Dani's Story: A Journey From Neglect to Love (3 page)

He got married the first time when he was twenty and his wife was only sixteen. She also saw marriage as a way out of her house. As soon as she graduated from high school, she got pregnant and had their first son, Shawn, and then Ryan a little more than a year after that. She was still a child herself, and when Ryan was only eight months old, she walked out on all of them.

So there was Bernie, a twenty-two-year-old single father. It was really hard for him. During the three years before his mom finally stopped working to watch the boys for him, he went through nineteen babysitters. I give him so much credit, to take on that kind of responsibility at his age. It really shows his character. His ex-wife rarely saw her boys, and she certainly didn’t pay child support, although she did harangue him simply out of meanness, often calling social services to report him as neglectful or negligent. The inspector would come to the trailer and find it clean and neat, dinner on the stove, and Bernie folding clothes while his boys took a bath. Bernie was father and mother to them, as much as he could be.

He admits that some of the relationships he had then were more about getting a mom for his kids than a partner for himself, which had a predictable result. His second marriage was to a woman a few years older than him whom he’d met in church. She wanted kids of her own, and they really tried, but it never happened, and I’m sure that was hard on her.

They ended up in Nashville after she saw a segment on
Oprah
called “50 Fabulous Places to Raise Your Family.” Nashville and Phoenix were the two places that appealed to her, and Bernie didn’t want to go to Phoenix, so he and his wife came to Nashville, right around the same time that Paul Senior and I did. We laugh that we have Oprah Winfrey to thank for our being together.

Bernie’s second wife didn’t think Nashville was so fabulous, though. After they spent about four years together, she ended up leaving, so it was just Bernie and the boys again.

I had gone to work for my ex-husband Paul, who had a construction company that specialized in trim. I did doorknobs. I have no idea what skills I possessed that translated to doorknobs, but it was good work. Every building needs a door, and every door needs a doorknob. I would get up at Dark-Thirty o’clock every morning, do the farm chores, get the kids up, get them ready for school and onto the bus, race to work, do a half-day, dash home to be there when they got off the bus, supervise homework, make dinner, do chores, and fall into bed. Then I’d get up and do it all again the next day.

Bernie and I met on the job; there was nothing at all romantic about it. We were both seeing other people at the time, and he was a smoker, which is a deal breaker for me. Yet that gave us a chance to become friends first, and we became really good friends. This was a first for both of us in a relationship. He would talk about his girlfriend troubles and challenges as a single parent, and I would do the same. We saw each other all day on the job and then talked on the phone for a couple of hours after our kids went to bed.

As time went on, I think we both began to see the possibility of a relationship, although I was probably more hesitant than he was. There were his kids, for one thing. Maybe it was because they were being raised by a single dad, but I had a problem with some of their behaviors. Bernie’s boys were older than mine, so I was afraid they might influence my boys to be age-inappropriate.

But eventually Bernie won me over. He quit smoking to seal the deal, and we were married on March 31, 1997, at the Baptist church Bernie attended in Franklin. It was very simple: the four boys and just a few friends. The church was feeding the homeless that night, so we ate our wedding dinner with them. That felt right to us. We didn’t have the money for a honeymoon, so we just went home after our dinner with the homeless. At least, we had a home.

I think I got pregnant that very night. We definitely didn’t plan it—we had quite enough on our plates, and we didn’t feel a driving need to have a child together. Bernie was under the impression from the fertility doctor he and his second wife had seen that his siring days were over. At least, that’s what he told me. Surprise! But we embraced the news as God’s plan and celebrated William’s arrival the week before Christmas.

Blending the families was a bit of a challenge, and we probably should have done a little more prep work on that. The boys had gotten along fine before we were married, but when my sons and I moved into Bernie’s tiny three-bedroom house, things got tense. Steven and Paul were used to sharing, but Shawn and Ryan had previously had their own rooms. Shawn was sixteen years old and had always taken on a lot of responsibility for running their house. In hindsight it’s understandable that he might get upset at a relatively strange woman coming into his house and taking his job, on top of being forced to share his father and his bedroom. There was definitely some tension. When we moved to a larger house, Shawn had the whole basement to himself, and we just tried to stay out of each other’s way. Thankfully, the misunderstandings between us lessened when Shawn went to live with his mother, who had settled in Atlanta.

