Foster Care and Adoption Series - Beyond Biological | Ep. 1 "The Reason"

in the heart of Appalachia you'll find there's a community of foster care and adoption that can be both familiar and unfamiliar to the world beyond to the coal fields through in-depth interviews with the doc needs I was three days old when I was officially adopted two days old fifteen two years old I came home forever I 2080 authors I did a book called fall or fly I wanted to share the story of all these caregivers social workers I was a social worker for 25 years the last 23 years I think I'm now in my 42nd year a trauma therapists have been working in the field of therapy for a very long time probably 30 years mothers who place their children for adoption I was 16 years old when I placed Jaden up for adoption I was 20 years old when I gave my child up for adoption foster care and adoptive parents we have adopted five kids in foster care I'm the legal guardian we became a family when Malin was 2 we adopted Jayden when she was 2 days old we are adopting our nine-year-old daughter Molly through foster care a unique and honest look into the different ways families are made is painted amidst the beautiful backdrop of the Appalachian Mountains while these personal journeys are isolated to rural America there are universal truths and emotions that people experience and feel as they navigate the world of foster care and adoption the voices from Appalachia will resonate with others around the country and beyond there is a connecting thread of hope inspiration resilience and love first time I remember late feeling like unconditional love was with my dad join them through their hardships and their triumphs and to go beyond biological you a collection of voices from authors foster children foster parents and social workers in Appalachia candidly share about how they found themselves in the world of foster care from heartbreaking to heartwarming from trauma to healing these stories will open your minds and hearts [Music] my name is Wendy Welch and I run the Graduate Medical Education Consortium here in Southwest Virginia I also own a bookstore and every once in a while I get a funny notion to write a book I did a book called fall or fly the strangely hopeful story of foster care and adoption in Appalachia my husband and I had always talked about how someday we would open a bookstore but someday had never had any real timeline to it until the day we moved to a small town and saw this beautiful big old house and we looked at each other and said is the bookstore that we were going to run someday someday is now and so we settled in and created a bookstore in a town of 5,000 people and 11 years later we're still here telling our story my name is Ken and I'm the pastor of the northern United Methodist Church in Virginia I work in behavioral health field and in the foster care adoption field years back when he brought to us a storytelling circle and the purpose of this storytelling event was to help increase people's awareness of the need for screening and the need for good education about treatment of cancer and it came to mind that perhaps an event like Wendy's storytelling conference might be a helpful helpful thing for foster parents or persons thinking about foster care I used to be a full-time storyteller and I used to be on the boards of the Scottish in the u.s. storytelling organizations and work a lot with professionals and over and over it was beginning to see the practical applications of using storytelling and in-ceiling practices the whole topic of foster care and adoption is something people are uncomfortable with talking about they don't have a good awareness so there's some stigma attached to foster care and adoption it's very similar to the stigma that we have with mental illness or substance abuse or suicide those are topics that are difficult for people to talk about and in handle after the cancer storytelling circle project was all done he basically emailed me and said could you do that with foster parents I said probably not because of all the HIPPA laws and all the other you know well the the secrecy that surrounds being a foster parent how would how would we do that and he said well let's let's think about how we can shape this so he came up with the idea of doing a blog because a blog is anonymous we called it a storytelling project and she was collecting some stories and we decided that the upcoming Appalachian Studies Association conference being so close to us we decided that the best thing to do would be to launch the blog there and just a couple of nights before my phone rang and this woman with a South African accent says I have read what you're doing with this blog on foster care and adoption stories is there a book associated with this project now I had to laugh because the pastor the first thing he wanted to do when we got this group together which he wanted to produce a book so when the South African accent on the phone said if there's not a book associated with the project would you like there to be the only thing I could think was it like the pastor had called in his god card and prayed for this book to happen so I told her that I would check but I thought that would be fine and then I called up the pastor and said that's really cheating dude that is so totally cheating to pray your way into a book deal but he was pretty happy about it the book wasn't directly related to our project it was I like to think an inspired or originated inner end in this in the post adoption project I got in trouble because I skipped school because I wasn't really having much fun things to do and my consequence for skipping school and not having many fun things to do was to sign up for a class so I took a class on making jewelry I started liking it like the first day I did this at school and I just found an image and it cut it into a piece of wood and I made it for Jimmy my name is Jimmy I'm a professor of English teach English teachers I'm the legal guardian of Gabe along with my wife Laurel I'm Gabe I'm 16 and I first went to foster care when I was 18 months Laura and Jimmy were my foster parents from then and then I went back and forth between my biological family and then when the social workers called us up you know hours before and said we're bringing the kid by and my wife couldn't be here so I was the only one here and and they just handed him off to me and I think we needed to bond right at that moment I consider Jimmy like a second dad to me the fact that he was the first person I saw when I came to this house and the first thing he did was play with me I think that really helps me feel normal in this house so when I started writing fall or fly I thought oh this is gonna be so interesting because my PhD is in ethnography which is folklore so you spend a lot of time going out and listening to people's stories and then writing academic papers about them and I had also been a journalist so I really really enjoy listening to other people's stories and then putting them back together the way people want them told so follow fly I thought was going to be fun we started with the social workers and they were the bulk of the people that I talked to and once they knew everyone info on fly has a pseudonym they blew like volcanoes they had so much to say and they started in a pattern that's familiar to any journalist who does this kind of work they started with the negatives and they talked for a long time about everything that was wrong and then this story started to turn to kind of a but you know this has got some hopeful parts to it and they moved from there their tragedies and angers and failures to their triumphs and hopes and plans my name is Carol and grimore I'm retired from living in the magical mountain so far southwestern Virginia I was a social worker in an educator I'm Roberta and I was a social worker in child welfare for 25 years I have adopted two children from the child welfare system I grew up in western Pennsylvania and attended an undergraduate there and then I came for the mountains of North Carolina to attend graduate school my name is Kay Weitzman I'm originally from Eastern Kentucky I've been a social worker LCSW probably the last 23 years and that's how I became acquainted with the foster care system here in Southwest Virginia [Music] my name is Molly and I'm nine years old I came home forever on July 16 2008 mm-hmm my name is Katie I am 30 years old and I stay at home um and take care of our nine-year-old daughter Molly who we are adopting through foster care my name is David I'm 35 years old I've been in the Army for 11 years now and I work see I'm bad at this already good we met back in 2008 we were both on active duty military we met at a bar he was with his friends and I just was hanging out with