Charles Kent Schafer was ”a gleam in his mother`s eye” for at least seven years.
He finally arrived home with his proud parents, Kathy and Clyde Schafer, of Glendale Heights, on Sept. 15. Overtired but overjoyed after a whirlwind week in South Korea, the couple said that it was worth the wait.
”Charlie is such a good baby, a real angel,” Kathy said. ”He smiled at us right away. He`s 5 months old and weighs 18 pounds, 10 ounces.”
Most infants adopted from Korea are escorted to the United States, but the Schafers chose to travel. ”I wouldn`t do it any other way. We plan to adopt again in a couple of years, and I`d go back again (to Korea),” Kathy said. ”It saved the baby a lot of trauma, too. He didn`t have to bond to an escort and be separated and bond again with us.”
Married for eight years, Kathy, 38, said that she and Clyde, 37, had tried to have a baby for five or six years. ”By the time we had exhausted all possibilities, I was over the magic age of 35, the cutoff for a lot of agencies for placing a healthy (Caucasian) infant. And the risk inherent in private adoption was too much for me.
”Some friends adopted a Korean infant through Bensenville Home Society, and we just fell in love with him,” Kathy said. ”It seemed to be a perfect solution to our problems. It would be a set process, and at the end, you know you`re going to have a child, though you might have to wait.”
Kathy, a school social worker, and Clyde, an energy systems engineer, said that they had no idea the wait would be so difficult. When they submitted a formal application to Bensenville in October, 1986, the normal waiting period was about a year. But Korean officials changed some requirements, Kathy delayed in submitting a document, and both factors slowed the process.
”There were a lot of peaks and valleys during that time. We`d be up and down, ecstatic to hear we went down a few numbers (on the waiting list), and then it would stay the same for three months,” Kathy remembered.
”At one point we named our baby Charles. We knew he wasn`t born yet, but that there would be a particular baby out there for us,” she said. ”We tried to put it out of our minds on a daily basis. It was hard. People asked us all the time.
”He developed a personality and a face in our minds. Just as if you`re going through a pregnancy, you form ideas of what your baby will be like.”
In June, 1987, the Schafers learned that they were No. 11 on the list; so they got busy and wallpapered their son`s room, thinking he would be arriving by Christmas. ”But it didn`t happen. Everything ground to a halt while we waited,” Kathy said. ”We didn`t want to get ourselves too excited anymore.” And then a year later, the magic phone call came. ”We got our referral on June 22 at 12:30 p.m. It took a little bit of getting used to the actual picture, but he (got) cuter every day,” Kathy said. ”I carried that picture around in my purse wherever I went.”
The last hurdle the Schafers had to overcome was the travel restrictions resulting from South Korea`s hosting of the Olympic Games, which would have delayed Charlie`s arrival until November. Final approval to pick up their son came Aug. 23, and the couple scrambled to make flight and hotel arrangements in just two weeks.
”It`s been a long process,” Kathy reflected. ”In a way, it`s been good. If it all went real quickly, there would be time for doubts. But it`s gone on so long we know this is what we want to do.”
