Since Martha Miles was a little girl, she dreamt of being a mother, having a home swelling with the laughter of children. But after giving birth to her son Peter, then suffering through years of infertility, miscarriages and six major operations, including a hysterectomy, the Des Plaines woman and her husband, Paul, realized their dream for more offspring might never come true.
”I remember Mother`s Days so vividly,” Miles says of the first 4 1/2 years of her marriage during which she and her husband tried unsuccessfully to have a baby. ”Paul and I would go to church services and all the mothers would get a corsage. I would sit quietly. Then I would come home and cry.”
Today, Mother`s Day is different for Martha Miles. After turning to adoption, Martha, 43, and husband Paul, 47, are the proud parents of a unique and still-growing brood of five adopted children: April, 8; Blake, 6; Keith and Chelsea, 5; and Darcy, 3. All are from different ethnic and racial backgrounds.
Although full of love and joy for her family and eager for it to continue to grow, a tragic footnote to Miles` story was the death almost two years ago of her birth son, Peter, who at age 18 lost his battle with cancer. Yet, it is her adopted children who have helped ease the sorrow from that loss and fulfill her childhood dreams of motherhood.
”I always wanted at least six children, but I never in my wildest dreams envisioned the kind of family we have today,” says Miles. ”I remember all too well the Mother`s Days I spent with empty arms. Now, it is my favorite holiday.”
For childless adults who envision themselves one day holding an infant in their arms or clapping at their toddler`s first steps, adoption-that possiblity of a child joining their family-can`t happen fast enough. Unfortunately, the time-consuming, expensive and difficult process (many U.S. agencies won`t place infants with people 35 or older) can be an emotional rollercoaster.
But increasingly, couples such as the Mileses have found the answer to their dreams of raising children through trans-racial or cross-cultural adoption. Some travel halfway around the world to bring their new families home. Others, such as the Mileses, adopt children of other races domestically. In all cases, however, they are giving parents to children who might otherwise languish in orphanages or be shuttled from foster home to foster home, according to Deb Harder, program services coordinator for Adoptive Families of America (AFA), a Minneapolis-based adoption support group.
”Adoption itself has become a market issue of supply and demand,”
explains Harder. ”Cross-cultural adoption has become an increasingly popular option for families who don`t have time to deal with the increasingly difficult domestic process. Typically, and this sounds callous spoken strictly in terms of the market, there are just more kids available through international or bi-racial adoption.”
Many of these adoptions are handled privately, with support groups providing referrals. Church groups and some private agencies also place some children.
Pat Madden of Schaumburg more than two decades ago adopted two U.S.-born daughters, Anne, now 27, and Molly, 18. Eager to add to her family, Madden found options only by looking overseas. Today, she also is mom to three adopted Korean-born children: Joseph, 21; Daniel, 19, and Aimee, 9.
”It was never a planned thing for us to adopt children of another culture,” says Madden, a member of the Chicago Area Families For Adoption.
”But, it was a matter of timing and availibility.”
Indeed, U.S. statistics show that prospective parents are increasingly turning to international adoption. According to a 1991 survey by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, international adoptions by parents in the U.S. almost doubled to 9,008 from the 4,868 adoptions in 1981. Currently, Romania tops the list of the country from which most children are adopted, with 2,552 of the foreign U.S. adoptions in 1991 from there.
Cost can be another factor in making international, bi-racial or cross-cultural adoption more attractive, adds Harder. It can cost $9,000 to $18,000 to adopt an infant from a foreign country or a minority in the U.S., according to the AFA`s Harder, compared to the estimated $25,000 and up for a healthy U.S. Caucasian infant, she adds.
Joe Kroll, executive director for the National American Council on Adoptable Children (NACAC), a national adoptive parents advocacy group based in St. Paul, Minn., explains it this way: ”Price is a big factor. When you`re talking about $25,000 to adopt an infant white baby, you are ruling out a lot of people who can`t afford that.”
Most of the cost of adoptions includes legal fees and related expenses.
Despite the apparent advantages of adopting children of another race or from another country, there are some drawbacks. Just ask Jane Huml of Wheaton, a mother of 6-year-old Meredith, adopted at 27 months from Korea, and an older biological daughter, Lindsaey, who turns 9 in September. She and her husband, Bill, learned the hard way how formidable the bureaucratic red tape of international adoption can be.
The problems start with the lengthy pre-adoption screening required by U.S. Immigration regulations, which include fingerprinting and a criminal background check of the parents, and continue on through the travel to a foreign country to get the child, to legally changing the child`s name, to trying to obtain U. S. citizenship for the child-an ordeal that dragged on for more than six months. Says Huml: ”It can be a real nightmare that seems like it will never end.”
Another drawback to international and/or bi-racial adoption is that it intensifies the psychological burdens carried by all adopted children, especially when their physical appearance so obviously distinguishes them from the race or ethnic background of their adoptive parents.
Pat Madden of Schaumburg says that now that her three adopted Korean children are older, they`ve started to reveal to her their feelings as children growing up in a foreign country. ”My sons have told me how it often was so embarrassing for them to go out to a public place, because people were always staring at us,” says Madden.
Yet adoptive parents say they are starting to see the social tide concerning international and cross-racial adoptions change.
”Now, almost everywhere you go, you run into other families who`ve adopted internationally,” says Huml. ”We`ve had people stop us and tell us how their daughter is from Korea, too. The same thing when we were at Disneyland. And once we had a Korean man come up to us and ask if she was from Korea. When I said yes, he said, `God bless you.` ”
But perhaps Huml`s 6-year-old very Americanized (high-tops and perm)
daughter Meredith explained their cross-cultural family best when she told her mother, Jane: ”Now if Daddy`s Czechoslovakian and you`re English and Lindsaey`s American, no wonder I don`t look like the rest of the Korean people.”
