When Adoptions Don’t Work Out : Children: Sometimes parents can’t cope, or the youngster doesn’t fit in. A look at four failed cases and the scars left behind.

The great majority of adoptions in America, even those involving older or disabled children, succeed. But a small number of cases fail. Sometimes the parents can’t cope. Other times, the child doesn’t fit in.

Here are four stories of adoptions that didn’t work out:

STACEY:

When Rhonda and Dan Stanton adopted little Stacey, they thought the next 20 years of their lives would be devoted to nurturing, raising and loving their daughter.

After years of being unable to conceive, the Texas couple finally had a child--a soft, sweet-smelling newborn girl. No genie could have granted them a greater wish.

That promise soon turned to pain. As Stacey grew, the couple learned that she was severely mentally retarded. They anguished, they cried, then they gave her up, because, Rhonda Stanton said, “I just didn’t have what it takes to cope with that.”

The Stantons became aware of Stacey’s problems months after adopting her from a private agency in 1986. The child looked alert, but something didn’t seem quite right. She began having eye problems. She didn’t cry.

The couple took her to the best doctors and therapists. Then, Rhonda Stanton recalled, came a brutal assessment from a neurologist: “He said, ‘Her brain stopped growing at 9 months. Go home and grieve. Men do it different from women. Try not to fight with each other.’ ”

Afterwards, Rhonda Stanton placed a sleeping Stacey in the car, thinking “my beautiful little baby had died.”

The Stantons were torn, wondering how they could keep Stacey, how they could give her up. “For six months, we died every single minute of every single day,” she said. “We laid on the floor and cried.”

They gave her up, Rhonda Stanton said, objecting to any suggestion that they returned her. “She’s not shoes or groceries.”

In 1989, a judge ended the Stantons’ visitation rights and suspended their financial obligations but refused to terminate parental rights. That will happen if Stacey, now 3 1/2 and in a foster home, is adopted.

The Stantons say some folks have branded them cowards. “We feel terribly, terribly guilty,” she said. “Nobody knows how this just kills us.

“She was the greatest joy and the most special love of our life. There was no love like that love. It’s like a giant hole in my heart. A real shattered heart. Time won’t ever completely mend this. . . . We still miss her incredibly.”

ARLYNN:

One of ArLynn Leiber Presser’s early childhood memories is the day she said goodby to her mother and embarked on a new life in a new house with new parents.

“It’s one thing to be put up for adoption when you’re a day old,” she said. “At 3 years old, you think, ‘My God, what did I do? What kind of horrible child was I?’ ”

Presser’s childhood years were turbulent, with some joyful moments, mostly in school, and many more unhappy ones--at home. She says she never made many friends, never went to the movies, never felt like she belonged.

When her adoptive parents gave parties, she says she often was asked to make a little speech: “I’m specially adopted. Of all the people my parents could have chosen, they chose me. I’m very lucky. . . .”

“In some ways,” she now says, “all of us recognized I really wasn’t their child.”

Presser says she was harshly punished, ran away several times as an adolescent, was kicked out, and was committed to a psychiatric unit. Finally, when she was about 15 years old, she legally severed ties with her adoptive parents.

“I really thought they were horrible people,” the Chicago lawyer and free-lance writer said. “I still feel that. I feel like they bit off more than they could chew.”

As an adult, Presser, 29, tracked down her biological parents, who divorced shortly after giving her up for adoption.

She is now happily married with two stepchildren and a 2-year-old son, but there are scars.

“I felt enormously like I had done something terribly wrong,” she said. “This is a feeling I still have years later. Everybody else sitting in this world has parents who just adore them and fight like mother tigers when anything threatens them. I failed at being a kid.

“I look at the adoration I have for my son now,” she said. “I don’t think that anybody looked at me with so much love as I look at my son with. When he watches ‘Sesame Street,’ I watch it. When he walks in a puddle, I walk in it. I feel like I live my childhood through him.”

‘ALICE’:

Susan Tom still keeps a heart-shaped box she received many years ago as a Mother’s Day gift. It is a bittersweet reminder of one of the saddest experiences in her life.

The box was given to her by a little girl she had hoped would be her daughter, a dream that never came true. The Toms decided not to make permanent the adoption and the 9-year-old left the Toms’ home in Fairfield, Calif., after almost a year with them.

“It was the worst day,” Tom said of their separation. “I had to tell her and I took her back the next day. Although she cried and I cried . . . she never said, ‘I’ll change’. . . . She had given up.

“I went into a very bad depression,” she recalled.

The girl moved into the Toms’ home in 1982 after four years in foster care and five more with a family who didn’t want to finalize the adoption.

“She came directly from their home into my home,” said Tom, now divorced. “There was no in-between. We had a child who needed to grieve for the loss. That’s exactly what it is. It’s like a very bad divorce.

“The tension built. The stress built,” Tom said, noting that the family moved to Fairfield with Alice, her name for the girl. “She stopped doing some of her schoolwork. She was so unhappy. I didn’t know what to do.

“Now I would probably ride it out,” said Tom, a 42-year-old single mother of six. “I was fairly naive at the time and did not have the support system that I now have. I have learned there are probably things I should have done. There are people I could have called.”

Tom has four adopted children with special needs and, with an organization called Aid to Adoption of Special Kids, runs a group for single women who want to take similar steps.

Several years after Alice left, Tom met her and they reminisced. “I care very much about her,” she said. “I think if she ever needs me, she can call at any time.”

‘ROBERT’:

Bonnie Hudson, mother of 13, is an optimist who doesn’t like to give up on any child. But when it came to her adopted son, Robert, it was give up--or destroy her family.

The Hudsons already had adopted four special-needs children when they welcomed a boy from India. He had serious physical handicaps they didn’t know about. His tormented past was a surprise too.

Robert, they learned, was in jail in India before the orphanage. He was a clever pickpocket and had been sexually abused at knifepoint as a child.

So when Robert began stealing and lying months after his arrival, Hudson, who was adopted as a child, told him: “We want you to know it’s never too late for any human being to change as long as there is life and breath.”

Eighteen months later came a shocking discovery. Robert, who was probably 12 years old, not 9 as they had been told, had been sexually abusing three of their daughters--two of them infants, one a mentally slow first-grader.

“I wanted to kill him. It’s beyond anger. It’s rage,” said Hudson, who asked that her and her adopted son’s real names not be used. “There was no history to let us know this little guy could not be trusted in a household with a younger child.”

The Hudsons tried therapy, switching schools, having him watched constantly, even locking him up in a psychiatric ward, where, Hudson said, he sexually abused boys. “He couldn’t promise to reform and he couldn’t promise to control himself,” she added.

Back home, the fears mounted. Hudson worried that Robert would set fire to their house.

“This is the kind of kid who couldn’t accept love in a family life. It’s like catching a wild lion and saying, ‘You don’t have to hunt and kill for your food.’ ”

After six years, “It snapped in my head--for the sake of rehabilitating one, you may lose the whole family,” she said.

In 1987, Robert insisted that they legally end the adoption. “He told me, ‘I would rather be on the streets in India begging than living with this family,”’ she said. “Even the judge said, ‘This isn’t going to work.’ I kept saying, ‘I’ve never given up on a human being in my life.’ ”

“I cried for three months. I never failed with a kid,” said Hudson, who lives in the Midwest.

“No one pats you on the back and says, ‘Thank you,’ ” she said. “They mark you off as a failed adoption.”

Hudson said Robert lives in a supervised foster home and calls occasionally. But she doesn’t want him in her house.

“I still pray for him all the time,” she said. “He still calls me ‘Mom’ and I still think I am.”