some of my friends and we ended up talking and you dared me to ride a bull and if I fell off I had to give him a kiss and if I stayed on he would have to kiss me I stayed on so he had to kiss me and a week later we were dating and six months later we got married and we've been married it'll be ten years in September my real mom loves you and that's the one that didn't really really feed me a lot and then my second one was my nanny she also didn't see me the third one was because I split up because of my behavior and because my behavior towards my brother it wasn't bad it was just that me we didn't meet each other in trouble the last one is because they didn't want me more no more the system works for the little ones who are easier to find placements for who are easier to find adoptive families and who tend to be able to transition into their new lives but for the older children who have come out with significant trauma and are harder to love they have the system has failed them and they get moved from placement to placement because people don't understand what they need or they can't give them what they need and I think sometimes the system just puts more drama on them I'm gonna talk about how you felt when Dakota was adopted to know you um I was about eight or seven you would've been seven when Dakota was it up good he was sexy verse 7 when the other feel me to go down some of me I felt very sad and push me that was her brother the good poem that I was living in another few children which were girls all of them in the house was or than me Eric I'm into me mother was two and a half when she came in to care for the first time she was placing the carry Jude and neglect and suspicion of abuse her mom was young when she had her and wasn't able to take care of her she was also around people that she necessarily shouldn't have been around and around some situations that most people would not have put in a small child around and just as kind of in danger she was also not being fed was another one of the really big reasons heads why she's so small now the parental rights were terminated when she was four and a half and so she's been in care for four and a half years as a child that is eligible for adoption we are the eighth move that she's had one of the earmarks of Central Appalachia is we're almost synonymous with being coal fields one of the things we say around here is a soundbite when people ask us is we don't discuss coal with anyone we don't go to church with because it's such a hot topic right now I started clean collecting actually in seventh grade because my science teacher he wanted us to do something with pennies and then he told us what the most expensive penny was and I was like no no all penny is one cent and he was like no there's my coin album these four down here which were more Appalachian there are coal scripts so and the coal mines they would pay the miners in the coal script which they were only able to use in the mining company that they worked for owned they didn't get actual money so it was basically worthless they were getting paid worthless and they jacked up the prices real time the extraction industries that arrived in places that are rural it forms a different kind of poverty than inner-city poverty but in rural areas you get extraction colonization people come in they buy the timber they buy the coal they buy the uranium and they hire people at good wages to get it out but they don't build schools or hospitals or roads beyond what they need we actually have an example here in town called the dummy line because it's a railroad that was built to go back to where the coal mining was done and just spur back out it doesn't go anywhere that passengers could go the sole purpose of that track was to get the call this one says 1950 so it was really like the I guess just the height of coal mining when all the miners were going to Appalachia before they went to Ohio or wherever after the coal mines shut down and stuff we don't recognize ourselves as victims in the sense that we want people to feel sorry for us or give us handouts but we really get ahead when people talk about it's your own fault because a lot of what we had going for us was taken from us with nothing being left in place except the people who worked there got good wages while I was going there's no infrastructure in that colonization system that lack of infrastructure has bloomed into a desert if you like instead of planting a garden that receded itself they took out what they wanted and left behind literally nothing that's very hard to explain to people because it was in the 50s and 60s and 70s that that would have taken place it's like well what do you do now you know so what that was so long ago yeah but our grandchildren are still bearing the effects of that so it's very difficult to stay in Appalachia and have a professional career if you're not in nursing or education or the prisoners and that leads to two things it leads to high unemployment but it also leads to a doughnut hole in your popular the people who turn 18 to 24 they might go to college here but then they're gonna leave and they're gonna get jobs somewhere else and then when they retire in their 50s and 60s they're going to come back here so you have a literal doughnut hole in the population from about twenty four to forty five if you take your twenty four to forty five year olds out of your population the depth of services you need to run your community are surprisingly shallow I heard stories that when I first went to them I was scared of Laurel eventually I get closer to her and she would take me down to the creek and protect and she pretend to be a horse and I was like she'd splash around in the water and it made me laugh and I was I know we got we became really close and I would consider her like a second mom to me hi my name is Zach I'm 21 years old and I was put into foster care when I was 11 or 12 and I was adopted when I was 15 hi my name is Joel and I work at our local hospital as a histology technician my name is David I work in IT over at the local university here and Dave and I have been together for going on 13 years I believe is that right so we have adopted five kids in foster care and ages are 22 21 642 23 23 sorry sup and we have one grandkid we have a foster grandchild as well Dave and I met at a local proud of it 13 years ago 13 years ago yeah well funny enough I was actually there to meet somebody else and then I think you introduced yourself to me first right then because I knew I knew our mutual friend so chased him down a little bit he was not committed he didn't want to be with me but no sure that wasn't what it was he was he was emailing to the wrong the wrong email on August 7th was their first date that's right I remember but anyway so that's one of our anniversaries besides when we got married so which is what's that day March 22nd 21st 22nd I get him confused cuz we went to DC to get married it wasn't legal in our state at the time so Leslie Wendy season actually on that very first date we talked about wanting kids what our thoughts were about wanting and at that time it was abstract we didn't know how it would happen what would happen and here we are 13 years later five kids a grandchild and couldn't be happier right now I am a senior at a college in North Carolina and I study psychology and social work and hopes to pursue a PhD and learning and conditioning the reason I was removed from home is because my biological mother and biological brother both suffered from severe addiction I remember the date actually April 27 2009 she tried to commit suicide by overdosing and like chugging it down with alcohol and stuff like that me I was like eleven and I called the police because I remember the exact occurrence she asked me for the black phone instead of the white phone we had two different landlines so I gave her the black phone white backs downstairs and I did that thing where you like hit the talk button and then hit pound and you just listened to the conversation because I was nosy I'm still am nosy but getting back to the story um I remember her talking to her therapist she called her therapist and said she's not coming back for any more therapy sessions that she's going to be sleeping for a long time so I kind of understood or had like a kind of intuition of what that was what that was so I called the police and she was taken to the hospital got her stomach pumped and then the next day I was put into foster care forty years or so ago we saw families who were financially unable to care for a child and that may have been the primary reason for placement in a foster care setting it used to be in the 80s and early 90s that children were turned in for social care by their teachers they saw bruises they saw neglect they saw