Then we moved again, to a huge old house that had been converted into rental units. It had six apartments, six bathrooms, and six kitchens. Restricted to the no-budget plan, we did everything ourselves to turn it back into a single family home. It took us almost four years of backbreaking work on nights and weekends before we finished that house. It consumed every waking moment, and it was a showcase when it was done.

But we wanted warmer weather. Paul kept getting bronchitis every winter, so we thought a change in climate might help. We had driven through Florida a year earlier on vacation, down one coast and up another. We liked the west coast of the state better—the Gulf water was warmer, shallower, and calmer than the ocean, which we thought was better for Willie. He was only three, and the Atlantic was very rough. We found the kind of small-town community we liked in Fort Myers Beach, so in October 2002 we put our Tennessee home on the market, packed everything up, and moved to Florida, the Sunshine State.

Chapter 2

Seeking

The easygoing lifestyle in Fort Myers Beach suited us well. We walked, biked, swam in our pool or a neighbor’s pool, went to the beach, and played in the park. We had a small, partly pebbled yard, so there wasn’t much upkeep involved, and the house—compared to other rehab projects we had taken on—was finished. We grilled outdoors a lot and loved to eat on our second-floor deck that overlooked a canal where we could watch the manatees play. Anytime we could be outside, that’s where you would find us.

Willie was in a good school, Steven was close to graduating and had a part-time job that he loved because it was on the beach, Bernie had steady work, and I was a happy housewife. Yet my desire for another child kept tugging at me.

Some little things came up that moved the process along for Bernie. We were attending a Baptist church on the beach in Florida and got a new pastor. He and his wife had four kids of their own and wanted to adopt a baby from China. The wife and I talked about it frequently. She already knew that I was interested in adoption but that Bernie was reluctant. Maybe she thought it was something that would be easier to do with another couple. I talked to Bernie about it, and he said that if we adopted, there were probably plenty of kids in Florida who needed a home. That “if” gave me hope, and I sensed that he was softening.

Our church had a retreat center on the beach, and if it wasn’t being used by the church or rented out to another group, the pastor invited the Florida Baptist Children’s Home to bring out some of its children for the weekend. It was such a fun thing for them and a break in their routine; they got to swim in the ocean, play on the beach. The retreat has a kitchen and a dorm and is very simple.

When the kids from the home were there for a weekend, families from the church would send out food for them, so that when the kids got there, everything was taken care of. Usually, we’d just drive the food over and drop it off, but Steven volunteered to go and teach the kids to skim board. He is really good at it, and lots of those kids had never been to the ocean, much less on a skim board. Steven ended up staying all day and had a blast, but I noticed that he was really quiet on the drive home.

That night at dinner, Steven talked about how sad it was, all of those great kids without families, and how he wished he could take them home with him. I think Bernie was really touched by these kind words coming out of the mouth of a teenager! I could see tears in his eyes and sensed another stone being laid on his path.

I didn’t want to push it, but I couldn’t resist a nudge every now and then. With all of the four older boys except Steven moved out and his exit right around the corner, I pointed out to Bernie how quiet it was getting around the house. That didn’t seem to bother him a bit, although when I added that Steven’s departure would leave Willie an only child for at least the next decade, it hit a nerve, as Bernie remembered the loneliness of having no siblings.

Not long afterward, we were visiting with the preacher and his wife after church, and she filled us in on their adoption quest. As we walked away, Bernie turned and looked at me and asked, “Do you still want to adopt a child?” I couldn’t believe it. I searched his face to see if he was serious. He took me by the shoulders, looked me in the eyes, and said he was ready.

So, I was ready, he was ready, and Willie loved the idea of having a brother or a sister closer to his age whom he could play with.

