Guest Post: Marcia

Tom and Marcia

l-r: Maggie, Bella, Kate, Grace, and Caroline

This week's post is like a five-in-one special... Mark's main inspiration for considering adoption was his cousin Marcia and her family. You'll see as you read her account of their adoption journey that they have an extraordinary family! Each time we visit with them, we are amazed at the tight, tight bonds of this family, and we are so very thankful for the support that they are to us.

~~~~~~~~~~

I (Marcia) was blessed to grow up in a large and fun-loving extended family. While my home was just a mom, dad and a brother, my mom has 3 younger brothers (one of which is Mark's dad) whom we spent a lot of time with. My uncles were still teenagers when I was born, so needless to say I was well educated in all the finer (funner!) things in life by them. My husband Tom and I met in college, so he got to experience the next generation - there were 7 of us cousins- and all the craziness and love that came with those gatherings. As we talked marriage and family, we thought about having 3 or 4 children. At some point we also talked about adoption - neither of us remembers exactly why, but it was a positive experience. Mark and I have a cousin who is in between us in age who was adopted as an infant. We grew up understanding that adoption was another way for a baby to come into a family and never gave it much thought - she was ( and is) cute and fun to play with - what else could you ask for?

We married right out of college and decided to wait two years before starting our family. Clearly God had other plans and we discovered that pregnancy was not going to happen without medical intervention. Through lots of soul searching and prayer we realized our desire was to be parents, not to be pregnant, and that adoption was where we were to be putting our time and effort. International adoption - though gaining popularity at the time - was cost prohibitive and frightening to us. We stumbled upon Bethany Christian Services and our lives would never be the same. It was now 1991 and domestic adoption was just starting to become a little more open. We learned that we would be creating a family profile for prospective birth mothers to look through and hopefully see that we were the ones to raise her baby. We did initially meet with a birth mother and father who had chosen us. However, after the baby's birth, they decided to try parenting. We were, of course, devastated at the loss of this little boy whom we never even met.

However, we decided to get right back into the action and within a few months we were called again. This mother wasn't due until October, but wanted to meet us in the summer. She knew that I was a teacher who planned to quit working after becoming a mother. She wanted to make sure I didn't start back in the fall. Needless to say we were a little skeptical after the first go around. However, we met with the birth mother and her parents. It was an amazing meeting. We talked a lot about our lives, our plans, our families, etc. She had cross stitched a little scene for our nursery and gave us her high school senior picture so that our baby would know what her birth mother looked like ( yes, she told us that day that the baby was a girl - a total shock since we had 6 nephews at that point in time!). The next 8 weeks or so were very long. Finally one day in October we got the news that the baby had been born the night before and the birth mother wanted us to come to the hospital to meet our daughter!! I will never forget how very peaceful it felt to walk into that room and see the birth mother, her mother, her sister and the most beautiful baby ever. She immediately handed Grace over to Tom to hold. We spent some time with them just hearing about the last few weeks of pregnancy and the delivery. We left them together at the hospital. It felt good that birth mom and baby would be able to have some time alone. The next day we had Grace placed into our hearts at the Bethany office. What a miraculous event! (Fast forward to today - Grace is 17 and has a good relationship with her birth mom. They reconnected - at our request- when she was 14 - God is good and has blessed us immensely through this connection).

So, after a few years we felt it was time for a sibling for Grace and so we filled out all the necessary paperwork. We were thrilled to hear that we would be receiving a baby boy just as Grace was turning 3 1/2. David came to us at 5 days old and Grace was thrilled to be a big sister. His birth parents decided they wished to parent, so we became the first Bethany family in our office to experience a disruption - he was taken from our home after 3 days. While our hearts were ripped apart and we had many questions for God, we did remind each other that we had chosen what at the time were known as "high risk" adoptions - meaning that the parental rights had not been terminated, so this was a possibility. We were blessed to have given him a loving home for 3 days and trust that God had a greater, different plan for his life.

Thankfully, that next call came within 2 months and 6 week old Maggie came into our lives. This was our first experience with receiving a child who had been blessed by an amazing foster family. We received lots of great instructions for how Maggie liked to be cared for and beautiful pictures and stories of her first weeks of life.