trouble and they could see it in the kids and at this point what we're seeing the primary issue is particularly opioid substance abuse now its police who are doing drug rights and they call social workers to ride with them or they get in the middle of a drug-induced situation and they find out that there's a kid in danger and they call the social worker in this community we see a lot of substance abuse there's domestic violence and there is mental health issues so they all are very interval I think in the our area one of the main reasons well two pretty big reasons one is substance abuse and the other is just poverty there's sort of this misconception that because of families poor they can't parent their children and that's really not the case at least my experiences that there's a lot of support to try to help that family provide for their children if they're open to receiving services people have a lot of children and not always jobs or to parents to work and feed the kids and a lot of times that's a case for a removal and you know it's a little bit of that snowball effect is what I see that things start to get worse and worse so you've got parents who maybe are maintained sort of living paycheck-to-paycheck and someone loses their job and then they become depressed and then they turn to substances and then things snowball from there substance abuse is so prevalent in our part of the world here and there's a lot of different arguments about why begin to see an increase in oxycotin drug abuse and the foster care system was becoming overwhelmed with a large number of children that's definitely becoming prevalent everywhere I know that there have been an increasing number of infants that are coming in to care because of that Carolyn came into care due to drugs and neglect which against a was when she was 18 months and so that was our first really really young child that we had really really young child so the Roberta calls us it's a couple of weeks before Christmas Roberta is our social worker I was just all excited because of like so she was covered head to toe in scabies it was so bad it was in her hair it was it was everything so she literally come to us you know the kids come to us with trash bags [Music] came to us with the clothes on her back which we were told to burn as soon as we got to our house or throw them away so I've got this beautiful little blond-haired blue-eyed girl and I've called David I'm like Dave go to Walmart pick up whatever you've got to pick up so we can take care of this child two and a half to three hours later he's coming home and I'm sitting here with this baby because I don't want to get her off my lap because I'm like she has bugs and I don't want bugs at my house and she's just looking at me these beautiful blue eyes and she's completely fine with it we've never we didn't have anything we hated for that age because what we were dealing with before was its teenage teenagers so you don't need like diapers and all the other things that go with us so we didn't have a crib we didn't have any lar seats or anything so that's why it took me a little while because I think I tried to get prepared for everything everything and I'm just like hurry when we got Carolyn I was in high school and I remember coming home and seeing this little girl just in the house I was like there's a little girl here does everyone know that there's a little girl here at first it was like weird adjusting it was a running joke with the dads that I was gonna be the only boy and I was gonna be the only one but that wasn't because I'm selfish that I wanted to be an only child it was because I was afraid that wasn't gonna be a good big brother like how my biological brother wasn't the best brother I was afraid that I was so I had a lot of fear towards that and I hope I'm doing a good job I think I'm doing a good job is being the Big Brother we were singing an opioid epidemic in our own area maybe 10 years before it was recognized as an issue and on the national scene I heard a brilliant discussion of this at the Appalachian Regional Commission meeting in Pittsburgh where one of the commissioners said Appalachia is the canary down the mineshaft what happens to the rest of America happens to us first the year that the opioid crisis began to impact foster care in our region what it would clearly have been around 1990 to 1995 by the time people see what the foster care opioid driven crisis is doing it's gonna be because they're in it not because they saw an example in Appalachia it's like the crack addiction in the 70s and 80s and the the African American community was burning and knew what was happening to them appealed for help very articulate well-thought-out arguments nobody listened now you look at the opioids and how it mirrors the crack epidemic and America was a huge apology to the african-american community over the crack and epidemic but we're gonna pay for it because karma has come back in the shape of the opioids and our inability to form any realistic policy because we didn't draw on the lessons from the people who knew what was happening we talked to some psychologists we're in more trouble than we know Carolyn and Leah are biological siblings from both father and mother and Leah was different so biological mother found out she was pregnant while she was in jail so Leah actually got a very good start to life because when she was in jail she wasn't using so she was in jail then had to go to rehab and then they call us and they're saying you know we be prepared you're gonna have to take this baby Michael no we're good we've got Carolyn and they'll take care of her we'll figure it out and so Leah did go into another home when she was I think like two months and it it didn't work out at that home and so they called us again and I was like well how can you say no it's a biological sister how can you sing now I remember Dave and Joel with Leah the youngest sister there were hesitant about getting her there like we are not sure if we should or not and they asked for my opinion like they have with every child and I was like yes take her she shouldn't be separated from Carolyn like take her so we we told him again we talked we talked we talked and so we decided we would go ahead bring her in the fold and originally why we didn't take lien at the very first time we were kind of a little bit still learning with Caroline and was a little bit overwhelmed still just learning everything and so we weren't sure that another one we wanted to dedicate our time to Carol and she had her own problems and we wanted to make sure that she was taken care of we were fine as a family of four everything was going great June comes around and they say we've got a little boy that needs a home and Dave was absolutely not our house is chaos and I was like well you don't have anywhere to go and so we talked with the social workers but of course you know they call us and they say we need an answer by five o'clock they call you at 3:00 so we're talking too much her stuff doing all this stuff and finally I asked his social worker I said well what does he look like so she sent us she takes this a picture and then Dave said no I thought I'd go look that you add you went and picked him up yeah when they got Aidan it was different because I had not interacted with young he was like a baby I had no idea how to interact with this like living chunk of like meat and I was afraid like with Carolyn Leah that I wasn't gonna be a good big brother but I remember when they were like he's being adopted I was like sweet another child gets an awesome home like I'm so thankful for the kid his adoption was finalized very recently and we're very thankful to and happy to like welcome the little dude to the family in 1999 I became director of a community-based program called Kent care and became aware of how many people in this nation we're grandparents or other relatives for raising grandchildren and they're racing children for a lot of the same reason that the foster parents are raising the children they weren't getting paid money for the system kinship care providers touched a part of me that not a lot of folks I've worked with in the past had so I began writing a book and it took me 16 years to finish this story and I wanted to share the story of all these powerful caring caregivers with the world so it took a long time the story is I'm bound on grandma they're from North Carolina who her daughter goes off in the middle of the night in a reality that does happen a lot of the information from that book was created from parents who left their children for one reason or another and then the children and the caregivers are left with all the emotionality that comes from what happened to the pier my first foster family started out fantastic they