Girl’s Guardian Parents Forge Rare Kinship With Navajo Birth Mother

The “Welcome Home” banners taped to the living room walls at Rick and Cheryl Pitts’ modest tract home here are beginning to droop. Television crews no longer film the couple’s every move, as they did during the tumultuous week before Indian authorities granted the Pittses temporary custody of the Navajo baby they hope to raise.

Life at the Pitts home has regained a semblance of normality in the 2 1/2 weeks since the couple and Patricia Keetso, the child’s natural mother, returned from Arizona with 9-month-old Allyssa Kristian Keetso.

But while the immediate drama of the custody battle has faded, another, equally compelling story is quietly unfolding here.

The Pittses, both 33, and Patricia Keetso, 21, have formed an unusually close relationship. Keetso is temporarily living with the Pittses, as she did for two months before Allyssa was born. The Pittses, who coached Keetso through labor, say she has become part of their family. They say they want her to remain in close contact with Allyssa throughout the child’s life.

They are forging an unusual new family structure, complicated further by the involvement of the Navajo extended family with whom Allyssa will have contact as she grows up.

“She’ll have two mothers and one father,” Cheryl Pitts, laughing, said of Allyssa. “We’ll explain that to her later.”

The Navajo nation last month intervened in California adoption proceedings begun by the Pittses and Keetso. Although Keetso wanted the San Jose couple to adopt her child, tribal authorities took jurisdiction of the case and custody of the child under the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.

The act was designed to stem years of abuse of Indian adoptions, which resulted in many Indian children being separated from their families and their culture.

The temporary agreement reached in the Children’s Court of the Navajo Nation last month grants “open and liberal” visitation rights to Patricia Keetso, her parents and her extended family, most of whom live on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. The Pittses have dropped their adoption petition and now are seeking permanent guardianship. The agreement is expected to be made permanent at another tribal court hearing in late summer.

Continuing contact between birth parents and the adoptive parents and child has become increasingly common during the last decade, particularly in California, according to adoption professionals around the state.

No statistics exist on the trend, but Kathleen Silber, director of the San Jose branch of the Children’s Home Society, estimates that 25% of the California adoptions her agency handles each year involve some form of continuing contact. The Society is the oldest and largest private adoption agency in the state.

But only a handful of adoption cases involve the close relationship between the natural parent and the adoptive family that the Pittses and Keetso say they intend to continue.

Depending on Trust

The Pittses and Keetso are confident that the trust they have developed will see them through any difficulty that might arise.

“It’s like I’ve known them before,” Keetso said of the Pittses. “I thought I would be feeling really bad to give up my baby to these people, but I wasn’t.”

“We didn’t have any idea how close the relationship was going to be,” Cheryl Pitts said. “We were told by the lawyers not to get this close.”

The Pittses have turned an alcove off their living room into a bedroom for Keetso, who says she will stay with them until she decides what to do next. She has left Brigham Young University and is thinking about joining the U.S. Air Force, but for now has taken a part-time job at a drugstore across the street from the Pitts’ home. On a recent morning, she and Cheryl giggled like teen-age sisters as they prepared to go shopping.

Some adoption professionals caution adoptive and natural parents against forming such close bonds. They say the parties’ interests are fundamentally different, and that emotional entanglements may get in the way of each side continuing with their own lives.

Both Feel Obligated

“As well-meaning as the people may be, we think it’s very unprofessional,” said William Pierce, president of the Washington-based National Committee for Adoption. “It makes both parties feel quite obligated.”

Pierce also opposes continuing contact between the natural parent and the child, saying it confuses the child. “It allows neither party to have a clear role definition,” he said.

But other adoption specialists say such contact can free the child from doubts and questions about his or her “real” identity, leading to a greater sense of security. Some birth parents, and adoptive parents too, say continuing contact takes some of the uncertainty out of the adoption process.

“Not knowing is worse to me than knowing,” said Debbie Scannell, 31, a Palo Alto nurse who gave her daughter up for adoption five years ago. Scannell, who is now married and expecting another child, talks to her daughter’s adoptive parents several times a year, and sees the child about once a year. “If anything, seeing her made me go, ‘Wow, I really made the right decision,’ ” Scannell said. “She is so happy.”

Los Altos Hills parents David and Carol Jury and their 2 1/2-year-old adopted daughter see the child’s birth mother several times a year. Carol Jury said the arrangement is working well and she is not concerned that the birth mother will become overly involved in the child’s life.

Pattern of Upbringing

For Keetso, the dual-family, dual-culture life being planned for Allyssa mirrors her own upbringing. She spent her early years living as part of a large extended family on the Navajo reservation. When she was in the fifth grade, she left home to live with a white Mormon family in California as part of the Mormon Church’s Indian Student Placement Service.

From then on, she lived with Mormon families while school was in session and returned home to the reservation during the summer.

It was the influence of Mormon culture, she says, that led her to give Allyssa up for adoption.

“That’s how I learned that family is important,” she said. “I wanted my baby to have a mother and a father.”

Keetso learned she was pregnant in the fall of 1986, while a student at Brigham Young University. “It was like a bombshell,” she said. “I thought my life was over.” She returned to the reservation at the end of the term to decide what to do. Marriage was out of the question, she said, and she considered abortion only briefly.

Answer in an Ad

But Keetso did not feel that she alone could give her child the kind of upbringing the baby deserved. An ad in a tribal newspaper placed by the Pittses’ adoption lawyers reading “Pregnant? We’re willing to help you” seemed to offer a way out. Ironically, Keetso thought that placing her baby for adoption in California would mean that she could keep her pregnancy a secret from friends and relatives. As the oldest of nine children, she said, she always felt compelled to set an example for her brothers and sisters, and she felt ashamed of her pregnancy.

Under the terms of the permanent guardianship agreement the Pittses and Keetso hope to make final this summer, custody of Allyssa would be permanently and irrevocably transferred to the Pittses.