We may have been ready, but we had a lot to learn. Knowing how many children are in the world waiting for adoption, lots of people think that once you decide to adopt, you call an agency and children start arriving on your doorstep. In Miami-Dade County alone, there were about four hundred boys and four hundred girls ready and available to be adopted. In one county! That didn’t count the kids in foster care who, for various reasons, were not available for adoption.

We did it all backward. First, we searched for a child, then we found out that we couldn’t even be considered for adoption until we had our Home Study done by an agency and completed our MAPP (Model Approach to Partnership & Parenting) classes.

We wanted to move quickly—and I didn’t want to give Bernie too much time or a reason to change his mind—so we went through a private agency to have our Home Study done. If we had gone through the county, it could have taken two or three years; instead, we paid $1,200 to have it done privately, and it took about three months.

While we were waiting for the Home Study to be done, we started our MAPP classes, ten weeks of weekly classes. People get discouraged because they don’t want to wait three years, they don’t have $1,200, or they have a hard time fitting in the MAPP classes. It is hard, and it is a lot to do, but it’s worth so much in the long run. Bernie and I learned a lot in the MAPP classes. Before we went, we thought that after five kids, we knew it all.

The Home Study is extensive, as it should be. The state is entrusting you with a life and can’t just take your word for it that you’re adopting out of the goodness of your heart or that you are stable, have an adequate home, and are financially prepared to raise a child. It’s too bad there are no requirements like that before people get pregnant.

We were fingerprinted and had criminal background checks. Happily, all of us had clean records, and the state didn’t unearth any rattling skeletons in our closet worse than making mistakes in our previous spouses. We had to get reference letters from neighbors, relatives, and our pastor. We had to produce copies of our divorce papers, which was a problem for Bernie because he had burned his, so he had to contact records offices in California to get proof that he was not a bigamist.

The adoption officials made home visits, called our employers, checked our financial records, and interviewed all of the kids many times, as well as their teachers and employers and the people who wrote letters on our behalf. The older boys were getting irritated, but Willie just got more excited as it began to seem real to him. Steven was closest to him in age, but he was still ten years older. Willie thought he would have a playmate, someone to go on bike rides through the neighborhood and go to the beach and play board games with.

When the Home Study and the MAPP classes are finished, and you are ready to start considering children, there is a checklist to go over. Would you take an African American child, a blind child, a mixed-race child, a disabled child, an older child? All of these are called special needs children and are harder to place. We knew we wanted an older child, and we thought the color of his or her skin would be such a small thing, compared to what so many of these children have been through.

The adoption officials had told us to be very aware of birth order. We didn’t want to bring a child into the home who was older than Willie. We definitely didn’t want a baby. We wanted a child we wouldn’t have to potty train and who would sleep through the night. We didn’t want a child who had been sexually abused or who was severely mentally challenged. So much of what we were looking for—in fact, most of what we were looking for—was based on how Willie would interact with that child and how it would affect him.

I became obsessed with looking at available children online. It seems like an odd way to do it, searching online for a child as if you were looking for a car or a boat or a dog. But it’s become the norm, and it’s actually very informative and practical. A lot of kids sounded promising, but then we’d make further inquiries and find out they couldn’t be around other children or around animals. One little girl we asked about—who looked like an angel—had gone through several disrupted adoptions and was sent back to the agency because she consistently attacked the mother in every home. She had issues with other females. We found siblings—seven and eight years old—who seemed great online, but we found out they had been sent to homes and had come back five times. There was another girl who urinated all over the furniture whenever she got upset. There were other kids who mistreated or tortured animals.

Some of the kids had already spent time in mental hospitals. Others had been through so much that they would never be able to function as normal members of society. It is heartbreaking, but you have to protect the family you have.

We were getting discouraged. We became more open on some conditions and more opposed to others. Some of the answers on our checklist changed from no to maybe and some from maybe to no. Some yeses became maybes.

Then we got a call from the woman who had worked with us on our Home Study. She told us about a Heart Gallery event coming up in Tampa and suggested that we see some kids live and in person. We decided to give it a try.