Love Repairs Adoptive Babies’ Ruined Lives

Linda Darden smiled at the infant making gurgling sounds in the baby carrier balanced on the lap of her husband, Jim.

“Hi, Danny,” she cooed, patting the baby’s long, dark hair. “What are you doing? Can you see me?”

The 8-month-old infant, who suffered brain damage at birth and is thought to be a drug baby, appeared to look at Linda.

“They don’t even know if he’s aware of his surroundings,” she says. “I think he’s aware, but I’ve had two doctors tell me that I’m wrong.”

Seated in the admissions office at Miller’s Children’s Hospital in Long Beach, the Anaheim couple had brought the baby in for tests to determine why he was choking on the special formula that must be fed to him through a gastrostomy tube in his stomach.

As foster parents for “medically fragile” babies and babies whose mothers took drugs, the Dardens have made scores of trips to hospitals over the past eight years, usually in the middle of the night.

The drug-addicted babies who share their home often require special medication to prevent seizures. Many have feeding, respiratory and sleep problems. And because they’re going through withdrawal, they’re often irritable and agitated.

The medically fragile children arrive with special equipment such as oxygen tanks and apnea monitors that sound an alarm if they stop breathing. They also require special medication and constant supervision.

Because of the difficulty in finding adoptive homes for these babies, they often spend years in foster care.

While it’s not unusual for a foster family to adopt one of these babies, the Dardens have adopted two drug babies within the past three years, and they recently obtained legal guardianship of a third drug-affected little girl whom they ultimately plan to adopt.

All three girls have had serious medical problems. And because their biological mothers took drugs while they were pregnant, 5-year-old Priscilla, 3-year-old Jessie Sue and 2-year-old Becky have learning disabilities and face unknown future medical problems.

But after providing at least two years of love and care for each child, the couple couldn’t bear the thought of giving them up.

“It’s real hard to let go,” Linda says. “The pain was too difficult.”

So at a time of their lives when their daughter is married and their son is in his senior year of high school, 43-year-old Linda and 45-year-old Jim Darden are raising three young girls, each with special needs.

This is in addition to caring for the two infants: Danny and Joshua, a 3-week-old drug baby.

To accommodate everyone, the Dardens took out a second mortgage in order to add a second story to their Anaheim tract house, giving them four more bedrooms and a nursery off the new master bedroom.

For Linda Darden, who can’t remember the last time she slept more than three hours at a stretch and never knows when the next medical crisis will occur, being mom to a houseful of children with special needs is not an imposition.

“We’re so fortunate that our two children were normal and that we never had a lot of trauma in our life,” says Linda, who became a foster parent in 1972 after an 18-month-old girl began showing up at her front door at 6 a.m. clad only in underpants. The girl’s mother was never even aware she was gone.

“I knew there were other kids like her out there,” she says. “I saw a great need and I wanted to help.”

Linda began taking in medically fragile babies, many of whom were drug-addicted, in 1982.

“These are children who really need our help and we feel we can do that,” she says. “I don’t care if they’re 18-hour screamers. I love to do what I do, and it’s real easy for me to love them.”

Linda gazed down at Danny in the carrier on her husband’s lap.

“I can’t imagine anything worse than not being wanted and loved and needed in the beginning,” she says. “And so when I take these babies, I feel I have something to offer them. If nothing else, I can give them a good start.”

The drug-addicted babies that Linda now cares for come through the Orange County Social Services Agency’s Emergency Shelter Home Program, which provides short-term emergency shelter for abused, neglected or abandoned children until the courts decide what will happen to them.

Since July, 1987, 536 newborn to 1-year-olds have gone through the Emergency Shelter Home Program; 85% to 90% were drug babies, with cocaine being the most frequently detected drug.

The Darden family, one of nearly 50 in the program, has cared for seven drug-addicted babies over the past 18 months.

“Every one of those babies has a different need,” says Linda, whose three girls illustrate some of the medical problems many drug-addicted babies experience as they grow up. (To assure confidentiality, the real names of Danny, Joshua and Becky have been changed.)

It is not known what type of drugs Priscilla’s biological mother took during pregnancy, but Priscilla had severe respiratory problems and required blood transfusions at birth. Eleven days after placement, Linda had to perform CPR on Priscilla after she stopped breathing. She has since had seizures, surgery to correct a serious stomach problem and has had to be fed through a G-tube. At 5, she has perceptual deficits and learning disabilities. “I have to remember that I have to repeat things to her several times,” Linda says.

Jessie Sue, whose biological mother was on cocaine, heroin and other drugs, came to the Dardens when she was 3 days old. “She had hepatitis, syphilis and severe (stomach) problems and had to be forced to eat,” recalls Linda. Jessie Sue also has immune-system damage and has undergone two major surgeries and has had 23 gastrostomy tubes. Despite being the most medically damaged of the three girls, Linda says, Jessie Sue has the fewest neurological problems.

