‘Would I Do It Again? In a Minute!’ : Ups and Downs on Road to Adoption

The emotions range from “midnight doubts” to “adoption euphoria.”

The realities of adoption can be daunting. For social workers and adoptive parents, though, the rewards are many.

Patrick Quivey described the pleasure he feels when he discovers people who are obviously going to make good parents:

“I get a feeling of promise. I’ll be in their home . . . talking with them about daily life. Their family history. As it weaves together, the thought begins to grow ‘This is only the beginning . . . but some child may be very fortunate.’ ”

A tall, bearded, soft-spoken man, Quivey, 32, is senior counselor of the Multi-Cultural Home Recruitment Network. He is in the business of recruiting parents.

The “midnight doubts,” he explained, are likely to hit a soon-to-be parent when he or she is several months into the process--after the first excitement generated by the decision to adopt has worn off.

“They tend to wake in the night and think: ‘What am I doing?’ ”

Quivey and adoptive parents he has worked with know that it can be a long process, with many steps along the way.

The state-funded network is part of the San Diego Urban League. Three of its four counselor-recruiters--Quivey, Candace Trotter and Joyce James--talked with a reporter recently at the agency’s offices on Martin Luther King Way.

“We’re not an adoption agency,” Quivey stressed. People, he says, sometimes get the wrong idea about the network, imagining a back room full of babies, all waiting to be picked like summer peas.

“Our function is to find people who might adopt--including single people--and link them with private and county adoption agencies,” he said.

“We work with the black, Hispanic and American Indian populations,” Trotter said. Both she and James are black. Both have children of their own.

“Most of these homeless children--at least 80% of them--end up under the care of the Department of Social Services because they’ve been abused. Or neglected. Or abandoned,” James said.

Minority children, children over 3 and children who have handicaps have historically been difficult to find permanent homes for.

“But that doesn’t deter us,” Trotter said. “Just the opposite. It’s our motivation.”

Joining the discussion of adoption was Diane Evans, a psychologist in private practice in La Jolla and downtown San Diego. She is single and has two sons. Kwame, whom she adopted, is nearly 11. When he was 5, she gave birth to Amar.

“I was 27 when I decided I wanted a baby. And I wanted a boy,” she said.

“At that time, I was a senior social worker at UCSD. I was stable economically and socially, but I felt my home needed a child. If there had been a suitable man in my life at that time . . . “ She shrugged. “Well, there wasn’t one.”

The adoption agency--Tayari, a San Diego County agency that works primarily with the black community--warned her that her chances of adopting a baby, rather than an older child, were slim.

“But they were very helpful. They really tried,” she recalled. “Once you decide to adopt, you begin living with fantasies about your child. Tayari suggested several babies to me, and each time I’d mentally begin to bond with them. But then it didn’t work out.”

James said, “Adopting a child proceeds in stages, like a pregnancy does. But inception begins in the mind, not in the womb. Do you remember those diagrams in biology class? The ones where the sperm are swimming toward the egg? Sometimes they made it, and sometimes they missed. The matching stage in adoption can be like that. And it often takes about nine months.”

For Evans, it took much longer.

For more than two years, she seriously considered adopting a baby boy without legs. “And glaucoma. He had all kinds of problems. ‘Diane, that’s crazy!’ my friends said. ‘You’re a single woman with a full-time job. How can you manage to get him back and forth to the hospital for the medical treatment he needs every week?’ And they were right,” she said.

When she finally relinquished the idea of adopting the little boy, Evans felt terrible about it. “I’d been visualizing him as a part of my life for so long. It was like a mental abortion.”

To subjugate her feelings, she started working on her Ph.D. “Three months into my Ph.D. program, I got a phone call from Tayari,” she said.

“We’ve got a baby boy,” they told her. “Seven months old. But you must make up your mind right this minute--it’s now or never. And you’ll have to pick him up in Las Vegas.”

“I jumped in my car right away,” she said, laughing with pleasure at the memory. “Oh, he was just gorgeous! That round little body. And his face was completely round! He was called Baby Matthew, but I renamed him Kwame after the African leader.”

Things ran fairly smoothly.

“He was more independent than the average 7-month-old,” she said. “Being in a foster home had done that. He would pull up his own blanket at night--that kind of thing.”

Unlike an older adopted child, Kwame didn’t have a history. He hadn’t had time to pick up any negative habits. Evans’ 17-year-old sister, Denise, was living with her, and that was a big help in balancing her work, school and baby schedules.

“We had a really good time,” Evans said. “Kwame is a chatterer. I’m a chatterer. I used to do my housework carrying him in a body sack, both of us chattering away.”