gave me everything like a kid needed like their own bedroom like school supplies better clothing I got to hang out with friends and stuff like that I spent two years with my first foster family and about halfway into it towards the latter part religion became a very very significant thing in the family it always has been but around that part kept growing and growing and before I was put into foster care I didn't really know what religion was I had heard it a couple of times biological family was never really religious so I had no exposure to it and ultimately when they discovered that I'm gay found out through like the Internet they were not supportive of it at all they did what they could to reform me they took me to several churches tried to pray the gay away and America should know praying the gay away does not work so I was taken to several churches and I was taken to counseling therapy sessions and the latter part was just not safe for me because where God out that was gay everyone found out at school it was just it was a mess everyone looked at me differently because I'm gay and ultimately tension just got so high that I was put into respiratory care and respiratory care is when the foster child is removed for an allotted period of time for like a vacation or something that the foster parents can go on and I remember the foster family that I was put with was not my dad's it was actually a different family and I remember loving them so much and them being supportive even of the fact that I was gay that I was like I want to live here and things did not work out with them and that's perfectly okay I don't remember the reason why it didn't work out I just remember that there was some like legality that was weird and then my social worker knew about Dave and Joel and my parents and he was like perfect match we're putting him here and that's how I ended up with David persons who have experienced trauma her kind warm and patient approach to a difficult subject is unique we welcome you and thank you for being with us things so hello everybody want to use Jules I'm Jules Alvarado and I consider myself a peace consultant I teach people how to be kind and loving and compassionate and caring why are we called to serve what is it about us individually that has this calling to serve wounded others why not fold clothes in a department store why not work as a teller in a bank there are a lot of things we could do to make more money with a lot less stress than those of us in this room so there's something about serving that needs of humanity that I believe you and I are called to do I'm trained as a trauma therapist and have been working in the field of therapy for a very long time probably thirty years I'm a foster mom and adoptive mom mother of four biological kids and doing my best to leave a footprint of love in this world I would invite each of you for just a minute to ask yourself right now what is your purpose what is the purpose that you do what you do because when we can't answer that we don't have a direction if we're not clear about what the purpose is moving toward a moving target just takes our life and does this with it when we know what our purpose is we move toward that [Music] moving into this I think when Laurel first said to me could we be foster parents I was a bit unsure like how she but visualize being a foster parent I thought okay we're gonna have a kid come in for two weeks here and and take care of them and be nice to them and then we're going to hand them off and it's going to be a transition sort of period if it were up to me I think which it wasn't in any case I probably would have said give me a kid and let's just adopt him and take care of him for the rest of our lives there and but it wasn't that easy and to tell you the truth I wanted my wife to be happy and I really just loved her and when to be with her but part of me wanted to have another kid around I also have like a son who is 27 and so I I was not averse to doing that foster parenting I think people Foster for a variety of reasons they they want to give back to the community they feel like they have something to give to a child when you talk to foster parents they tend to fall into four categories the first is people who are unable to conceive so they get in they adopt they get out the second is people you might call empty nesters people who have raised their children and they want to do it again the third group is people who have been foster kids so they've been on the dark side they know what it's like they want to help and the fourth one is people who are expecting some sort of payoff I can range from having a child who will love you to a paycheck to darker things that take up a lot of bandwidth in people's minds about 25 years ago I had been working in the field of therapy for about 10 years and I was offered a position in child welfare working in this system called foster care which I knew nothing about and I had no interest in internet it was easier to not be reminded about what some people do to our children but I was offered a phenomenal position and within about the first few years I decided that instead of just working with these children instead of seeing these children in their families I needed to become a foster parent or really understand it my ex-husband husband at the time was a pediatrician and I was a developmental specialist and so we thought we've got this thing down was I prepared to be a foster parent I think I was fairly prepared to be a parent but to be a foster parent knowing that there was like a legal component to it was not always easy for me I think I felt more and more prepared as we went along I never really dreamed that the first kid that we got we would still like be intimately connected with like sixteen years later I have a daughter was in Colorado and she has a daughter who is 16 she was pregnant unwed mother and we helped her care for her job she's the most fantastic mother you ever want to meet she has one son she's married her husband's a nurse and she's imminently ready to have another child and she works in early childhood if you think your own children have a special place in your heart grandchildren oh my goodness they didn't light up a room when when they come in they light up our room they write up our lives when they come inside and I think that's another reason with our grandparents raising grandchildren I know what it means to be a grandparent and to be responsible for the care of your children we decided to add to our family back in Colorado I would say which is 2010 we were stationed there for a while unfortunately though I started going through some pretty serious health issues that needed to be addressed and that postponed it and we had always really talked about adoption we'd occasionally had talked about having biological children but I'd been part of the system when I was a child especially during my teenage years experienced physical abuse verbal abuse psychological abuse emotional abuse neglect my mom died at 41 and breast cancer she was diagnosed when she was pregnant with me I decided that I really went into a faster probably in college I was getting my degree in psychology and I started to learn more about Foster and adoption and kind of like kind of inquiring about it a lot more I don't know it just felt like a natural thing for us to kind of well for me to kind of go back and be able to help another child get out of that situation and to have safety and to have those things that I didn't get to have as a child and we've had it told we're moving a minute to Virginia that's when we said we're actually gonna make this happen now everything's good to go and then since we got here we've got sold in a few months later sorry the process I think I'm now in my 42nd year of professional work a lot of what I do is supervised and the program development and work with staff who are delivering direct services to persons and who are helping families and children make the best possible adjustment in life I came up with a spiritual heritage and was interested in doing some religious vocation and happened to meet someone who was a clinical social worker and I was so intrigued by the work they were doing and how effective it was with with persons that I decided to pursue a degree in social work more and more I I didn't really feel need to have my own child we I have tons of nieces and nephews so I was more about her child and somebody needed a good thing to be in and there's tons of kids out there that need to be adopted so it kind of pushed me a little bit easier that way we are actually the third largest provider of foster care in Virginia by population which is very scary to think about we actually learned that in our first class and it was very hard to hear and so I