Adoptive Families of America Adoption Magazine
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Parallel Lives
Nicole is 16 and pregnant. Otto and Chanda are desperate to adopt a baby. A generation ago their paths might have crossed. Today, it's less likely. By Paula Span The morning's prenatal visit begins just like all the others: Step on the scale, hold out one arm for the blood pressure cuff, pee into a cup. The nurse-midwife feels Nicole's ankles, makes sure they're not swollen. She wags her finger when she learns that Nicole skipped breakfast and reminds her to eat. Nicole Bussard's due date was yesterday, so she and Ralph Snyder, the baby's father who's sitting nearby, know that labor could begin any time now. What startles her is the midwife's casual comment: “Forty-one and a half weeks.” “It could be, like, next week,” Nicole says, surprised. Only a few days' difference, but for the rest of her appointment, she wears a slightly stunned expression. She's a pretty girl—fringed blue eyes, carefully sculpted brows, brown hair that in a certain light glints slightly from a hair color called Plum. Often serious and levelheaded, Nicole can also sometimes drift wordlessly off into an unreachable place, and this news seems to have sent her there: It's really happening. It's happening soon. “Wow, one week. I've got one week.” This is the second time that Nicole and Ralph, who were sweethearts in eighth grade and have had an off-and-on relationship ever since, have conceived. The first time, when Nicole was 14, their parents persuaded her to have an abortion. She felt pressured into it, grew depressed and angry afterward. But this time, she reasons, it's a different story. This time she's 16. She can work, she can drive—this time she can take care of her baby. People have tried to talk her out of it. Nicole has been getting an earful about placing her baby for adoption. “There are so many people out there who want babies and can't have them,” her mother, Lisa Hamilton, herself an adopted child, urged. Many adoption agencies would allow her to choose a family for the baby if she relinquished it. At Adoptions Together in Silver Spring, Maryland, just an hour down the interstate, she would receive counseling and could then look through the photo albums that dozens of would-be adoptive parents have assembled, painstakingly, with a yearning that almost radiates from the page. But for Nicole, adoption has little appeal. “That wouldn't be the same,” she says. “I want to be the one to take care of him, to make sure he gets what he needs and he's happy.” She's sure it's a boy. Otto and Chanda Kern put together their own album for Adoptions Together last spring, just about when Nicole ran out of birth control pills, made an appointment at the county health department to get refills and then—in the intervening two weeks—got pregnant. Got pregnant, just like that. Whereas the Kerns, who'd married on a hot August day in 1995, had been trying to conceive for more than a year, with no luck. They both grew up in families of four children, always wanted to raise kids, built a cozy Cape Cod house on five acres in rural Cecil County, Maryland, because it seemed like a fine place to do it. They wanted to be young parents, ready to play ball and hike and build sand castles with their children. Instead, they were starting to feel the gnawing ache of infertility. “It got hard there for a while, just seeing a pregnant woman or a little one in a stroller,” says Chanda. They went to baby showers for friends, trying to feel appropriately joyful. “When's it my turn?” she wondered. She's 28, with a broad open face and a quick laugh; Otto is 29 and boyish in a crew cut, with a slightly goofy grin and a way of saying things very directly. For example: “When you want a kid, you don't want to wait forever.” The Kerns decided not to consult a fertility specialist, not to undergo treatment that could last months or years and cost tens of thousands of dollars and might or might not result in a baby. They decided to adopt. By spring, they had already slogged through most of the piles of paperwork. Police clearances from the FBI and the state. Statements from their employers—he works for a plumbing and heating supply house; she's a senior credit analyst—and from their doctors. Bank records. Three years' tax returns. Reference letters. Their house had been inspected for fire safety and their drinking water tested for pollutants. A social worker had visited their house three times for the home study. Then they had to figure out how to distill their lives into a black leatherette album. What would a young, pregnant woman want to see? “It's almost like you're selling yourself, you're advertising yourself,” Chanda fretted. They chose a big Christmas portrait of themselves for the opening page. They unearthed childhood photos, wedding pictures, snapshots of their