Declaring Truce in Adoption Fight

Someday, when they get older, Bridget and Lucy Rost will have more than their family’s ample photo albums to recall their childhood. There will be testimony in the Congressional Record. There will be briefs filed with the U.S. Supreme Court. There will be the oral history of a small California tribe--the Dry Creek band of Pomo Indians.

The documents will tell the twin girls how they became the centerpiece in a national debate about adoption law, Indian sovereignty and the rights of children. They will tell how two families--one American Indian, one white--fought tenaciously over which should raise the girls, now 4 years old.

And it now appears that the record will also reflect how, on Dec. 8, 1997, the girls’ Indian birth parents, from Long Beach, gave up a nearly four-year legal fight and conceded custody of the twins to the only parents they have ever known, a couple from suburban Columbus, Ohio. On Monday, under a settlement to be signed at the Edmund D. Edelman Children’s Court in Monterey Park, the girls’ birth family is expected to drop the court battle they started by invoking a federal law that limits adoptions of American Indians by non-Indian families.

Under the settlement the rambunctious, olive-skinned twins will be placed permanently with Jim and Colette Rost of Columbus. The Rosts, in turn, will agree to enable the girls’ blood relatives to maintain contact--with yearly visitations, exchanges of photos and videos, regular telephone calls and perhaps, one day, a visit to the Dry Creek Rancheria near Geyserville, Calif.--the reservation where the girls’ grandmother once played as a child.

“It’s time for our families to heal,” said Jim Rost, echoing the words of the twins’ paternal grandmother, who is part Pomo Indian. Colette Rost added: “Family is something that has always been important to me--what my roots are and where I came from. Years down the road, one of the girls was going to say, ‘I want to meet my mother,’ and we didn’t want to burn our bridges in case of that.”

Focus on Well-Being of the Children

As they prepare to seal the new arrangement, the Rosts will be guests this Saturday in the West Covina home of Richard and Karen Adams, the paternal grandparents who were a force behind the Pomo tribe’s custody claim. Also present will be Bridget and Lucy’s birth parents--Rick and Cindy Adams of Long Beach--and the twin’s blood brothers, ages 5 and 6.

“It was time for this to end,” said Karen Adams, the grandmother who initiated the custody fight and is leading her family and tribe to settle. “This started when the girls were 3 or 4 months old. But now they are 4. We didn’t want to drag this on. It’s about their well-being.

“It took some soul-searching, but I realized that what was in the best interest of the twins was to stay in Ohio with Jim and Colette,” said Adams, a loan investigator for a mortgage company. “They are happy little girls. That is the main thing.”

The agreement heads off what promised to be another nasty custody hearing at the Monterey Park courthouse.

Such a seemingly amicable ending makes a sharp contrast to the furor and superheated talk radio debates that surrounded the case when it became public 2 1/2 years ago.

The girls’ birth family argued, essentially, that the adoption was illegal because the extended birth family and tribe had not been notified and therefore had not been able to invoke the Indian Child Welfare Act. The federal law gives Indian parents or any tribal member the first right to adopt members before they are placed outside for adoption.

The case known in the courts as “In re: Bridget R.” had started innocently enough. Jim and Colette Rost were leading a successful and comfortable life in Columbus in the mid-1990s--he as a construction manager for a major contractor and she as a hospital technician--marred only by some difficulty in having children.

It took years to conceive their first child, Hannah, and as they approached 40 and had failed to have another, they turned to adoption. California seemed appealing because the state permits “open” adoptions, outlawed in Ohio, that would permit them to meet their prospective baby’s parents and to continue a relationship after birth.

Beverly Hills attorney D. Durand Cook became the Rost’s representative and he soon introduced them to Rick and Cindy Adams, who were barely in their 20s and struggling with unemployment and a tumultuous home life.

The two couples met at Cook’s office, got along, and sealed their adoption agreement over lunch in Beverly Hills.

Colette Rost stood at Cindy’s bedside as the twins were born and held the girls for the young mother to kiss and cradle. Cindy recalls now that her heart told her she had made a mistake, but that she stuck with the deal because she saw how Colette glowed around the children. “I did what everyone else wanted, not what I wanted,” she says now. “I think I did the wrong thing.”

The real snag in the adoption came when the girls were 4 months old and Rick Adams, separated from Cindy, for the first time revealed the birth of the twins to his mother.

Karen Adams was devastated that she had never been told about her granddaughters’ birth, much less been about their adoption. She immediately contacted relatives at the 75-acre tribal reserve in Dry Creek, near Geyserville in Sonoma County, and discussed the possibility of stopping the adoption.

Although the twins were only about one-eighth Pomo by blood, Karen Adams said she considered them full members of the tribe. The Adamses disdained efforts by the courts to assess the extent of the families’ Indian lineage, saying that such an analysis was demeaning. Tribal officials agreed that the girls were full members and placed them on the Dry Creek Pomo’s official rolls, which number less than 300. The grandmother also enrolled herself and her son Rick at the same time, according to court records in the case.

Most birth parents fail in eleventh-hour appeals to nullify adoptions to which they freely consented and Rick Adams had a particularly difficult case because he had not disclosed his Indian heritage on standard adoption forms. Lawyers on both sides and the judge in the custody fight later blamed that failure on lawyer Durand Cook, who has declined comment.

