Family Treeby Amy Scheer

Families who branch out through adoption grow in more ways than one

If you want to make God laugh,” begins the film Bella, which won the Excellence in Adoption Media Award, “tell him your plans.”

Couples plan to expand their families naturally. Women expect to become pregnant in good and convenient timing. A young girl playing with her dolls never guesses that one day, when she bears her own children, she might not be able to afford diapers or even enough food.

Adoption is simply this: A child whose birthparents are unable to provide care finds a new family. The playing out of this act of societal redemption, however, is as varied as the faces and personalities of the children themselves; laws, processes and costs differ from state to state and country to country.

Just as diverse are the reasons why people choose to adopt, and how children come to be found.

BARRY GUTIERREZ

A 2-by-2 inch photo was Leanne De Vos’s first picture of Emma, whom she adopted from China in 1996.

Leanne De Vos ’78 was 39 and single when The Rocky Mountain News she had been receiving on a free six-month subscription ran a photograph of people returning from China with girls they had adopted. China’s one-child policy, instituted in 1979 to cap population growth, results in fines for urban families with multiple children, leading to high abortion rates and a preference for male babies.

De Vos, a Denver attorney who taught in Taiwan for a year after graduating from Northwestern, had never previously entertained the idea of adoption nor felt the push to have children. She managed her life as she did a lawsuit waiting to be filed—with careful planning and forethought. When she saw the newspaper photo, however, she knew instantly she should adopt a girl from China.

“I felt a certainty I didn’t have any facts to base on,” De Vos says. “Empirically, this was not a rational decision at all.”

In Sioux Center, Iowa, Sheila (Born ’94) De Jong and her husband, Kelly, were hoping to expand their family. Sheila had had difficult pregnancies with their two boys and a miscarriage in between; when the concept of adoption began weaving through the Bible study she was attending at the time, she took notice.

Jesus was raised by an adoptive father. Moses’ mother gave him up so he could have a better life. Romans 8:23–24 says, “We wait eagerly for our adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved.”

In 2003, the De Jongs traveled to Guatemala to meet their new daughter, Maria. “She likes to tell the story,” Sheila says. “‘You put out your arms and I touched your face and you were crying.’”

PETER WIIG

Lindsey and Ajay Eshcol have been working since last December to adopt Karuna from India. As of early November, their court case still hadn’t been finalized.

Ajay Eshcol ’03 and his wife, Lindsey (Erickson ’03), talked about adoption even before they were married.

“We dreamed of having a family that looked like the family of God, full of different colors and cultures,” Lindsey says.

The Eshcols had been married for four years when, a few days before last Christmas, Ajay received an urgent e-mail from his parents in India. A woman had given birth to her sixth daughter and was forbidden by her husband to return home with another girl; the mother and child were temporarily staying just a few miles from Ajay’s parents’ house.

Ajay, an Indian citizen, assumed he could easily adopt the girl and bring her back with him to the States. In February, he flew to India to meet the baby and begin paperwork to adopt her; Lindsey joined them a month later.

By definition, adoption is a legal process by which the rights of a child toward the birthparents are ended and a new set of rights is established toward the adoptive parents. The act of adopting starts with a series of decisions and a pile of papers, making it difficult to ignore that the forging of family bonds must necessarily begin as a transaction.

CARISSA MARTIN

Nathan and Stephanie Huisman planned to adopt a Vietnamese child. Instead, a phone call from a church friend led to a whirlwind adoption of Adrian from Ohio.

Stephanie Huisman remembers being handed a list of 80 medical conditions and asked to check those she and Nathan would accept in a child adopted from Vietnam. No choices on their part would ultimately matter—they eventually halted the international proceedings, and only en route to Ohio did they realize they hadn’t even asked the baby’s race. But earlier, working down the checklist, choosing a child felt like selecting a china pattern.

“You battle within yourself,” Stephanie says. “If I was having a biological child, I wouldn’t have these choices. Some of the decisions in the adoption process seem selfish, but you’re trying to make the best choice for you and your child.”

She admits it was helpful to think through these decisions, to face the shock of events not following an expected course: marriage, pregnancy, kids. Of not having a daughter with curly hair, just like Stephanie’s.

Bonnie (Adkins ’83) De Jong, former director of the Southern California branch of Bethany Christian Services, agrees these thorough first steps are essential. The current trend for birthparents and adoptive parents to bypass agencies’ counseling and screening services, usually through online social networking sites, doesn’t protect the child’s best interests, she says.

“With the Internet, people just find each other. The screening process has been removed from adoption as a whole,” says De Jong. “When you forego that front part, a lot can go wrong. There’s a huge emotional piece of this that needs addressing before, not after.”

