Today is my Adoption Day! Each year, my family and I celebrate what the Lord has done in our family, and how He’s woven us together. Of course there have been bumps along the way, but the Lord’s hand is evident throughout our story!
I thought I’d share a little bit of my adoption story (If you’ve read Longing for Motherhood, this is the introduction to my book!)
My adoptive parents had the privilege of meeting the teenage girl who brought me into the world. Over the years, they told me stories about her sitting in a cold apartment in Romania, holding me as tears fell down her cheeks and knowing that she’d never be able to be my mother . . . knowing that she was about to give up her daughter and—at least for that time in her life—her motherhood.
My story begins in that former communist nation in the capital city of Bucharest. Romania was under the rule of one of the cruelest dictators in Eastern Europe, Nicolae Ceaușescu. He held the beautiful country in a proverbial iron grip for almost a quarter of a century. Under his dictatorship, the people of Romania suffered greatly beneath the restrictions of rationed food, constant surveillance, and persecution and imprisonment.
In an effort to compete with the Soviet Union’s population, Ceaușescu devised a plan to increase Romania’s population from 23 million to 30 million by 2000. In 1966 he enacted a decree that essentially made pregnancy a state policy and proclaimed that the “fetus is the property of the entire society” and that anyone who avoided having children would be deemed “a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity.” Women under the age of forty-five were routinely brought in by authorities for check-ups, and if they hadn’t become pregnant within a certain time frame, they’d be subject to a “celibacy tax.”
A result of this cruel policy—a consequence that lasted far beyond Ceaușescu’s death by execution in 1989—was that women were forced to have children they couldn’t take care of, leaving half a million children as wards of the state. Parents abandoned their children by the droves, because they didn’t have the financial or material resources to take care of them. The majority of children placed in communist orphanages weren’t actual orphans; they were simply children whose parents were unable to care for them. Such orphanages were known as the “slaughterhouses of souls.”
Although I was spared such a place, I was one of those babies whose mother couldn’t afford to keep her child. My birth mother was a nineteen-year-old girl with no money, no husband, and limited resources. Her decision to place me up for adoption wasn’t an easy one. It rarely is an easy decision for a woman to give up her child. My birth mom longed for motherhood, but instead she had to choose childlessness.
Bobby and Christie Patterson were the two people God ordained to become my parents. They were in their late thirties and had lived a full life in the fifteen years they’d been married. Their love for adventure took them all over the world, including West Africa where they spent a year helping to build a church.
When my parents got married in their early twenties, they didn’t want children. But as the years went on, they discovered a desire to have children. But children didn’t come. They walked through year after year of trying to conceive and explored different treatments that didn’t seem to help. Finally, my mom conceived, but a few short months later, she miscarried. They were back to square one.
In 1990, right after my father had started his own architectural firm, my parents found their longing for parenthood intensifying, and they also found themselves in the middle of an excruciatingly long domestic adoption process. During that time, they had conversations with several couples who were also considering international adoption. Finding friends in a similar stage of life and walking toward the same goal made them feel like they weren’t alone. One night, a call came seemingly out of the blue from my dad’s business partner who told him a 20/20 documentary called “Shame of a Nation” about the Romanian orphans was airing that Sunday evening and that they should watch it. My dad almost dismissed it until my mom’s sister called and suggested the very same thing. They decided to watch the documentary and invited their friends over to join them. That evening, they turned on the TV not knowing that one hour would forever change their lives.
They learned that soon after Ceaușescu was executed in a revolution on Christmas Day in 1989, the Western world quickly arrived in Romania. What they found were thousands of children existing in horrible state-run institutions. The documentary introduced the world—and Bobby and Christie Patterson—to these children, struggling to survive. In the days following, my parents prayed about what they’d just witnessed. Starving children. Disabled children. Children who had experienced massive amounts of trauma. My parents asked themselves, “Is this our chance to become parents?” The Lord had begun to place a desire on their hearts to travel to Romania to adopt. Five weeks later, they were on a plane with their friends, bound for the adventure of a lifetime.
One of their deepest prayers while they were in Romania was that the Lord would intentionally guide them to the children He wanted them to adopt. It seemed like an almost impossible prayer. There were so many needy children; would the Lord really direct them to the ones He’d ordained for them? Through a series of events, several Romanians stepped up and began helping my parents with the adoption process. They visited several orphanages, but also had the chance to visit some birth mothers who were planning on placing their children in an institution.
Several times, my parents met various children but didn’t sense a peace about adopting any of them. There were other American couples in Romania hoping to adopt, and the process seemed quicker and easier for them than for my parents. My mom recounts going back to the dingy, cold apartment where they were staying and crying out to the Lord, “Have you brought me all this way, only to leave me without a child? It’s not fair!” Even in the midst of the pain of so many other mothers and children, my mother was overwhelmed by the pain of her own longing.
A few days later, the Holy Spirit directed Bobby and Christie to my birth mother and to me. Before I was even handed to my parents, my mom said she knew that I was going to be her daughter. Immediately they began the necessary paperwork to legally adopt me. Since Romania had just recently broken free of its Communist leader, the government was still accustomed to working on a bribery system. My parents quickly learned that if they wanted to leave the country anytime soon, they’d have to pay extra cash so it would take weeks instead of months to process paperwork. Finally, after five weeks, they purchased plane tickets home to North Carolina. In addition to finding and adopting me, they also adopted a little boy, eleven days older than I was.
My dear birth mother, with tears streaming down her cheeks, came to hold me one last time and say goodbye before my parents boarded the plane and headed back to the United States.
My parents went on to adopt four more children. Because the adoption laws changed in Romania, and foreigners were no longer allowed to adopt Romanian children, my parents went to other countries, and over the years, adopted a boy and three more girls, making the Patterson family complete. While the beginning of my story started off rocky in the world’s eyes, my heavenly Father was quietly and tenderly preparing me for things to come. Little did anyone know that the baby girl adopted from Romania would one day learn that she could never have babies of her own.
I’ve discovered that what, at first, may look like a legacy of childlessness, the God of hope means for good.
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