A problem cropped up when Kwame was 3, however. They were living in La Jolla then.

“I was driving him home from nursery school when he said: ‘I don’t like those kinds of people,’ ” she remembers. “And the people he was referring to were black! The children he played with in school were primarily white. He didn’t realize he was a black child.”

So that Kwame would not lose touch with his own identity, Evans moved to Southeast San Diego. The move worked out well, she says. “He’s grown into one of the most humanitarian people you could meet. And he sings, too. Everybody loves Kwame.”

Finding such happy parents is the task of Multi-Cultural Home Recruitment Network workers. They give workshops on adoption for churches and organizations. They recruit for long-term foster care--”fost-adopt”--too. The program covers Imperial, San Diego, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and Kern counties.

“One big myth surrounding adoption,” Candace Trotter said, “is that you have to have lots of money and a perfect home to qualify.

That just isn’t true, she stresses. People of very modest means, renting a very modest apartment, can qualify. A home is a home.

“And nobody’s family is perfect. I consider myself a very good parent, but there are days when I think ‘If a social worker came into my house now, I’d never pass!’ ”

Fred Hayes, who is on the board of the recruitment network, is a sportswriter in his late 40s.

Like Evans, he is a black adoptive parent. And like Evans, he says his children have brought him great joy. But his experiences with adoption have been different from hers. His children were older when they joined his family. A brother and sister, they had been trundled through four foster homes.

“I saw them first on ‘Tuesday’s Child’ on television,” he said.

Javier was 7 then. Hope, 5.

Hayes already had a grown son and daughter from his first marriage. But his second wife, Pearl, had lost several babies through miscarriages. They had talked about adopting, but not very seriously.

“But something about Javier and Hope touched me,” Hayes said. “They were so appealing.” (Hayes wasn’t the only person to feel this way. Thirty-seven families applied to adopt them after seeing them on television.)

The adoption process, he remembers, moved swiftly. (“Unfortunately, because of legal and family problems, it often doesn’t,” Quivey said.) Within a few months, a social worker brought Javier and Hope over to the Hayes’ house to spend the weekend.

“She warned us that Javier would be shy and Hope would do all the talking,” Hayes said. “And she was right. He didn’t say much. But if you asked him a question, he’d answer.”

He was also very protective of his little sister. He had grown used to watching out for her through home after home after home.

“We took them to Seaport Village on the Sunday afternoon,” Hayes said. “For a picnic. And Hope started to climb a tree. Javier tugged at her and whispered: ‘No . . . No . . . come down. Don’t you want these people to like you?’ ”

“These people” did like them. A lot. Javier and Hope moved in permanently in May, 1982, a few weeks before Hope’s 6th birthday.

But Hayes said it was years before the children really relaxed, before they really accepted them as their parents, as they do today.

“Parents adopt a child,” he said. “But the children still have to adopt the parents.”

Children who have been shuffled around a lot, he explained, get the feeling that “I don’t belong to anybody.” They are forced to build a shield around themselves to survive.

“Pearl and I kept trying to convince them that they belonged to us now. But whenever the social worker dropped in, they would hide in their bedrooms. They were afraid she was going to move them again.”

Hayes said Javier grew close to him more quickly than Hope did. The fact that they both love sports helped. A father-and-son relationship gradually developed.

“With a lot of effort on my part,” Hayes said, smiling. “Hope was much closer to Pearl. Then, one summer, she hurt her leg at camp. It wasn’t broken, but she needed a cast. As she saw the hospital doctor approaching with the equipment, she suddenly flung her arms around my neck and yelled, ‘Daddy! Daddy! Don’t let them do it!’ ”

He realized then that she had accepted him.

“It’s an . . . er . . . emotional thing,” he said, looking a little damp-eyed.

(Evans, too, had tears in her eyes when she spoke about bringing Kwame from Las Vegas.)

“Parents go into adopting with such excitement and euphoria,” Hayes said, echoing Quivey’s earlier comments. “But my feeling is that you have to think carefully about what you are getting into.” “No matter how bright these kids are, because of the lives they’ve led, they’ll have a lot of bad habits. They won’t have good study habits. They probably won’t be used to going to church. Maybe they’ll lie. Or steal from their classmates. If you adopt an older child, you’re taking on the full-time job of restructuring their lives.”

“Fred, would you do it again?” Quivey asked him.

“These two kids have been one of the greatest sources of happiness in my life. And I’ve had a lot of happiness,” Hayes said firmly. “Would I do it again? In a minute!”