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Long but fascinating story of a rather low-income couple who adopted, and adopted, and adopted.
"There were so many children who, because they were too old, or too violent, or too traumatized, or unable to walk, or too close to death, or the wrong color, or had too many brothers and sisters, were unlikely ever to be adopted; and when Hector and Sue thought about what those children’s lives would be like without parents, lives that were already unimaginably difficult, they could not bear it."
We still have some really people out there, but rarely hear about them.
I have a friend that has adopted and also did foster care. She was taking in babies from drug-addicted mothers and children coming out of their homes because of abuse/neglect. She has a heart of gold, but is also tough as nails.
If only we could clone some of these remarkable people..........
I have a lot of conflicting feelings about stories like this. On the one hand, it's great that these kids have a family. On the other hand, children still lose out when they are fighting for attention, and one 'date night' every once in awhile simply isn't enough. So many of the children had real problems when entering the family and those issues couldn't receive the care they deserved because there were just too many others, and look at the outcomes the children faced! And not just of the children, but the grandchildren too, as some of the grandchildren also had children really young.
You reach the point of the home functioning more like an orphanage, which is something we have determined is not the best setting for children. Not to mention, several of the children interviewed also mention that they were parentified due to having to help care for the other children in the home. This is just not good.
When I read stories like this, I often think that the subjects may be dealing with an adoption addiction. In this story, the subject literally described the experience of adopting a new child as a high. It's great to help children. I adopted my two children from foster care in the last year, I'm a huge advocate for this. I get the desire to want to save them all. The thought of my two children not having a home kills me and I want every child to have the same family my kids now have. I could buy a large home and start adopting every child that comes along until I was at capacity. But I could never do that to my kids. The idea of putting them in a situation like the one described in the article makes me feel violently ill. My children deserve much better than that. All children do.
I read the whole story and can say that I really feel sorry for the adopted and birth children. They were basically raised by a single father. The mom only supplemented the state subsidies with her salary. She was not there enough to really raise the kids.
The kids got to take turns with the mom on one night and the dad on one morning each week--so the kids got an hour or two individually with each of the parents TWO TIMES A YEAR. Sorry, but these kids needed more. And if they got more parent time, maybe the girls would not have had to run to boyfriends to get that love and attention and end up with child.
I adopted TWO special needs ten year old girls, two years apart and that was all I could handle. I has foster girls, one at a time for a while, but stopped that too. After they were both over 21 years old, THEN I adopted two kids again. No way I cold have effectively parented more that the first two, given their needs and background.
Makes one wonder if they would have had a better marriage and life for the first four if they would have stopped adopting at that time. Then maybe waited 18 years and then started adopting a few more after the first batch was raised.
Seems that a lot of the parenting was passed onto the older kids too, and that really is not fair for kids that were not parented themselves.
To 'care' for the kids that were available and not adopted, there are other things they could have done--advertising, mentoring, providing respite, training potential adopters, etc.
I do feel sorry for the father as it seems that he had a rough thankless life....
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