Some agencies, like Bethany, post prospective adoptive family profiles online to be browsed by birthparents before they begin the standard process. But when families and birthparents make their own matches and pay agencies for limited legal services, organizations like Bethany oblige but often do so without their stamp of approval, recognizing that perhaps there is still grief to be lived through and choices to be made.

One such choice is open adoption, in which contact between the adoptive and biological parents is maintained at some level.

In 1974, research indicated that psychological problems experienced by adoptees, adoptive parents and birth parents were a direct consequence of the secrecy maintained in adoptions up to that point. Open adoptions became more common in the following decades, but many adult adoptees still find themselves lobbying policymakers just to learn where they came from. Only eight states currently allow access to birth records, with legislation being considered in 10 other states to remove the need for a court order to open sealed records.

Linda (Vanderhorst ’68) Van Beek can point to only a handful of times when she considered finding her birthparents. She always knew she was adopted—“picked,” not “had,” her parents told her—but it wasn’t until her own daughter was pregnant and asking about the family’s medical history that she began sleuthing out her past.

With the help of a private detective, Van Beek learned her birthfather had died of cancer and her birthmother was living just 25 miles away from her California home.

On Sept. 9, 1995, her 49th birthday, Van Beek decided to make the call.

“I weighed my words very carefully; I wrote them down,” she says. She used her birthmother’s maiden name to arouse curiosity and to be sure she wasn’t mistaken for a telemarketer.

“Do I know you from a long time ago?” the woman asked.

Van Beek replied, “I believe you are my mother.”

The National Council For Adoption maintains on its website that “policy and practice should not empower one party to adoption to receive identifying information or unilaterally impose contacts without the consent of another party.” The media likes to sensationalize these reunions, but sometimes they aren’t happy ones, says Bonnie De Jong. Some birthmothers desire, for complicated reasons, to remain anonymous. The birthmom is not necessarily a hero or a villain, she says, “just a regular human being trying to make the best choice.”

Van Beek was fortunate—her birthmother was thrilled to hear from her. They kept up a correspondence by mail and eventually met in person. “We became best friends.”

Making the call was worth the risk of being hung up on, she says. “It was like a nagging feeling of having no connection. You finally know your roots—it makes you feel complete.”

These issues of identity arise often in discussions of transracial adoptions.

In 1985, William Merritt, then president of the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW), told a Senate committee, “Black children who grow up in white families suffer severe identity problems.”

Just 10 years before, the NABSW had helped reverse the position of most state agencies on transracial adoptions, stating that minority children should, when at all possible, be placed in homes that share their racial origins in order to preserve their culture and sense of themselves.

SUZANNE HALL

Mary Ann Pals, left, and her adopted sister, Rachel Wooley, laugh while viewing old family photos. Transracial adoptions were rare when their family adopted Rachel in 1979.

Around that time, the parents of Mary Ann (Anker ’77) Pals were welcoming home their 26th foster baby. Rachel, an African-American girl, had osteomyelitis, an inflammation that settled in just after birth in the bone and marrow of her hip.

The agency asked the Ankers to keep Rachel through her first surgery at 15 months, during her six weeks in a body cast, and while she learned to walk. By then, the Ankers thought of Rachel as their own, and when they began the process to adopt her, they had to stop and ask themselves if this was best for the girl.

Their hometown of South Holland, Ill., was, at that time, occupied primarily by white families with roots tracing back to the Dutch immigrants who settled there in the early 1800s; black faces were rarely seen. When Rachel was two, the family was at a restaurant with their five girls, including Kim, who is also adopted and is deaf. As they began eating, Kim, age 12, grew increasingly angry. She stuck out her tongue at a family sitting at another table.

“Kim!” her mother exclaimed, horrified. “What are you doing?”

Kim had been reading the lips of the other family. “They’re saying mean things about us because we have a black baby.”

Pals, who was in her early 20s at the time, says her parents had to carefully weigh the reality of racism against their own desires to adopt Rachel, in order to best serve Rachel’s needs growing up as a woman of color.

“They asked themselves, ‘Is this selfish of us? What’s the most loving thing to do?’” says Pals. “They decided to risk it, and trust that love would get them through.”

Their agency, which had placed dozens of diverse foster children with them, wouldn’t process a transracial adoption. A friend who was a social worker advocated for them, and the Ankers became, to their knowledge, the only white family in their region at that time to adopt a black child. Rachel was four, and life went on as it had before the papers made it official—she had been part of the family since she was two days old.

Pals, Rachel, their mother, and two other sisters were featured in a series of books by Rita Simon and Rhonda Roorda on transracial adoptions into white families.