think that kind of drove us even more to want to do it but we just got into the classes right away the social workers in our County were really helpful and very easy to work with initially what led me to my career was a desire to serve others but I quickly realized that what led me to my career was my only need for healing my purpose is to become a conduit to healing for every person who I come into contact with that is my purpose to be for someone what I did not have when I was a child as I was helping others bring healing and restoration into their own I began to recognize this ache for my own and how that was connected to growing up in a family where abuse was also happening but a secret and like many families where there's incest it's a family that is highly functioning on the outside well known very well established and known in our community yet we were living this life behind closed doors that no one knew about and so of course I couldn't let anybody know about it and I carried that into my desire to help others tell their story I would much rather have helped a child that's older that is going to have a more difficult time finding a family of having a home than babies even around here what's crazy is third one like a sibling set up a one and a three-year-old will come in and people who want babies will say no to them which I've been crazy I'm like one in there three wait there there baby we see many families many adoptive parents in our practice who adopted at birth because they were told and they if that children who are adopted at birth don't suffer the trauma that many of our other children in the system suffer unfortunately what they've not been told is that trauma can absolutely happen for a child prior to birth one of the important pieces of information that we've learned from recent research in neuroscience is the impact of trauma two children in utero babies experience psychological and auditory processing in about the six month of pregnancy so whatever biological mom is experiencing that baby is experiencing if mom is experiencing trauma domestic violence poverty addiction if she lives in a country where there's war and is surrounded by fear the biochemical impact to moms trauma and stress is delivered directly to the baby so babies are absolutely born traumatized they're born with brains that are not optimally functioning they're born with brains that are already in the stress response mode unfortunately sometimes this experience become suppressed and children don't act out this trauma that's happened in utero until they hit certain other developmental stages so for example we see families parents in our practice with children at the age of five or six and then again between ten eleven and twelve and then again between about fifteen and eighteen and then once that frontal cortex really starts to close in at about the age of twenty five those tend to be the developmental phases where children who have had trauma at Birth begin to express and manifest that trauma saying to a parent has your child ever had trauma and they say no we adopted our child at Birth becomes a conversation about how trauma can impact the developing brain prior to birth and and that's scary for parents because many times they've made their decision on who to adopt based on the fact that they can adopt a child at birth so that there's no known trauma so again I think it's a it's not only a misnomer but I think it's it's a failure of our system that we are not training parents who are adopting children at birth to the possibility of trauma even at birth or immediately after birth for their adopted children you know I have seen in everything from I want a playmate for my child too I have had families inquire who have lost children and are wanting to be able to be a parent in a different role but it was maybe too painful to have their own but they're learning to parent in a different role to people who really feel like this is their calling that this is their mission is to support and love these children to really people just recognizing there's a need and wanting to help so it kind of goes from really incredible true intentions to maybe a little bit self-serving for some people and you know part of what we had to do was weed out the people who maybe did not have the emotional capability to go down this path because it can be difficult and you know we always used to say that you know the mantras do no harm and so being able to be emotionally healthy is really critical for somebody who is going to take care of these children because they are wonderful and amazing but they can also be very challenging there's so many ways now that you can start a family and we just really weren't sure which route we wanted to go so at first we were going to do the open adoption route and so we went through the classes we paid them money and we did that for two to three years and we would get nibbles you know with the open adoption the parent choose the biological parent chooses you and you go through the process that way and it was just getting to where you know I was getting older we started this process later for me it kind of got frustrating because it seemed like the adoption agency was not really they were about their money they were about their money but not about you know actually getting the process going on stuff like that I was really very young I always just felt passionate about helping people and seeing kind of the inequity and people's lives and wanting to find a way to balance that a little bit and really just feeling passionate that every child deserves to feel safe and loved and have the opportunities that they should have a friend of mine at my work her husband is over uh DSS here in our county or local Department of Social Services and so she said why don't we try out foster care and we talked to them and that's how we got started took the map class and I got started on foster care and we were a little worried too about being gay because we were the only gay couple that had ever went to the foster program so there was a lesbian couple a couple of years ahead of us so you know we were nervous they were nervous but it all worked out in the end I have a lot of family who have a lot of depression and an incredible amount of friends and family who have substance abuse issues and basically I wanted to be able to bring something back that would help that problem I think Eastern Kentucky and Southwest Virginia are both really underserved I had kind of had a personal experience with foster adoption my mom and dad were foster parents and my sister was in foster care and they adopted her when she was 11 many years ago in 60s women didn't really have a lot of choices for what they what profession they were gonna go in it was gonna be teaching or it's gonna be such a work shows and absolutely love working with with people it just happens that I started 20 years ago talking about not only the therapy I was providing but the work that I was doing with foster and adoptive children in our home and one group after another asked me to come speak about it and I began to educate myself more about it and lo and behold 25 years later I have a full-blown consulting firm I teach organizations around the world how to be kind how to be nice how to use an understanding of how stress diminishes our capacity for compassion and kindness and understanding both in corporate organizational culture in family culture in the public sector in the private sector and then I also have a small private practice I see families and couples and individuals a lot of adoptive families and adopted children and I also provide a spiritually based healing work our local DSS was very supportive that their outreach was amazing they could come to our house said you know David I had questions like is this even possible and they yes you can you can foster the adoption at that time only one of us could adopt so we did go into that knowing that only one could adopt and that was that was actually the oddest thing about the whole situation we could foster as a couple but not adopt as a couple which that was very it's a very weird again there was a state law yeah but it had nothing to do with our local DSS or local DSS they really were so amazing to work with so probably like many other families who come down this road that we went through some infertility for several years which is really painful and challenging and then we went through several miscarriages and just reached the point where we didn't really want to do anymore and throughout that I always knew I wanted to be a mom and they didn't really care what that looked like and I didn't care how I got there and thankfully I had a husband who was equally supportive of that I went through definitely a grieving process