Story #52 - Rose, Dumfries VA (USA) | Pyeongtaek (South Korea)
My husband already had a daughter when we got married. Being a stepparent was like dipping my toe into motherhood, but we spent several years not knowing for sure if we wanted to have children of our own. We had talked about adoption, and six or seven years after we got married, we decided that we wanted to go ahead. Back then, Russia was open to international adoption, and we had the chance to adopt two older children who weren’t biologically connected: Katya and Edward.
About three months before our trip, I realized I was pregnant. So we went through with the adoption, traveled across the globe, and then had a new baby! That was Isabella.
In a way, I had two different kinds of postpartum: one with two adopted children who were nine and ten years old, and another one with a newborn. Both were very different processes! Still, it was really nice to have a couple of kids who were able to put their own shoes on and help me a little bit. We also hosted an exchange student from Kazakstan who spoke Russian with them as they learned English.
I quickly began to feel that this birth and postpartum thing were rough. I didn't know what I was doing. You think, 'People have been doing this for thousands of years, how hard can it be? Huh?' But it was tough. All of it.
“One very prim and proper friend once asked me 'What was your biggest surprise about having a child?' I said, 'Leaking.' She’s probably still shocked at that response.”
When Isabella was about four months old, we got a letter from the orphanage in Russia saying they had found Edward's younger brother. When we told him, he said 'Mom, can we adopt my brother?' You don't say no to that. My daughter Katya, who also had a younger brother, asked us to look for him. We unfortunately never found him, but she told us that she, too, wanted another sibling. We thought, ‘We’re already going back to Russia, so what’s another kid!’ We went ahead and filed the paperwork for a little girl, Alona, as well as for Edward's brother, Alex.
So in September of 2001, we put our three kids on a plane and landed in Russia to bring two more children home.
Then September 11th happened.
We were sitting in a tiny airport in Krasnodar, Russia, with our now five children, when our translator got a phone call. We were waiting to board our plane for Moscow, and he said, 'Something terrible has happened in your country.' As he turned the TV on, we watched the second plane fly live into the second tower. The first plane was already old news in America, but because of the time lag, it all happened at once for us. We tried to figure out what it meant as they were calling our Moscow flight. They pulled all seven of us onto the plane, and the only thing we understood was that somebody hated Americans.
So you know, Russia, a great place to be while something like that happens. It took about two hours before we landed. We met our facilitator, Marina, who was waiting for us in Moscow. She told us that no one here really knew what was going on either. It was only hours after the attack, and here we were, seven Americans in a big white van driving around Moscow. We got stopped and were delayed everywhere we went and had to show our papers.
Because there were so many of us, no hotel could accommodate us—or at least that's what Marina said. We ended up at the Russian Orthodox Church. I'm not sure if it was because she felt we wouldn't be safe somewhere else, but we got to stay in this gated community that looked like the Vatican, full of guards, and gardens!
After a couple of days, we felt it was safe enough to venture outside the walls. It was very obvious we were American, and people would come up to us and say this one phrase over and over: 'We are together with you.'
We went from believing that somebody hated Americans to feeling so much love and solidarity. And in Russia, of all places.
A couple of days later, we flew back to America with our four adopted children and our 18 months old baby.
By then, as you can imagine, life was pure chaos. I felt so tired all the time and, somehow, couldn’t get over my jetlag. Well, come to find out that I'm pregnant again.
Sophia's pregnancy and birth were considerably easier. Such a difference than with Isabella, my first, where I felt like an enormous slug and ripped from here to Shinola. Sophia was born in six hours, as opposed to 16 for her sister, which I still remind her about. Then when she was about five months old, I got pregnant again with our third biological daughter, Olivia.
I became quite depressed after I had her. I remember about three weeks in, I was sitting on the couch with my hair all greasy and the lights off. It was my birthday and my husband wanted to know what I wanted for dinner. I said, 'Salmon.' He said, 'Great, I'll go to the store,' and I busted crying. I was the one who wanted to go to the store! I was so mad at him for taking that away from me.
I had just enough of a spark to know it wasn't right. I called my doctor and went in the next day.
I told him about the salmon situation and he asked two things: if I would take medication, and if he could pray with me.
Both of them worked.
It's quite beautiful because he took me seriously. Actually, everybody did. I know sometimes people get more in-depth into depression, and some bad stuff happens. I only got to sit in the dark, crying. That was deep enough for me, thank you very much.
Life went on and I got better. I then had eight children, three biological, four adopted, and one stepdaughter.
And… I became pregnant again. To be honest, life after Max is a blur. He was my fourth baby, so I knew what I was doing and I felt I could trust myself. His brother, Atticus, came two years after, and his sister, Sicily, also two years later. There's a pattern here!
At the time, we then had ten children. I thought, ‘Ten, that's a nice even number! I'm good.' To be fair, we ‘only’ had seven kids living with us at the same time. People often asked how we made it work, and, you know, you just do!
