AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERSPECTIVE

ON JULY 20, 2010, I sat in the Governor's office explaining how children, adopted out of foster care, were cycling back into the system. There is a gaping hole in the state mental healthcare system and our adoptive son fell into it. He became violent and aggressive due to pre-adoptive trauma. The state refused all sources of possible funding for the residential care he needed to keep himself and the rest of our family safe. The policy advisor responded with a question that I never saw coming.

"Why did you adopt those mentally ill kids anyway?"

I had to ransack my brain to find an adjective to describe the way that question made me feel. The only one I could think of was a word that is used often in England, but rarely here.

Gobsmacked!

I took a moment to compose myself before I responded, "Because I'm darn good at it! Because not just anyone can love a mentally ill child — I can. The state of Illinois needs people like me."

I still wonder just exactly where this policy advisor thought mentally ill children should be. As parents of two mentally ill children, we have experienced a lot of stigma, but I certainly didn't expect to get it from the most senior health policy advisor in the state. Once I got over the shock; I realized it was really a two part question. Why did we adopt? Why did we choose to raise mentally ill children?

Why We Adopted

I'll explain why we chose adoption versus giving birth first. We had physical and emotional reasons for choosing adoption. There are a lot of things in life I do very well. Physically speaking, pregnancy and childbirth are not included among those things. Our emotional reasons for considering adoption stem back to my husband's and my own childhoods.

We are not an infertile couple. I gave birth to two of the most beautiful red-headed children you've ever seen. In fact, when we disclosed to our families that we intended to adopt, one of my sisters-in-law asked, "Why would you want to do that? You have the prettiest babies in the family." I believe that my nieces and nephews are all beautiful in their own way, but I suppose there is something especially engaging about a porcelain skinned baby with the perfect shade of amber curls. In fact, strangers have long stopped us on the streets to ask us if our daughter's hair was real or a wig. So, what was to stop us from having another equally beautiful child?

The issue of getting pregnant was not an obstacle for my husband, Jim, and me. In fact, in that realm, my biological clock never skipped a beat. We chose to have children and weeks later, I was pregnant. No waiting or wondering required. But, the issues of pregnancy and childbirth were entirely another matter. Just weeks after becoming pregnant, if I could make it from the bed to the bathroom before the morning sickness hit; it was a good day. None of the remedies, old or new worked. I was miserable for five to six months. About the time I could actually keep a meal down, I was so uncomfortably large, I could barely move around. I stand five feet nothing with a very short torso, so there was really no room for a baby to grow. Once it did grow, there was no space left for my bladder. After suffering a miserable miscarriage following my first pregnancy, I decided I'd had enough of hospitals. A co-worker had been telling me about how wonderful home birth was. After researching the differences thoroughly, it sounded like the most comfortable option for me. What I didn't anticipate was having a December baby in the Midwest, when it was 30 degrees below zero and having a virus with a fever at the time I went into labor. This precluded me from having the uneventful home birth I desired and sent me off to the hospital with a broken water bag and water freezing as it ran down my legs.

In 1989, my first full term pregnancy yielded the first of our two red headed cherubs, but not before 24 hours of hard labor followed by a Cesarean section birth. Five days after I came home from the hospital, we celebrated Christmas with our daughter, Samantha.

In 1991, my next pregnancy was identical to the last, except that two weeks after my due date, I was still pregnant. I was beyond uncomfortable and barely walking the week before I gave birth. Apparently, my body does not dilate, so once again, I was under the knife with an unplanned Cesarean section. The second incision was cut longer due to the size of our first born son, Mason, who weighed in at almost 11 lb., and stretched the measuring tape to 24 inches. We brought him home from the hospital in clothing for a 6–9 month old. He was three feet shorter than me at birth and my small frame didn't manage the experience very well. It stands to reason, that a large baby gets even bigger after he's born. It was not long at all before he was too heavy for me to carry him around. To make matters worse, I herniated a disc in my back, requiring surgery. When our pudgy little tyke could finally crawl, I taught him to wait until I sat down, and coaxed him to crawl onto my lap, so that I could hold him.

After our second baby, I started to re-think the plan about having a third child, but my husband very much wanted another one. We wondered if my back would support another pregnancy, and then, there was the issue of carrying the infant post birth. While another birth was physically possible, it wasn't really plausible, especially with already having two little ones at home. Ultimately, we decided another birth from my body was out of the question.

In 1994, a baby boy was born in another part of our county. He was starved, lethargic, and severely neglected. After being admitted to the hospital, he was diagnosed with "failure to thrive." The nurses fed him with an eyedropper once an hour to keep him alive. He almost died. Social services removed his older brother and sister from that same home a few weeks later. Their sister was placed with one of her birth father's biological relatives, who declined to take in her brothers. The boys initially went to live with their birthmother's parents and later to a foster home. They'd been in foster care nearly two years...