and it was even twofold because I was working in child welfare and seeing a lot of parents who weren't taking care of their children and that was really painful and so I did seek out some counseling to just sort of process some of that grief I count so many parents in my private practice who have not been able to conceive and then moved to adoption and then recognized the grief of what was not to be and as that grief unfolded they were parenting their child but through adoption instead of birth and the complexities of that for every member of the family can be overwhelmingly traumatic it actually probably wasn't until a little bit later on when I had my children to just sort of process some of that grief and it's hard I mean I think it's part of its letting go of that dream and being able to embrace your new dream or your new vision you know greece's it is a it is a continual journey and that there are times when yuri grieve but I also think that that's another place another area of need in the system that we as a macro system of providers in child welfare could do so much but more effective support work around asking it and when parents potential adoptive parents say we couldn't conceive that's why we want to adopt and we're good with it that we ask them another question about it or we ask them a question in a different way and we continue to provide enough safety for those parents who have not fully grieved not being able to conceive so that their need to grieve doesn't happen while their parenting an adopted child I also think that there are there are couples that I've worked with who never considered the need to grieve grieving what they couldn't didn't have didn't occur to them as something necessary before they adopted and so introducing this concept of grieving what will never be grieving what we dreamt of that will never be at least the way we dreamt of having it introducing that to parents and giving them a safe place to to process that grief with us before they adopt I think is vital and we don't do a very good job of that either so the interview process for faller fly was a real mixed bag of stories that were so intense that I had to figure out a way of dealing with them myself when you're a storyteller and you hear other people's stories you give them back that's what writers do you you push the story out to other people and that's how you don't let it lay in there and burn inside you for a lack of a better term let's not get metaphysical but these stories that don't get told go sceptic the first time you tell your story there is such a release and surrender to that I was recognizing my need for that as I was helping others do the same but we have encountered experiences where people have come forth and told an adoption story with a great deal of emotion and it was a very very healing and a very positive experience for them to be able to share something that they had held inside for a long time [Music] a mixture of voices the map Alachua come together to shed light on the world of private adoption from domestic to international from closed to open there are a variety of reasons in ways that families are created [Music] my name is grace I am retired and I was 20 years old when I gave my child up for adoption I was born and raised in a small town in South West Virginia this is a town where everybody knew everybody else's business and in 1967 which is when he was born it was a disgrace for a girl to have a child out of wedlock my parents were were older they were 40 years old when I was born so they were elderly already then they would not be able or probably willing to help with the child and I wanted the child to have a family that loved him and that would raise him the way I would raise him my name is Karen and I work with my husband in insurance and this is our daughter Jody I'm Jody and I work organization call fashion and fashion where we help women who are coming out of difficult situations such as drug addiction domestic abuse homelessness and what we do is we provide employment opportunity for them that allows them to get back on their feet again and then also I work for the family business and I was 16 years old when I placed Jayden up for adoption my name is Jayden and I'm 14 and I was adopted when I was two days old I was given up for adoption because my mom she had baby when she was really young and I she just couldn't take care of me it was too hard for her which I understand and so she decided to like another family to Jeremy and that's where I am now [Music] my name is Alicia and I am a sign language interpreter and I also teach sign language at a university I'm Jim and I have a small business landscaping and lawn maintenance and a little bit of art making in the winter we adopted Jayden when she was two days old but we did know her in utero we met her mom and her birth mom's parents when she was in the womb we all met and instantly liked each other we got married a hundred years before for four years we were married and I'm a survivor of stage three cancer that was in my it was testicular cancer and went and lung so that was my college years so we went into our marriage knowing that it was certain I couldn't have children it wasn't a question so Alicia was okay with that and we hadn't even really thought of adoption at the time we just loved each other and knew that we would leap off into it together and she was the brave one that really really engaged the process and got us going I knew I wanted to be with Jim whatever that meant I did have a little mommy tug as I got older but I never felt sad that I wasn't pregnant or that didn't give birth or none of that I was so thrilled to just be a mom and have a kid and I knew that Jamie was the perfect child for me she was the one and we never did you know no miscarriages no in vitro none of that you know we didn't have to go through any of that we just picked the path and went down it me personally I was just glad to be alive after mine after my ordeal so I was just celebrating life and not grieving the inability to have a child at the time I was so young I was 21 at the time so I was ready to just get back in the saddle and go get go get life but in hindsight God's playing is perfect is you know Jaden is the perfect daughter for me the perfect child Jim went to school here and stayed and I just moved here because I love it I love mountains and we both enjoy rock climbing and we just became friends really good friends for a while led to other things Jim told me one time he was never gonna get married we were in the car together yeah we were in the car together and driving on the Parkway and he was like yeah I'm never getting married I said okay we were in our first little house close by and I'd had just been scheming for a while and we had a little ring in our family that was my grandmother's soon I asked mom for that that sent off the bells and it was pretty humble with just on me in the kitchen he said do you like this house I said yeah I said could you live here I said yeah and he said well I don't want to get married kitchen I said yes of course his birth father and I met when we were working at a resort one summer and it was kind of a summer fling I would say that we did love each other but maybe not a deep deep love when I found out I was pregnant we didn't have cell phones I couldn't even call him because he was in school he was in Wisconsin and I was in Virginia and school and I told him and he sent me some money and he write a letter and he said I don't want to get married and he reacted like he did I guess in a way I wasn't surprised that he felt that way because we were so far apart he was trying to get on with life and I wants to that I felt alone you know really alone [Music] my name is Marla I'm an English professor we have three children they're grown now we are obviously a non-traditional family oh yes non-traditional especially for this area and I was artificially inseminated we got married about three years ago once it became legal to be married in Virginia and sorry two years ago and Kaye adopted the children at that point name is Malin I'm 16 years old and I was adopted from China when I was 2 years old my mother told me that I had been found on like this could be my mind making this up because it seems a little bit particular fetishes in retrospect but um found me on like the doorstep with like a note that said please take care of this baby my name is Liz and I'm retired I've been on the faculty of a music department for about 20 years and retired two years ago we became a family when Malin was 2 and that was in August of 2003 was in December of 2001 and a friend of mine had just adopted a child I thought how brave and what a great thing to do to make a family this way my husband and I work I'm concerned