The Wolffs: A weekly profile of a family--its history, joys and trials. : Playing for Keeps

With dinner done and dishes cleared, Ron and Nita Wolff unwind in the small living room of their Burbank home. Both have full-time jobs, and with two sons still in diapers, their lives have become joyfully hectic. At day’s end, chaos typically flickers, then subsides, and life, mercifully, turns quiet and still.

They recently started camping out in the living room, an attempt to dissuade 20-month-old Bryan from crawling into bed with them. He now sleeps in the playpen, while 3-month-old Brandon sleeps in the bassinet. Sometimes in the darkness, Nita lies awake, exhausted, and listens to them breathe.

The moment brings fullness and an evolving sense of family to her life. To be a family is to sacrifice, sometimes even suffer together, this she has learned. It is to trust and care, to forgive and love. It’s to remain near each other’s dreams.

Initially building a family seemed simple: fall in love, marry, have children. It turned out to be far more complicated and painful than that, however, and in 1992, when Nita required a hysterectomy to remove a tumor, she thought she had missed her chance.

But then she met Debbe Magnusen, founder of Project Cuddle, a nonprofit agency based in Costa Mesa that rescues babies at risk of being abandoned. Since 1996, when a 24-hour crisis line was initiated, Magnusen has seen 140 babies find families. More than half of the women who call in end up keeping their babies, Magnusen says.

Magnusen and her husband, Dave, have two children born to them and five adopted children. That adds up to 25 loads of laundry a week and three lanes when they go bowling.

She has her own definition of family: “It’s a group of people who love each other, who are willing to sacrifice, to love, to laugh, to cry, to support each other unconditionally,” she says. “They don’t all have to have the same blood line or be the same color. It’s just people who have decided to form a bond between each other and make it work.”

So it is that the Wolff family did not come neatly wrapped. From Ron, 36, and Nita, 42, to the two children, to Mutley the dog, they had to find each other first. Ron and Nita met through a friend. Initially Nita held back her feelings, not wanting to give her heart away so easily.

“I thought if I told him I couldn’t have children he would feel differently about me, and I didn’t want to get hurt,” she says. “I wasn’t sure he was going to love me because I knew he loved children.”

She also knew she had to tell him before the relationship got too serious. When she did, it did not change how he felt. One night, with candles lit, he told her there was an envelope for her on the television. She picked it up and could tell right away there was a ring inside. She’ll never forget the feeling of that moment.

They married in 1995, six months after they started dating, and agreed they would pursue adoption. One day, Nita’s mother told her about a public service announcement she had seen about Project Cuddle.

Nita called for information and ended up becoming a volunteer, working closely with Magnusen on weekends. When she heard the voices of women calling in, she understood their desperation. The work stirred deep, unresolved feelings and brought back a painful part of her past.

She understood the women because when she was 17 years old, she became pregnant. She chose to terminate the pregnancy. She went alone to a doctor and claimed that because she had polio as a child, it was unsafe to have a baby.

“He just took my word for it, and it was a lie,” she says. “I regretted that for so many years. I mourned for that baby.”

In some ways she never stopped.

After her hysterectomy, it was painful to even look at a pregnant woman. She would have to turn and walk away, but then in July 1997, on the other side of the country, the child who would become her first son was born. It would be 10 days before she met him.

Baby Was Born in the Young Mom’s Apartment

It was about 2 a.m. when the telephone next to Magnusen’s bed rang.

“I just gave birth,” the 23-year-old woman said. “What am I supposed to do with the bellybutton?”

The question caught Magnusen off guard. She told the woman she would call an emergency room to get help then call her right back. She fumbled around in the dark for a note pad but ended up writing the woman’s number down with an eyeliner pencil on a gum wrapper.

After talking with the local hospital, Magnusen called the woman back and advised her to tie it off with three strands of dental floss.

“What should I do with the baby?” the woman asked. “I don’t want it. I don’t know what to do, but I don’t want it, and I don’t want my parents to find out.”