My husband and I have always been a one or a one-and-a-half-income family. We've also homeschooled since our first two adopted kids. It started out because they didn't speak great English. They tried public school when they arrived in the US, but one day some kid said something about Edward's mama, and he punched him. We got called in (obviously) and were told that because they weren’t fluent, they were kept apart from the other kids and had to stay inside all day. They had no recess, no contact, nothing. I mean, except for the punching…
I'm a speech pathologist for military families, so I thought, ‘If I can teach people how to talk, maybe I can teach English at home as a second language.’ It was supposed to be a few-months-thing, but we just fell in love with it. We had missed ten years of their lives and we got to know them better. And as we had more children, the system was already in place, so we simply built the curriculum around each one of them. We outsourced a few things. Every time we moved for my job, we'd find co-ops, churches, or schools that would help.
Sicily was born in California and with that many kids around, she just hit the ground running. We'd planned to do a cross country in an RV after my contract. We sold a lot of things, put furniture in storage, got the RV, and… you guessed it: 'Honey! I'm pregnant!'
I didn't do an RV pregnancy (my husband wouldn't let me), but all along, I felt like the pregnancy was different. We did an ultrasound a little bit before 20 weeks, and someone called me on a Friday at five o'clock to give me an appointment for the following Monday.
Listen: whenever a medical professional calls on a Friday evening and starts with, 'Don't worry,' you definitely should worry. We met with the doctor and she said that he had a bilateral brain cyst. I was told it might disappear after 22 weeks, but she also mentioned that it could be trisomy 18.
The average life expectancy for trisomy 18 is between three days to two weeks for girls, and boys are often stillborn.
We knew we were having a boy.
If she said anything about Down syndrome that day, I did not hear it.
My provider wanted me to do a level-two ultrasound to get a closer look at the cysts and the nuchal fold. It would have required me to travel and spend the whole day there, and I didn't really have that kind of time. When the receptionist called, she said, 'After you do the test, you'll talk to the geneticist about your options.' It pissed me off. I said, 'I don't need this test. I have no other option than having this child.' So I didn't do it. Instead, I spent my pregnancy thinking that my son had trisomy 18 and was likely to die.
The day he was born, I got to the hospital when the contractions started to become so intense I couldn’t walk. If you want to see a nurse move fast, you tell her, 'This is my seventh pregnancy!' as you come out of the elevator. They hooked me up, and as I looked around, I realized that the person who was holding my hand was the director of nursing, which was a little unusual.
On my right, there was also a man standing and when I asked who he was, they were like 'Oh, it's just a respiratory therapist.' I kept asking around if everything was okay, and they're very dismissive, saying, 'Everything's fine!' I don't know why it had to be a secret: we knew the kid was likely to have issues, but doing like nothing was happening was much worse.
When Dominic was born, they put him in my arms, cut the cord, and suddenly, the room went quiet. I asked my midwife, 'Is anything wrong?' and she said—bless her heart— 'There is nothing wrong with your baby.'
I took a look at him and asked if he had Down syndrome, but everybody walked out. Every single person left the room except my husband. Nobody answered the question.
Here's the thing: I never thought there was anything wrong with my child. Down syndrome doesn't scare me. You live with Down syndrome, not with trisomy 18. I had this brand new baby who was going to live, and the staff treated us as if someone had just died.
It felt like they were telling me that my child was less, that his birth didn't deserve to be celebrated, but had to be treated like a stillbirth. I just wanted out of there.
The midwife did come back after and apologized for walking out. She said it was the first time she'd had a child with a disability, and it caught her off guard.
I guess my biggest struggle with that experience was the perception. You know, they closed the door after he was born and left me alone. The on-call pediatrician wouldn't even look at me when she came to check him out.
We got to go home soon after and saw our regular doctor, the one who prayed with me after the salmon situation. The first thing he said was, 'Congratulations!' That was all I needed. I needed the medical community to tell me that my child was wonderful. I knew that he was, but you have so many voices telling you it's not true, that it's hard not to hold onto that. I called the regional center in California and got him connected with early intervention. He started physical therapy at six weeks and checked out every appointment he had since.
Dominic has been an absolute joy, except for the few sleepless nights or the puking. But these have nothing to do with Down syndrome. Just parenthood.
I guess I want people to know that a disability doesn't define who you are. People shouldn't assume anything. Ever. I get a little bit of a pass because it's visible that he has Down syndrome, but it's not always true for other disabilities. We never know what other people's challenges are, and having an opinion over how a parent handles her kid at Target doesn't help anybody.
We did postpone our RV trip and ended up leaving when he turned one. It was an awesome experience. We traveled with the family for 18 months, then went to Japan.
Dominic is six now. He's charming, always putting your needs over his, getting excited about new things. He was the first to want to go to South Korea. I got to chose where I would work next, and we had the kids vote between Italy, South Korea, and Belgium. He was the tiebreaker! We're leaving in two days. It's a good opportunity, both for the family and me.
It all just seems normal at this point, the chaos and the crazy. I told my husband that I would never wait to travel and to live our dreams—within reason—because you never know what's going to happen if you wait. Whether it's living in an RV or sleeping on the floor in a hotel room on our way to Asia, we are doing it all.
You can't trade today for tomorrow. I don't want to live my life thinking about how I'm going to be happy when something else happens.
I'm going to be happy now.