with how many people live in this world at this time so it was sort of a big foundation and how we were thinking about families and anyway I had a dream and in this dream a child came to me and said are you my mother I said yes and I woke up and it was real clear that's when I as a woman wanted to do and I knew it was the right time we got married a little older so after about 4 years you know my biological clock was kicking in and I thought if we're gonna do anything we should start now because adoption is a process it takes a while when you apply to adopt they give you a weird piece of paper where you check all the things you're okay with and all the things you're not okay with and that was one of the toughest parts for us in the adoption process to just be like really real with ourselves about what we could handle and what we couldn't and our family and we were so okay with any color skin we had no problem with any of that we tried to be real about other disabilities or or things that we thought we could or couldn't handle but we thought the colorful skin is no effect at all on us you know we just had no problem with that and our families didn't really either they were completely supportive jadynn actually has a biracial cousin - my half sister has a biracial child so that the exact same age so that worked out pretty cool [Music] Doug was 51 at that time and he wasn't sure that that's what he was interested in so we got a great therapist and worked together a wonderful person and after some months we decided that that was what we would do and we were in and once we were in we were in Doug and I decided to go the international adoption on route because we were older at the time and domestic adoptions had a lot of regulations around age combined ages was really interesting we didn't think we were probably a candidate for the domestic adoption programs here we talked a little bit about adoption didn't we like not like we did but I don't I don't think that we would have been allowed to adopt as a gay couple right the rules are different of course they're different now than they were you know years ago but at the time and because this was like we had our first child in 2000 not very open to a gay couple adopting and especially even if it was allowed in this area I think they would have found a way to not allow us to adopt it's you know a pretty homophobic area so I don't think you know that would have been an option for us even though it it's obviously a really good option but you know I feel like we created a loving home for the three kids we had but nobody had to give us permission to do what we did and so it was definitely an easier option I went to this doctor and I said you know I'd like to be artificially inseminated and she said why and Kaye was in the room I'm sitting there and I'm thinking like what's the question and I said well because she's my partner and she said okay and you know it no harm no foul right I mean she was totally okay with that which was really nice I did have some fears I was 45 when we became family my husband was 54 so I was an older mother it wasn't sure how that would play out or what that would mean to Malin I had never been with babies I had always been with younger children and worked clinically and as a music therapist with young children 3 and up but I had never been around babies so wasn't sure how I would do with that changing even changing a diaper had to sit here on the floor and practice over and over I didn't know if we would attach what that would be like I felt some some concern around that the most familiar story to me about Parenthood was a biological child but this was not familiar so it was an unknown I wouldn't call it fearful it was just an unknown my first reaction was how am I going to tell my parents and that was the hardest thing that I ever ever did was to tell my parents that I was pregnant but at one point when I was younger my father said made the remark someone in town we'd heard and had an abortion and my daddy said well if that ever happens to you don't even come home so you can imagine how how I felt about telling but I knew that my dad was not gonna turn his back on me I was too much of a daddy's girl and I called them on the phone they came right away they came to school where I was I was in school and the one thing I did six out of my mind is the look on my mother's face like I hate you I love you and I'll never forget the way she looked but my parents were were supportive and we decided that I would go to add a cousin in Michigan it was a social worker and we knew she would know all the people you know she would find out what to do anyway she didn't know we met through a mutual friend she was a very good friend of Kay's and someone I knew just a little bit and she thought we would like each other we lived in the same town and had never encountered each other yeah that's kind of unheard of early small but you weren't associated with the college really so no that's probably why we did meet cuz that's really those are really the only people I knew at that point I actually had a patient from Appalachia which is a community about Wealth's that way and it's about seven miles from here and she said do you know that lesbian couple that had that pig they raised like a baby that was us that was us we did have a pig we didn't raise it like a baby but it was in the house she had her own room she did she had her little fisher-price toys yeah maybe like a baby I don't know not really but pretty close but anyway I said no no I don't know them because I knew she would never come back to get therapy if I was the lesbian with the pig baby so that's kind of opened my eyes to how much fun we were gonna have being here being a lesbian couple my name is Micah I'm 23 years old I was 3 days old when I was officially adopted I'm from Southwest Virginia and I'm a first year lawsuit the only thing I know about my biological parents is that my mother was 16 and my father had left like as soon as he found out so it was it was a rough situation I've known my entire life that I was adopted they were pretty open about that there's not a day that I can remember not knowing and I've kind of I mean it's been pretty obvious too I mean both my parents were white and I'm brown so living in a small town where I'm one of few minorities it's also pretty obvious so going from there yeah I've always known that I'm adopted and my parents have always given me that option to find out more about my biological parents if I ever wanted it now there's a lot unknown obviously about the reasons why I was placed in an orphanage but honestly I don't know if the reasons are that important you know I think it would be interesting if I could find out but I don't think that it's really a pressing concern of life there was a note that the orphanage director gave us that said it was attached to her although we never saw the actual note he transcribed it as her name was Peter Chou Jing Chou is two weeks old and that's about all it said she was dropped off at a police station with the note there wasn't nothing really to identify her to a biological family however I left a note with the nanny and asked her to keep it at the orphanage that said my name is Liz rose this is our address this is our contact information if anybody ever wanted to get in touch with Malin we would potentially be open to that I thought anybody ever showed up later I wanted some record and I wasn't sure what the Chinese records would be in terms of us or accessibility so there was something in me that wanted to leave something behind in case an opportunity arose that would be helpful in the future it took me about three months to actually admit to myself that I was pregnant as the pregnancy went by I think it's at least for me and I I hate to admit this but it was kind of like I tried to ignore the fact that I was pregnant and at first I had to I was in college and I didn't want people there to know and then after I told my parents and we started talking about what to do and that's when it became real and I realized that I did have a human being inside of my body his parents actually gave us a reference for a private agency and it was the first and only one that we went to we had a couple other false alarms with two other moms that didn't work out and that was hard they were both unsure one we never even met the mom she never showed up that one was hard because it was the first one our first experience and we were so anxious and then she just didn't show so it's kind of a crash the second time we met a mother and then she just kind of didn't choose us but then threes charm and it all just fell into place so easily we knew it was all right because it was all happening very easily for us so I think it was not even