Two-year-old Becky is a heroin baby who only recently was taken off an apnea monitor. While extremely bright, Becky has the expressive speech of a 13-month-old. “So she’s very frustrated and self-destructive,” Linda says. “She does a lot of crazy things. She bangs her head and face on the wall. She doesn’t listen at all, and she’s real hyper.”

The three girls attend the Speech and Language Development Center in Buena Park full time and have made progress.

But, “I think that it’s going to be a long haul with all three of them,” says Linda, who plans to take sign language classes to better communicate with Becky.

Linda’s “typical day” begins at 6 a.m. when she gives Danny his medication. While waiting the 20 minutes before she can begin feeding Danny via the G-tube, she feeds Joshua.

“Many of the drug-affected babies have feeding and sucking problems because their little system is just so disorganized,” she says, adding, however, that she spends more time with the medically fragile babies: “You’re trying to stabilize them all the time.”

Linda, who is often up as late as 1 a.m. with one of the babies, wakes up several times a night for feedings. And she never knows when she’ll have to respond to an apnea-monitor alarm. A year ago, she was getting up three or four times a night with Becky, who usually responded to light rubbing.

Constantly dealing with such demanding infants undoubtedly takes a toll on even the most dedicated mother.

“How it affects me is I thrive on it,” Linda says. “I do really well in crisis situations and hospital situations.”

To give her a break, a licensed vocational nurse funded by the county comes in once a week to take care of Danny for four hours. And then there’s Jim, who works for a welding-supply company.

“Jim is wonderful with kids,” Linda says. “He can G-tube as good as I can. He can bathe and change and wipe those little runny noses and do all the things that daddies can do.”

But Linda has other “helping hands”: her parents, who moved in two years ago.

“If I need to be doing something and I’ve got one baby that needs to be attached to me, I can hand that baby to my mom and she takes over,” says Linda, adding that she and her mother raise children alike--except, she laughs, “she says I’m too easy.”

Linda’s mother, Wilma Fink, said she never knew the extent of her daughter’s patience.

“She loves helping the babies,” says Wilma. With a laugh, she added, “The only thing is she just can’t adopt them all.”

The decision to adopt their first drug-affected baby, Priscilla, three years ago was not an easy one.

“We never thought that we would adopt, and never in our wildest imaginations did we expect to have three more kids,” Linda says. “It’s just that when the adoption unit said it’s time to find her an adoptive family, we had had her for three years and I said, ‘No way. She has a family.”

Linda says she and Jim “laid awake a lot of nights trying to make that decision. We felt our kids were completely grown and very self-sufficient and were we ready to do this again? It was real fun to play house and be their mom, but to take them forever was real scary.”

But after that first time, she says, “it’s a piece of cake. And if another baby would come into our life that would really desperately need a home, I don’t know that we would not do it.”

Linda says it is difficult to find adoptive families for medically fragile children and drug-affected babies with medical problems. “If they have a lot of medical needs, the (potential adoptive) families aren’t prepared for that and can’t deal with that or just don’t want to deal with that,” she says.

(Linda said they obtained legal guardianship of Becky rather than adopting her at this time because they need the continued financial assistance for the girl’s extensive medical problems and special educational needs. As adoptive parents of medically fragile children, however, they receive financial help for Priscilla and Jessie Sue from the Adoptive Assistance Program, the amount of which is based on the child’s needs and the family income.)

She says she hasn’t had much contact with the mothers of the babies. “For whatever reason, I happen to have the babies whose parents don’t want the visits,” she says.

But as she sees it, such visits “are inappropriate. I mean, you know they’re using (drugs). It’s difficult to deal with them. It makes you angry. It makes you feel like, ‘How dare you do this to this baby?’

“But the other side of it is you know they have problems, too. They’re trying to get their lives together and don’t know how to do it. And here they have this beautiful baby and even having that baby couldn’t help them to not use drugs. So it’s a sad situation. It’s almost a hopeless situation.”

Linda said her two older children were thrilled when she and Jim decided to adopt the girls. If there’s one thing her children learned when she started taking in the medically fragile babies eight years ago, she said, it is compassion.

And now Priscilla, Jessie Sue and Becky are learning that same lesson.

Linda said the three little girls often gather around Danny’s crib “and they talk to him and they love him and they rock him and they pet him. He enjoys that.”

That, she said, is the difference between these babies spending their first months of life in a hospital or an institution where “they don’t get a whole lot of nurturing and loving and care and the things they do at home. These babies do so much better in the home. Any of the drug babies do.”

Linda says she will always have at least one drug-addicted baby and one medically fragile baby in her home. And because of her parents’ “helping hands,” she said, she could take on even more.

“I would love to have four little cradles,” she said, giggling. “That’s what I’m pushing for. Four little cradles. That would be wonderful.”