But the young couple seemed to have a trump card with the Indian Child Welfare Act. Congress passed the law in 1978 in an attempt to end decades of wholesale adoptions that had devastated Native American tribes.

It was on the force of that law that in mid-June 1995, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge John L. Henning ordered the 19-month-old twins taken from the Rosts and returned to their birth parents.

The night of the decision, an exhausted and emotionally spent Jim Rost collapsed. The next day his wife sobbed as the family prepared to pass Bridget and Lucy to the Adamses. But then the 2nd District Court of Appeal intervened, issued an unusual stay that allowed the girls to stay with the Rosts and ordered a full hearing.

“Ironically, that was one of the worst and the best days of my life, at the same time,” Colette Rost said last week as Bridget and Lucy played nearby--taking turns scaling and then leaping off the family’s kitchen counter.

The Rosts’ position grew stronger with each succeeding court action. Six months later, the same appellate court unanimously concluded that Rick Adams’ belated entry onto his tribe’s rolls was not enough to establish his rights under the Indian Child Welfare Act. The justices ordered that Adams appear again before Judge Henning to prove that he had “significant social, cultural or political” ties to the tribe--a burden the justices doubted he could meet.

When first the California Supreme Court and then the U.S. Supreme Court let that ruling stand, the Rosts clearly had the upper hand.

Meanwhile, family matriarch Karen Adams said she had begun to wonder if her family’s claim, pressed to the limit, would end up doing more harm than good to the Indian adoption law. It would be unpleasant, at best, to return to court and see her families’ “Indian-ness” put under a microscope, she said.

The Rosts, both now 42, had vowed to resolve the case this year. They still have more than $100,000 in legal bills to pay, despite an outpouring of public support. Today, they remain minor celebrities in Columbus--hugged in shopping malls and stopped in fast-food lines--where supporters have helped them raise more than $80,000.

The case has been a “constant specter” in their lives, thrusting them into fund-raisers, coast-to-coast travel and testimony before Congress in their ongoing attempt to amend the Indian Child Welfare Act.

They have shielded the twins from the fray as much as possible, retreating to a two-story clapboard house in North Columbus that is full of Americana--from quilt-covered sofas to ticking grandfather clocks and endless family pictures.

Maintaining Link to the Blood Kin

On the refrigerator, amid a collage of smiling photos, two brown-skinned faces stand out. It is a snapshot of Anthony and Ricky, the twins’ brothers from California. Occasionally, the twins talk on the telephone to the woman they call “Cindy.”

They nod uncritically when Colette explains how she watched them cry as they came out of Cindy’s tummy. Bridget and Lucy like to finish the story: “And the doctor at the hospital tried to put us back,” they giggle, “because we were too loud!”

Despite the burdens of the custody fight, the Rosts said they never wavered from their early commitment--to allow their daughters a connection with their blood kin.

In the spirit of the original “open” adoption, the Rosts had been meeting with an Indian shaman, a spiritual advisor, near their hometown. They said the shaman, a Shawnee Indian, helped them release the anger they felt toward the Adamses through rituals that included envisioning their opponents in a halo of white light.

As time passed, the Adamses said they realized the return of Bridget and Lucy would become more difficult.

“You get so caught up dealing with the law and the court system and the legal part of it that sometimes you forget the human side,” said Kristine Barrett, Rick’s older sister and a regular participant in family discussions about the case.

Rick and Cindy Adams, now 24 and 25, said they have come a long way since they were too poor and unhappy to raise the twins. Cindy had once obtained a restraining order against Rick, saying that she and their two boys were being physically abused.

The couple have married since the start of the adoption dispute. They have lived in the same Long Beach apartment for three years. He works steadily as a warehouseman and she in accounts payable.

Support From Native Americans

Cindy Adams said the family gained strength from the larger Native American community during its fight. It was spared the Rosts’ legal bills because the Adamses were declared indigent and their bills were paid for by Los Angeles County taxpayers.

But she said the stress was considerable--there were hate calls and picketing. One day earlier this year, driving in the car, Anthony began quietly crying. He asked why she had given his sisters away.

“I didn’t know what to say,” Adams recalled.

“It’s a relief that the whole struggle will be over with soon,” Cindy said. “The girls are never going to be mine again. I don’t know if that hurt will go away. But I am grateful to Jim and Colette. After all they went through, they still are going to let us have visitation.”

All sides agree that it was Leslie Glick, the Adamses’ attorney, who came up with a framework that made a settlement possible. The six-page agreement seeks to limit misunderstandings by closely orchestrating future interactions: The Rosts will bring Bridget and Lucy to Los Angeles in even-numbered years for one-week visits. In odd-numbered years, the Adamses can come to Columbus for one-week visits.

The Rosts will educate themselves and their family in Indian heritage, particularly that of the Pomo. Only the Rosts shall be called “mother,” “father” or similar titles. But they will tell the twins that the Adams family loves them.

Both families expect that they may take some heat for not fighting the case all the way: the Rosts from adoption advocates who might believe the compromise obfuscates the rights of parents; the Adamses from Native Americans who might feel they are allowing two more Indian children to slip away from their culture.

But both the Rosts and Adamses agree that the time is right to stop the fighting, and Jim Rost hopes to make the studiously scripted relationship seem as “matter of fact” as possible.

“I won’t tell you it’s going to be easy,” Rost said. “We have a lot of wounds to mend. We are going to just focus on the kids. Hopefully that will help us all heal.”