She had seen the Project Cuddle public service announcement on television weeks earlier and saved the number. The baby was born in her apartment with help from a friend. Magnusen, after establishing that the baby was safe, told the woman to rest then call her back.

Later that day, Magnusen paged Ron and Nita and gave them the woman’s number. Nita called right away, but there was no answer. In the meantime, the telephone rang at Magnusen’s, and it was the woman. She said her sister had shown up unexpectedly, so she hid the baby in a laundry basket, covered him with clothes and carried him to the pay phone.

Magnusen called the Wolffs again and gave them the pay phone number. This time Nita made contact. It was an unusual conversation, she says, because the woman mentioned nothing about the baby.

“All she talked about was her 3-year-old son, because she didn’t want to acknowledge that she had that baby. She wanted to block it out. She would talk about how her son loved race cars and loved to watch the NASCAR races on TV, and he’s so smart. . . . For a while, I thought, ‘Am I getting her 3-year-old or what?’ I wasn’t sure if she had a baby or not because she never talked about it.”

Ron and Nita flew into Pittsburgh and then drove to meet the woman and the baby. During the trip, Nita couldn’t erase the image from her mind of the baby in a laundry basket. Anxiously, they called the woman from their hotel, and she said she would be right over.

Nita’s heart soared when she saw the baby.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “He was so beautiful. I was so happy. I couldn’t believe this was going to be our son.”

Ron and Nita stayed for 10 days while attorneys and social workers prepared the paperwork. It was a period of new emotions. On one hand, how could this woman give up her own baby? On the other hand, by doing so, she was making their dreams come true.

The three got to know one another. They ate together, played miniature golf together.

“We bonded,” Nita says. “We wanted her to know that we were going to love the baby, so she would know she was making the right decision.”

The baby stayed with Ron and Nita at the hotel, but when they were with the birth mother, Nita always gave the baby to her to hold and feed.

When it was finally time to leave, Nita asked the woman if she wanted a moment with the boy to say goodbye. The woman said no. She hugged Ron, then Nita, in the lobby of the hotel.

“I told her I loved her because a part of her was with us,” Nita says.

It wasn’t until they were on the plane heading home with Bryan that she truly felt like his mother.

“We made it,” she said to Ron. “We’re taking home our son.”

At Project Cuddle, Bryan is known as No. 22, the Bellybutton Baby.

They Helped Woman Through Pregnancy

Last year, Magnusen was searching for a family for its 122nd baby. Again, she paged Ron and Nita.

This time the baby had not yet been born. Ron and Nita went to doctor’s appointments with the woman, felt the baby move. The woman needed a place to stay, so the last two weeks of her pregnancy she stayed with Nita’s mother. The couple was at the hospital when the baby was born in December. At first, the birth mother said she didn’t want to see the baby, but she changed her mind when he was being born. The doctor placed him on her stomach, and she looked at him.

“The look on her face was like, ‘Oh, my God, what am I doing giving him up?’ I saw that look on her face,” Nita says. “You can’t blame her.”

The baby was given to Ron and Nita. The next day, they stopped by the woman’s room as they were leaving the hospital. The woman looked at the baby.

“God bless you,” she said to the little one.

Then she hugged Nita and wouldn’t let go. She was crying.

“God bless you for doing this,” the birth mother said to Nita.

With Brandon, the final piece of the puzzle fell into place. This would be their family. To Ron, being a family means always being there for his sons, something he says he missed as a child.

He owns an automotive service and repair business, and before the children came along, he says, it was difficult to relieve himself of the stress it involved. Now, that all disappears when he arrives home and gets his first hug.

Nita is back to her desk job with the California Highway Patrol. Both of them do volunteer work for Project Cuddle. Their lives are busy and full, they say, thanks to Magnusen and two women they may never see again.

“I respect them both because they did what was best for the child,” Nita says of the birth mothers. “There aren’t enough words, and there isn’t enough money in the whole world to thank a person for doing that, for giving us life. That’s what they did, they gave us life.”

It’s life measured in laughter and tears, by healed hearts and each breath and dream that comes in the night.

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To contact Project Cuddle, call (888) 628-3353.