dogs and cats. In the accompanying letter, they wrote about their love of the outdoors, their Christmas tree-cutting ritual. “Please know if you bless us with a child, we will provide an endless supply of unconditional love and attention,” they concluded plaintively. They sent the book to Silver Spring and waited. Once, these people—the unmarried, pregnant woman and the unwillingly childless couple—were thought to have something to offer one another. Through adoption, she could find a home for a baby she felt unable to raise on her own; they could create the family they were unable to conceive. Now Nicole Bussard and the Kerns, moving separately toward parenthood, are on parallel tracks that will not intersect. There's a confounding imbalance of supply and demand. On one side of the equation, nearly half a million American teenagers gave birth in 1998, the highest rate in the industrialized West. The great majority of those pregnancies are unplanned, the great majority of the young mothers unmarried. On the other side, perhaps 150,000 families are waiting for an American newborn. No one knows the actual number; all kinds of adoption statistics are notoriously hard to come by. But because the baby boomers have postponed marriage and childbearing until older ages, when infertility increases, and because there are so many of them (including a growing number of single adults also trying to adopt), the demand is high. Yet U.S. women have virtually stopped placing babies for adoption. The relinquishment rate has fallen steadily and dramatically. The National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), the only reliable way to track the decline, shows fewer than nine percent of all women relinquishing in 1973, then four percent in 1981. The most recent NSFG, in 1995, found only about one percent of single women relinquished babies. The decrease has occurred almost entirely among whites. African Americans, who have tended to rely on extended families rather than turning to the formal adoption system, have always had extremely low relinquishment rates and still do. Early on, researchers hypothesized that the reason was Roe v. Wade. But the number of teen pregnancies ending in abortion is also falling. Pregnant young women are not having more abortions—they're becoming parents. And of all the reasons they're keeping their children, possibly the most significant is that they can. The stigma that once shadowed out-of-wedlock pregnancy and single parenthood at young ages has largely evaporated. In high schools, counselors say, what's frowned on these days isn't pregnancy; it's adoption. Once described as an unmarried mother's most selfless, loving act, it's acquired a stigma of its own among young women—if they consider it at all. Frequently they don't. “They say, ‘I would never give my baby away. I'm not that bad,'” says Margery Brubaker, a pregnancy center administrator. A common refrain: “What mother could ‘give away' her baby?” But teens merely express a heightened version of the ambivalence with which America views adoption. Americans say they have a favorable opinion of adoption, according to a national survey conducted for Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in 1997—but half believe it's not as good as having one's own child. Forty percent think it's best for a single, pregnant teenager to raise her baby herself. Perhaps it's not surprising that adoption triggers doubts and questions, emotions, even denunciations. It raises very touchy issues: What does it mean to be a parent? What's a family? Can nurture trump nature? Is blood really thicker? Nicole Bussard and Heather Staley have been friends since seventh grade. They were both cheerleaders at middle school basketball games. They spent long summer days lazing around the pond near Heather's house in their bikinis, working on their tans. In tenth grade, Heather moved away but she ran into Nicole at the fireworks last July 4. Nicole was pregnant, she confided, though she'd yet to tell her parents. “I was, like, oh my gosh, what're you going to do?” Heather recalls. By the end of the month, Heather was pregnant herself. Now, juniors at separate Frederick County high schools, they're on the phone all the time, comparing notes. Heather came to Nicole's baby shower, toting a bath set and bottle-warmer. Nicole came to Heather's shower, too. There was a huge cake that read “Diapers and Pins—a New Life Begins.” It's been a fluttery few months. Heather's and Nicole's friends all seemed happy and excited for them; people she didn't even know came up and wanted to rub Heather's belly. In fact, passing around sonogram pictures in the cafeteria or the classroom, to a chorus of awww's, has become a school ritual for pregnant girls. Nicole carries a videotape of her sonogram around in her purse, and Heather is ticked that she didn't get one. Earlier in the process, Nicole