Less than thirty days later, the people at Gladney called to do a home visit. I stammered that I didn’t have curtains in the baby’s room yet, and the reply of “The baby won’t know” went right over my head. That night we rushed to borrow a crib and a changing table and some clothes from friends. The very casual inspection was the next day, and the day after that we had a baby—Colin David. Poor Colin—it’s a miracle he’s as wonderful as he is, because he landed with two people who knew zilch about babies. To this day he swears I caused his Crohn’s by feeding him undiluted formula.

Seventeen months later along came Megan who taught us more than we wanted to know about colic. Today she’s a healthy, vibrant woman, but you’d never have anticipated that from the baby who drew her little legs up and screamed in pain. Took lots of love and hours of walkng, walking, walking.

Gladney policy was that if you have one child, they would help you complete your family; at two, your family was complete. Joel and I tried to be active at Gladney—we invited residents for holiday dinners, and we often went to talk to groups of girls who wanted some idea about the people who would raise their babies. Joel, gregarious and generous, would say, “I don’t care what color your baby is. Give it to me, and I’ll love it.”

So one day when Megan was seventeen months (and much healthier), Gladney called and asked what I was doing. I said the usual—I wasn’t working, although I think I was writing, and I had two babies. They had a mixed-race baby—Eurasian (half Chinese, half Greek). I said the world’s dumbest thing: “We’ll come look at him,” kind of like, “Are the tomatoes fresh today?”

I know from Jamie’s wife and others that women of his age find him most attractive—he’s happy, playful, handsome, fit, all those good things. He was not a pretty baby. Skinny, forceps marks on his face, a straight Afro. I named him immediately, and he came home with us the day after we first saw him. By now, the two older ones knew where babies came from: you went to the adoption agency and brought home a baby. I had three under three and three in diapers. Those were the days

Gladney promised to round out our family with one more dark-headed baby (Colin and Megan were blonde, Jamie dark like Joel). It was three years before we brought home Jordan, who they told us was half Hispanic. Not until she was in her forties did she do the DNA thing and find out she is 98% northern European.

So there we were—a family of six. Today we are a family of sixteen, with seven grandchildren in the mix. To me, we are an example of how the joy of adoption spreads. No, none of the four have ever gone looking for their biological parents. I know accepting such is the modern attitude, but I am pretty fierce about the idea that they are, though grown and out in the world, my babies.

The big blessing is that they truly love each other—and me. They can’t wait for family get-togethers, so this weekend we are anticipating Thanksgiving. The Alters are known for being a bit rowdy when they’re together—somehow each of them married someone from a two-child family, so sometimes we catch spouses with a look on their faces that says, “How did I get here?”  And I have contemporaries who are a bit wary of the confusion, but I love every noisy minute of it.

Today, Edna Gladney’s mission is still the same—creating loving families—but their work is entirely different. I am so grateful to Gladney for letting us be one of their special families.