Ann Ellsworth - We Adopted Five Special-Needs Foster Kids: The Inspiring True Story of How an Absolutely Crazy Idea Led to One Very Big, Happy Family

Copyright 2019 by Ann Ellsworth

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Paul Qualcom

Cover photo credit: iStockphoto

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-4529-2

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-4530-8

Printed in the United States of America.

To My Amazing Children

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

I n the spring of 2008, my husband and I adopted five high-risk children through the foster care system in New York City. At the time, Dan was forty-five and I was forty-three. I was childless, excited, and unprepared. Our children, aged five to ten years old, had been neglected and abused, and diagnosed with behavioral, cognitive, physical, and psychiatric conditions, none of which could be treated medically.

I read a lot of books about adoption before becoming a parent, but none came close to describing what we went through when adopting a large sibling group of older, special-needs children through foster care. I wish there was a book that could have shared some of the systems that worked, given me a heads-up on a few issues I had not seen coming, and put some faces to the devastating effects of early trauma, abuse, and neglect on developing brains.

Maybe this memoir can be a remembrance for my children of our first years together, a baby book of sorts, a mark in pencil on our kitchen door frame to show them how little they were, and how far they have come.

Maybe this story can reach out to someone like myself, someone in a position to act and make a difference, but who had never considered special-needs adoption. Before I started this journey, I had been completely unaware of foster care; Id never known anyone who had gone through the system and had no idea of the enormous need for permanent homes. I didnt know that I, as an adult, could make all the difference in the world to a child. I could be a parent to someone who didnt have parents. I could make a family for children who didnt have a family.

Love can make a family, but a family is not love. It is a container for love. It is a secondary womb where love can do its slow work of growing and nurturing a childs heart and brain. And it doesnt end when you grow up and are ready to leave. A family misses you, waves from the porch until youre out of sight, then waits and hopes for your return. It loves you when you feel unlovable, accepts you when the world turns away, and hugs you even when you dont hug back.

I always had it. But not until I loved my own children did I understand what it means not to have parents, a family, a home. Not everybody has a familybut every human deserves one and every child needs one.

Author Note: Please be advised that this book speaks candidly about violence and severe mental and physical abuse.

CONCEPTION

J ake lay staring up at me by the river, lying there, grinning ear to ear like a boy with a secret. Hey cousin, I said, whats buzzin? Jake yelled back at me, his voice distorted and strained. He stiffened his arms and legs and yelled again. My first cousin Melanie had adopted Jake as an infant. She was sitting ten feet upstream and I looked over at her for help: Hes hard to understand, she said, but if you listen carefully, he has a lot to say. I knelt on the smooth rocks and put my ear near his mouth.

He spoke again, arching his back. It sounded like, I have to pee. I pulled my head back, You have to pee? Jake rocked his body side to side, excited. All right then, I said. I called to my husband, knee deep in the river, Dan! Jake needs to pee! I smiled down at my cousin, I dont see you for five years and the first thing you say to me is I have to pee? He laughed, rocking back and forth. Dan splashed to the shore, I gotcha, buddy. Dan rolled Jake onto his arm and, lifting him up, pointed him towards the reeds. Jake yelled something at me. His mother translated, Jake says no peeking! I yelled back at Jake, Not peeking!

At nine years old Jake was maybe three feet long, and very thin, with stiff blond hair and lazy blue eyes. His body was limp from cerebral palsy; he couldnt stand or hold up his head. His speech was thick, but consistent, like a dialect. Once I caught onto his speech patterns, he was chatty and engaging. My mom is trying to get me to use the bathroom, he said. She gives me a quarter every time I dont pee my pants. But its hard for me, so she gives me a nickel if I can get most of it in the toilet and just have a little spot on my pants.

That sounds like a money maker right there.

I love my family. I have fifty-two first cousins, each with an average of six kids. Its hard to foster family tensions with so many bodies looking alike, so many humans growing so fast. We come from the Intermountain West, Mormon Country: wide streets and narrow paths. I am no longer active in the church, but with a last name like Ellsworth, I enjoy a cultural affiliation with my religion; faith and family are synonymous and my worldview remains awash with that hallmark Mormon optimism.

My life, however, was taking a very different path. I was thirty-seven, childless, enjoying a career as a classical musician, and the first ever in my family to get divorced in her twenties. I considered myself a pioneer in this regard. I was recently remarried to a lapsed Lutheran from South Dakota. He loved and accepted my family as his own and, except for our wildly differing doctrines, I felt at home in Dans congregation, sitting in his hometown church, watching him sing in the choir.

Dan and I were hosting my family reunion at our lodge in the Adirondacks, an old YMCA camp with a big field stone fireplace, bunk rooms, and a twenty-three-foot dining room table. It was rare for my family to gather so far east, but the lodge was big enough to hold everyone and in close proximity to the Mormon Mecca: Palmyra, New York, the birthplace of our faith. Jake and I were enjoying some quality time with our loved ones. We lay on our backs, watching the clouds while Jake shared with me his adoption story. When I was born, I had cerebral palsy and my birth mom couldnt take care of me, so one of the doctors in the hospital called my Dad, and my Dad says he knew right then I was his son. He told my Mom, Our son is lying in a hospital in Seattle and I am going to get him. He got in the car right then and drove six hundred miles to pick me up. There was pride in Jakes voice. He belonged to someone.

Jake was four the first time we met. I was on a road trip and stopped to visit Melanie and her family on their little farm in Idaho. The kids were outside chasing chickens when I pulled up, Jake screaming with excitement. I had to smile as Melanies husband, Max, grabbed his tiny son by the waist and dove with him head-first under a bush after a chicken, just like any other kid. These are good people. I wasnt like them, but I was proud to belong to them.