felt more anxious about it all. But along with the baby shower, the attention and the cooing from friends, she received help from a whole network of agencies. A program in the Frederick County schools assigned a counselor to meet with Nicole weekly to listen, advise her of her legal rights, refer her to social service programs. It sent a turkey dinner at Thanksgiving and gifts at Christmas. In February, when she no longer felt able to go through a day's classes, she had a home tutor; after she gives birth, her counselor will help her locate (though not pay for) child care so she can finish school. Now, just a week from her due date, Nicole figures she can handle it. She's been responsible about keeping every prenatal appointment, and she finally stopped smoking. She wants to move back into her dad's more stable home in New Market, where she has her own bedroom. She's optimistic but not delusional: You won't hear her fantasizing about marrying Ralph, for instance. But Nicole knows something about babies—she feels like she half-raised her little sister, and she says that at the end of a bad day, a hug from tiny Kaitlin always helped her smile. So as unreal as the impending birth sometimes feels, she's excited about it, too. Even Ralph, an ebullient 16-year-old with dark eyes and an explosive cloud of black hair who's adopted hip-hop language and fashion sensibilities—though New Market is not much of a ‘hood'—now delivers effusive paeans to parenthood. “I already love this child and it's not even out yet,” he announces one afternoon. Nicole talks fondly about what a good dad Ralph is going to be. She'll be a good mother too. “If you had parents who didn't treat you well and you hated being treated like that,” she explains, “that shows you what not to do.”Nicole's philosophy leaves little room for adoption. “I'm not going to put my own flesh and blood out in the world and not know if it's safe, not know if it's happy, not know if it's taken care of, you know?” she says. More significantly, “It would tear me up. After carrying a child for nine months, to hand it over after you already grow attached to it . . . It grows inside of you, you know.” The Kerns were waiting for somebody like Nicole to come into Adoptions Together, decide she'd like a childless Catholic couple who lived in the country to adopt her child, then leaf through their photo album and ask to meet Otto and Chanda. But the summer passed and no one did. Chanda had dreams about having a baby, a blond, blue-eyed infant. Sometimes it was a boy, sometimes a girl; she and Otto had always hoped for one of each. They told themselves, as the seasons evolved, that this would be the last Mother's Day they celebrated by themselves, the last Father's Day or Halloween. And on darker days they wondered, “Why isn't someone choosing us? What's wrong with us?” They could phone the agency once a month for an update, and before long found themselves debating whether, if they called on September 15, they had to wait for October 15 to make the next call. Wouldn't it be okay to call on October 1? It was a new month, after all. The months stretched on, partly because of the Kerns' preferences for a newborn who looked like them. In November, when Otto called and asked point-blank how many birth mothers had been shown their photo album, which meant that the Kerns matched the women's requirements and vice versa, the answer was: Zero. At which point, though seven months is not a very long wait in the adoption universe, all their preferences began to seem pointless. “You have a choice to make,” Otto says. “How long do you wait before you decide it's too long? Are you going to wait another year?” Maybe, they reasoned, it was not so critical to have a newborn. Maybe it didn't matter so much which country their child was born in, even if that meant less information about the child's past and some health risks. “You change your mind about everything,” Otto says. “You think you want one thing, and the next day you realize: It's not that you want. It's just a kid you want.” Like a growing number of adoption seekers, they decided to look for a child overseas, briefly considering Guatemala, then settling on Russia, land of many orphanages, which now sends more children than any other country except China—more than 4,200 last year—to American families. So the Kerns embarked on a new round of paperwork—visas, passports, INS visits—and hoped they'd be on a plane to meet their child or children (they'd agreed to accept siblings) by summer. But the call from Adoptions Together came far more quickly. In February, the social worker reached Otto at work; Otto called Chanda at her office. “We're going to Russia,” he told her. “Yeah, I know.” She wondered why he was restating the obvious. “No, we're going to Russia on March 18th.” A brother and sister in a Siberian orphanage—Sergei was a year old and Lidia