a year a full year and when we started the process to when we brought JD home the facility where I was I really never felt comfortable there really it was a home for unwed mothers but I felt like the staff there treated us like like sinners I just which was not comfortable there fortunately again I was only there one week I felt that that God was protecting me from having to be there for very long and when I left there the nurses said well I hope we won't see you here again and I'm knowing well don't worry we liked the private agency because the moms were really being counseled and loved and they had a say in where their child was going so she really picked us from you know books so that was assuring we were matched after about two years and during that entire time I felt like I was pregnant and carrying a child it was a very long pregnancy right before we had the match and we had her picture and we were really ready to go but the SARS epidemic happened right then so as we were making our travel plans we were stopped and there was a three-month delay and getting there so here we had this picture of this beautiful child and my experience was I really felt like her mother at that time the subject of abortion didn't exactly come but the doctor that I had gone to said well you know abortion is but and I didn't let her go any further I said no I can't I can't to do that I just I can't do it and I'm gonna give this baby a chance and he or she at that time I didn't know is gonna have a chance at life China was is or my impression was that it was really really big we weren't prepared and I'm not a traveler I don't travel a lot have not traveled a lot internationally Doug hasn't some and so navigating the crowds and just the presence of so many people was different we stayed in a comfortable hotel near Hangzhou when we arrived 107 and they turned the air conditioner off about 2:00 in the morning and flipped it back on about 6:00 so there was some hot nights but we managed that fine the day that the babies were bought to the hotel we did not go to the orphanage it was kind of unexpected they were like maybe four or five hours early and the phone call we were out buying a crib I mean a carriage and on the phone call came it said the babies are here come right now so we were in downtown in the city of Hangzhou we just ran back to the hotel so that was a little bit of a an exciting moment and as soon as I walked in to see the nannies and the babies for son knew who Malin was and she got into my arm that was really something [Music] we went through a Christian adoption agency basically I just looked through families different families and I came upon Alicia and Jim they just stuck out to me the most they have faith so that was important to me love that they were not too far away we had an appointment to meet Alicia and Jim and this was the first couple when I met them Alicia is just a very soft-spoken very genuine loving person and Jim is the same way just their their heart just caught me and I knew right then and there that that was that was it I didn't need to look any further we fell in love with them from the start I think that was the Lord kind of guiding our hearts you know making that decision and that decision - was it was all of us if she had had any reservation then you know we would have gone another direction but so we had to all be in one Accord on that [Music] it was in the adoption services in their office basically under fluorescent lights and the couch and it's kinda you're just sitting there and all of a sudden they walk in with your baby and it's just like it's pretty surreal really and they later in our arms and we just sat just like we are now and just stared at her for a long time and she's there to Dawson yeah she's looking right up at us with these big brown eyes like there you guys are hey like she was waiting on us seconds so uh she looked so calm and then they go outside with you make sure you've got the baby seat in right and that's it here's some formula for what right oh yeah so your instant parent we definitely felt an instant connection and bond with her who stared into her eyes and she took us in we took her and she was a great baby she was amazing she would sleep like nine hours singing right from the get-go she had allowed ourselves now like to experiment with her voice and this was a dream [Music] we each chose a name so her birth mom chose Jayden and we chose faith so she's Jayden faith he chose me and we thought we would call her faith but when she came home we were like she's Jayden she was 100% Jayden so that's who she loves she carries her birth mom's given name chose for her [Music] my parents were we're in Virginia my cousin was in Michigan but of course when I had him because I had her so fast and there wasn't anybody there with me when he was born the day the baby left you could I think dress the baby maybe feed the baby I didn't want to do that because I didn't want to get that close that I didn't asked if I could holding for P minutes so they they did they let me hold him and he was he was a really pretty baby for slaughter everybody says that but and I remember telling him that I was saying again I said we will meet again and the social worker came and I remember watching her walk out with you they were one disputes they and a hopeful for her I think the reason my parents adopted was I don't think they could they were they had tried and I don't know if they were successful but my dad was working his dude in his residency in Charleston West Virginia and he was there the day I was born actually and then he found out I was gonna be up for adoption I guess he kind of viewed it as a like basically so he called my mom and he's beautiful little brown baby you know and they agreed to it and three days later on stairs you know when I left the hospital I went straight to their house I didn't go anywhere else so I don't know I guess it's a mixture of both reasons as well as I think they maybe struggled at first I'm not entirely sure but then while they were trying I guess they they viewed me as kinda so when you adopt you have this 7 day period in our state where the birth mother can change her mind and you can opt to put the child in like a foster care for those 7 days if you don't want to totally bond and something could happen or you can bring the child home and if they decide you have to be willing so we were like of course we want to bring her home we want her instantly no matter what in that seven-day interim you're doing a lot of heart searching you're doing a lot of soul searching we were just in the deciding factor of does it stay closed or does it stay partial I think is what it is and then as a completely open you have to understand that in that period of time no matter what you do it can be painful with Jody only being 16 years old how does this look moving forward and will we be okay with that when we learned that and realize that that either one hurts either one can be painful because we will miss her greatly we went back to Jim and Alicia and we said we want to be a part of her life and also realizing that there would be a great void in Jaden's life down the if we were not all a part of her life and Jim and Alicia solve act I think it was like day five the agency called us and they had Jaden's family on the phone and they were really sad and they said we really want to be in her life can we do open we took a day and talked about it we heard them on the phone to some and talked with the agency and yeah we definitely prayed and talked and it was clear was clear that that's the right yeah and so within those seven days we came to the conclusion that we would not go through an agency and that we would do an open adoption and you know from the very beginning when she was a baby so we saw her it was opening from from a baby adoption is both joy and grief for it is when a family is separated so another can be made there are many different factors that lead to the same choice to place or to adopt there is great knowledge in gathering all of these experiences to make a better tomorrow for others in the foster care and adoption world

Channel: Shelby Redfield Kilgore

Views: 21,620

Keywords: adoption process, infant adoption, domestic infant adoption, domestic adoption, adoption awareness, adoption education, adoption journey, adoptee, adopting older children, birth mother, adoption q&a, our adoption story, birth story, my adoption story, how to adopt, foster home, open adoption, adopted, adoption, adopted kid, baby adoption, adopt a child, adoption match, special needs adoption, adoption documentary, adopting from China, gay adoption processs, adoption trauma

Id: cGQ6YUBpkCY

Length: 94min 36sec (5676 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 10 2018