“Sometimes transracial adoption is a good thing,” says Rachel in the first book, In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories (Columbia University Press). “A lot of children of different ethnic backgrounds are in the foster care system without any possible adoptive homes for them. And if white people want to adopt them, that’s great. But I think they need to make sure that the children stay in touch with their roots … I feel as though I’ve lost touch with who I am.”

Since that 1997 interview Rachel has married an African-American man, had a son and secured a teaching job in a Christian school. She met with her birthmother a few years back, and, according to her sister Lynn in the third book, In Their Siblings’ Voices, she came home the same day and said, “‘Mom, Dad, thank you! They led totally different lives without the values our family has.’”

Perhaps Rachel is still a “black Dutchman,” as she once called herself, but she appears to have found a balance in her life between the culture she comes from and the one she calls home.

Studies conducted since the 1970s movement against transracial adoptions have concluded that white families are indeed able to raise children of other races in a psychologically healthy way, provided they stay realistic about racism and open to the individual needs of the child. The federal government stepped in with the 1994 Multiethnic Placement Act and the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act, which essentially removed race as a barrier for agencies placing children into adoptive families.

The challenges for these families remain numerous, but success rates of transracial adoptions are quite comparable to those of inracial adoptions, according to the books by Simon and Roorda.

International adoptions carry their own set of similar trials as well, say the families interviewed for this article, but the joys and trials are uniquely situated within the dynamics of a given family, and not necessarily a product of race or culture.

“Love cuts across all racial boundaries,” says Pals.

All adoptive families count on this bond seeing them through the difficult times, especially because, as Sheila De Jong puts it, “with adoption, there’s great joy and great loss.”

Ajay and Lindsey Eshcol were thrilled when, in May, an Indian court accepted their case for legal guardianship of the baby girl. In June, a judge told them the case should wrap up soon, but he neglected to appear at the next two court dates.

Ajay, meanwhile, needed to return to the States to continue his medical residency, and later, on Aug. 8, Lindsey had to fly back to prepare for her upcoming year of teaching. Ajay’s parents were to appear in their stead at the Aug. 13 court date, but the lawyer had a fever and the date was postponed.

The Eshcols continue to wait for permission to bring home the little girl they named Karuna. Karuna is the first word Lindsey, an American citizen, learned to read in Telugu; it’s the word used to describe Christ’s act of mercy on the cross.

DAN ROSS

After the death of one of Sheila and Kelly De Jong’s adopted Guatemalan daughters, the couple began a ministry in her name. Katelyn’s Fund aids Christians seeking to adopt.

In early 2005, Sheila and Kelly De Jong completed the paperwork to adopt again from Guatemala. Twin baby girls had been born in May of that year, and the De Jongs were busily readying their hearts and home when in July they received word that one of the girls had died due to a respiratory virus. The family’s time of preparation had been so joyful that they found themselves devastated.

Though the little girl, whom they named Katelyn, would be buried in Guatemala, the De Jongs planned a local memorial service. A few days before the service, their eight-year-old son came to them and said, “I had this dream that Katelyn only needed a family for a little while.”

The De Jongs traveled in October 2005 to bring home Elizabeth, now four, who is as bouncy and exuberant as her curly black hair. The experience birthed Katelyn’s Fund, a ministry that provides emotional and financial support for Christian families looking to adopt. Over the past three years, they’ve awarded 82 grants of $3,000 each.

“It’s taught our family lots about trust and not holding things so tightly,” says Sheila. “Knowing all things are God’s. God is beyond us.”

On March 22, 1996, Leanne De Vos walked into a modest orphanage in the southern province of China. A uniformed worker brought out a thin, five-month-old girl dressed in traditional Chinese garb and handed her to De Vos. The two stared at each other. In that moment, an act that once seemed impulsive and irrational made all the sense in the world.

The concept of adoption evokes the word “grafting” for Lindsey Eshcol; a baby born half a world away becomes family, just as a young, severed branch can, after a period of time, grow from a new tree.

At little Adrian Huisman’s two-year checkup, a new doctor inquired about his family medical history. His parents went on and on about grandpa’s heart condition, grandma’s glaucoma, until it occurred to them that they had forgotten, briefly, that their son was not related by blood.

“We’re just a normal family,” Stephanie says. “Just like with biological children, Adrian was meant to be in our family, and we were meant to be his parents.”

Horticulturalists say the formation of a successful union—the juncture where grafting takes place—depends on a complex series of events; the parent tree must be bound to the young shoot, which is working to draw nutrients from a foreign root system.

Eventually the two will grow as one and, as on these Northwestern family trees grafted through adoption, the union’s faint scar disappears in the shade of strong, healthy branches.