was two—were free for adoption. Chanda broke down, right at her desk, and cried. Calmed down, she called the agency to arrange for delivery of a videotape of Sergei and Lidia, and fell apart again. “Thank you,” she sobbed into the phone. The tape arrived the next day, and waiting for Otto to get home so they could watch it together took more restraint than she thought she had. They sat on the living room couch, tensely holding onto each other, staring at the TV screen. They watched the tape at least ten times that first day. Sergei was sitting on a patterned, Oriental-style carpet, chewing on an orange rattle, staring at the camera. “Chubby cheeks,” Otto noticed, already developing a paternal fondness. Lidia, clutching a stuffed bear, stood beside her brother. They looked just fine, sweet downy-haired blonds in cheerful clothing—a ski sweater for him, a flowered dress for her—probably contributed by other American families who came to the orphanage bringing donations. After a moment, a woman in a white coat walked over to help Sergei stand up, probably to demonstrate that he could—institutionalized Russian children may have health problems and developmental delays. Lidia gazed around and gave her bear a shake—and then it was over. Two and a half minutes, which was much too short—Chanda wanted the tape “to keep going and going”—but long enough for them to fall in love. “Just adorable,” Chanda thought. “Our kids. There they are, thousands of miles away, but there they are.” A week and a half later, the Kerns are preparing to go to what sounds like the ends of the earth to bring the kids home. There's barely time to buy and borrow and arrange everything before they are scheduled to fly from Philadelphia to Moscow and then to the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, from which they will travel three hours to the orphanage in Cherepanovo. Frantic but focused, they compile lists, more lists, lists of lists. Nevertheless, every night before they go to bed, they watch the tape one more time. It's a girl. Corinn Alexandria Snyder, born at 3:03 p.m. Monday, February 28, weighs 6 pounds 14 1/2 ounces, has a thatch of dark hair and a scrunched-up expression on her tiny red face and is, of course, beautiful. By 3:15, she's in Nicole's arms, wearing a miniature stocking cap to maintain her body temperature. Thanks to Ralph's mother's coaching and an epidural, Nicole's labor went smoothly. She's exhausted but she doesn't let go of Corinn until the nurse-midwife asks to examine her. Nicole's friends Angie and Liz, who dropped by unexpectedly to see the birth, coo over the baby's blue eyes. Over the next two days, lots more people arrive: Nicole's and Ralph's families, Ralph and his buddies, Heather, Nicole's other girlfriends. Nicole has heard all the warnings about kids having kids and the problems involved. She simply thinks that she can be the exception—and of course, she could be. At any rate, no one is taking this baby home except her. “Uh uh,” she says. “That little girl is mine.” On day three, Ralph's mom drives Nicole, Ralph, and Corinn back to Nicole's basement bedroom in her father's house. A little over a year ago she painted it midnight blue and hung a glow-in-the-dark moon and stars from the ceiling. Now it also holds a swing, diapers, and a gingham bassinet. Three weeks later, Otto and Chanda Kern check in at the British Airways counter at Philadelphia International Airport two hours before their flight. Chanda's stomach is flip-flopping. It's the first time the Kerns have left the United States, and only the second time they've ever flown. And as Otto points out, “When we come home there'll be four of us.” The big suitcases they checked are full of toys, clothes and over-the-counter medicines for the orphanage. Their carry-ons hold cameras, two plush bears and Russian language sheets to study. Finally, their row is called. “All righty,” Chanda says, shouldering the large purse that will double as a diaper bag. They walk past the gate, without looking back, and onto the plane that will take them to their children.
Postscript: A few months later Sergei's learned to open every kitchen cabinet. His sister Lidia can reel off the alphabet in English. After months of waiting and planning, Otto and Chanda Kern finally have the family they so desperately wanted. “It seems like they've been here forever,” Chanda says. “We were meant to be their parents.” Corrin Alexandria Snyder is flourishing too. Nicole now lives with her father and has found a part-time secretarial job; she complains that Ralph, who helps pay for day care, isn't around much. Once she graduates, she wants to move to North Carolina. “I'd prefer to get far away from here and start over,” she says. o This story was adapted by the author from the Washington Post Magazine, where she is a staff writer.
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