Two little girls made for a wonderful home, but we still had that vision of a larger family. We were not going to qualify to adopt another healthy white infant from Bethany, and were afraid to adopt through anyone else, so we weren't sure where this next baby would come from. At the time, I was on the local board of Bethany and had heard about an informational meeting about Bethany's Chinese adoption program. I went as a board member, to gather information. As I sat through the presentation I heard the news that China had changed it's requirements for parents once again and couples who already had children COULD NOW adopt from China (something that was not true when we started this journey). I had been to Canada a few times and Tom went to Europe in college on a choir tour - we were not exactly savvy travelers- we also had two little girls at home and it was still awfully pricey, but my heart was racing with excitement and I went home and told Tom I thought we needed to go to get our next child in China. Through prayer we determined that our 2 greatest needs were child care while we traveled and money to cover the costs. A quick call to my parents secured child care and a bonus from work would cover the costs! International adoption turned out to be our most expensive, though also our "easiest" adoption - it was basically a series of forms and fees and a rather accurate time table which found us leaving a 7 year old and a 4 1/2 year old behind in order to bring 10 month old Caroline home. Caroline was all smiles and came right to us and then continued to charm the other parents as well - as she does today at age 10.

Tom and I had decided after Caroline that our family was probably complete and this would be a great time to "give back" to Bethany by doing interim infant care for them (as our Maggie and Ish were cared for). We were blessed to have 2 baby girls spend some time with us. It was wonderful to have our girls get involved in their care and realize we were taking care of these babies for Jesus. After the second child left our care we realized that we really did need 4, not 3 children. I had always had a desire to have "little black children" - for a variety of reasons, the most important being that God just put that desire in my heart! Tom knew about this and shortly after we started talking about adoption again confessed to having a dream about an African American girl. We went back to Bethany expressing our desire - within the year we found ourselves traveling to the Bethany office in Baltimore to receive 7 week old Isabella - a beautiful African American baby. We were able to meet both of her birth parents. Interestingly enough, the issue of race was never brought up - they seemed very comfortable with us and could see how much the older sisters were going to love and care for Bella. As time went on, we often joked that God was pretty clear that our family was now complete - Bella is blessed energy, enthusiasm and exuberance like nothing we had ever experienced - we had also both celebrated our 40 birthdays and beyond, so we were feeling some closure.

Through the years we had always hoped and prayed that adoption could just happen to us - that we wouldn't have to go through all the paperwork and home studies and the WAITING. Apparently, that was not the plan for us. Or was it? When Bella was 2 years old, we all returned from a great spring break to Arizona. On our answering machine we discovered a call from a case worker at Bethany - there was an African American baby - sex unknown - to be born within the month by c-section- none of the current family profiles matched this baby - were we interested? Laughter, shock, excitement, and denial were felt by various members of our family. Long story short, we realized this was what we had prayed for all of those years - of course WE had never dreamed of 5 children, but had God? As it turned out, our 5th daughter, Kathleen, was born in Ohio about 4 weeks after that phone call. Because it was out of state, she and I were going to have to live in OH until something called an Interstate Compact could be obtained (basically Ohio would say to PA - she is in your care now). We did a lot of planning - meals, car pools, child care for the other 4, etc. and the baby and I would live in OH with my mom for the 2-3 weeks until this Compact was compacted or whatever had to happen. Again - God follows His plan, not the legal folks' - Kate had respiratory distress in the nursery and it was determined that she needed to move to a bigger hospital in - where? Pittsburgh - 20 minutes from our home!! The fact of the matter is, if your child has some rather serious breathing issues - enough to land them in the NICU for 8 days - the legalities of adoption change a bit! Thankfully, we did not have to return to OH except to visit relatives!

Life with a transracial family is interesting to say the least. Our daughters each have a unique beauty and we are learning about all kinds of skin care, hair care and health issues that are common to those of a different race! Day to day though, girls are girls are girls - red and yellow, black and white - they are truly precious in His - and our sight! We are forever grateful to our Savior for enabling 5 brave young women to place their babies into our care for a lifetime. Our adoption journey was a long one - we are so thrilled to pass the torch on to Mark and Steph!!