MORGAN HILL — Maybe Kirsten Carr was only meant to give birth
to one baby. But by no means was that going to stop her from having
more than one child.
MORGAN HILL — Maybe Kirsten Carr was only meant to give birth to one baby. But by no means was that going to stop her from having more than one child.
“I was one of those women who wasn’t supposed to be pregnant,” said Carr, whose first pregnancy was filled with her feeling extremely sick and twice landing her in the hospital with dehydration.
Carr, director of the Gilroy Visitors Bureau, always had planned on having two children, and then adopting a third child. But after her son, Patrick, was born May 5, 1999, she decided that one pregnancy was enough.
“We decided, let’s just adopt now,” she said.
Carr was no stranger to the idea of adoption. In fact, it was because of adoption that she has her brother, Matthew.
“Adoption has always been something I was interested in,” she said. “My family adopted my brother when I was 5 years old.”
At that time living in Orange County south of Los Angeles, Carr’s parents welcomed Matthew, a Samoan, into the family. Because of her experience with adoption, Carr always had planned on adopting a child.
“It’s a socially responsible choice,” she said. “There’s a lot of children without homes.”
Carr and her husband, Larry, a Morgan Hill City Councilman, looked into county and private adoption options, but only had one problem with the county system – parental rights. Public systems for adoption for years have maintained and continue to maintain a focus on trying to reunite children with their birth parents. When a parent has their child taken away from them and placed in foster care, the parents have six months in order to get their lives back together and gain their child back. Sometimes that means taking the child out of the arms of their adoptive parents.
And that was a risk Carr didn’t want to take.
“One of the reasons we didn’t want to go with the county system was parental rights,” she said. “We didn’t want to bring a child here that would be taken away. Patrick would never understand why she was taken away, and that something we thought about.”
However, the family was told that while they were hoping for a girl about 1 year old, if they were willing to wait for the six month parental rights to be taken away, they could adopt a child through the county and not worry about losing their child.
So the Carrs began the process of adoption in 2000, a process that is so in-depth that it took three years before they would ever meet their future child.
The family got adoption papers in September of last year, and began taking classes on adopting a child.
“We signed up to take PRIDE classes,” Carr said.
The classes were based on letting parents know what they were getting into – some of the children available had parents who beat them, used drugs or were in prison. The program taught parents about the challenges of raising an adopted child.
Carr remembered during one of the classes how the instructor brought out a pile of teddy bears. While a prospective parent held the stuffed animal, the instructor would tell them about the child who owned that animal, and how much each child had been forced to go through. Carr said she told the instructor that she wanted to adopt all of the children because she felt so bad for them.
“There wasn’t a day of those classes that I didn’t come home crying,” Carr said.
The couple also had to explain to young Patrick that he was going to have a new sister, even though they had no idea when they would get her and what she would look like.
“It helped that we had told him he was going to have a sister and her name was Katie,” said Carr, who had decided on the name Katie from the beginning. “We also explained to him that some mommies and daddies can’t take care of their children, so mommies and daddies like use take care of them.”
Kirsten and Larry finished the classes in December, and then the county did a full background check on the family, including the home, letters of reference, their pasts and more.
The family passed, and finally they were assigned a social worker.
“We were complete approved in February of this year, then we were assigned a social worker who was then our advocate,” Carr said.
That social worker was Kuei-Ting Huang, who met and discussed children’s situations with other advocates, who tried to find the best fit for a child and parents.
On Patrick’s fourth birthday in May, the Carrs received a call from Huang saying they had a match. However the 18-month-old girl was Chinese, so she only been in contact with people who spoke Mandarin. She might not be able to pick up on language as fast as other children her age, but that was not a problem for the Carrs, who said that race and background were not going to be a deciding factor.
“Larry and I talked about it, and we said, ‘Of course,’ ” Carr said.
However, by the time they called back that afternoon, the agency had found a Mandarin Chinese family to place the child. They had lost Katie, for now.
More than a month passed with no additional information until June 18, when Huang called again.
This time, a Hawaiian, Filipino, Caucasian, Hispanic and Chinese 14-month-old little girl had been put in foster care from the age of five days. Her mother had terminated the rights to the child and was incarcerated, while the father had relinquished rights to the baby. All parental rights had been terminated. The Carrs ha everything they wanted. They had Katie.
The couple went and met with Huang, who began to tell them all about the little girl.
“It had to be one of the most surreal moments of my life,” Carr said. “I was sitting there taking notes on what was going to be the rest of our lives.”
They were told to call back once they made a decision about whether they wanted to adopt the girl and were sent home.
“We didn’t know why would couldn’t just say yes then, but we talked it over and called them back later that afternoon,” Carr said.
Soon, they were able to have their first meeting with Katie at her foster care home.
“It was very hard to leave that day,” she said. “It’s hard to understand why I couldn’t take her home. We always knew it was going to be a girl, but I now do have a daughter, and I know what she looks like.”
Larry, Kirsten and even Patrick were able to come and spend anywhere from an hour to eight hours with Katie, but she was not allowed to move in with the Carrs for good until July 10. Carr said Patrick handled the situation great, and she said he always reassured Katie that everything would be OK.
“He kept coming up to her and saying, ‘You’re going to come home with us, don’t worry,’ ” Carr said.
The family continues to meet with their social worker, and they will have a final adoption hearing in September or October, when Katie will officially be theirs.
And after going through the process of adoption, Carr’s only complaint remains the emphasis the county has long put on putting parents back together with their children – especially when children were put through abusive or unsafe situations.
“I don’t think it should be easier to adopt,” Carr said of the intensive process of adoption. “But the emphasis on reunification may be too strong. The kids don’t deserve to go through this and then have to do it all over again.”
Another family who went through the adoption process, albeit 20 years ago, the Robb family in Gilroy, also said they don’t trust the reunification focus. According to Pam Robb, that was one of the reasons she and her husband, Phil, did not adopt through the county.
“We were concerned how the American adoption process works,” Robb said. “Five months later, the mother changes her mind and you lose your child.”
Instead, the couple adopted through Holt International Childrens Services, an adoption organization that started up after the Korean War when the Holt family of Oregon wanted to do something for all of the orphans left behind in the war-torn country.
The couples adopted children, Emilie and Andrew, were adopted from Korea and have grown up to proud parents. Emilie recently graduated from Notre Dame University and Andrew graduated from Gilroy High School this year.
And other than a scare the second night when Katie awoke scared because of her new surroundings and Kirsten “felt helpless” because unlike with her son, she couldn’t differentiate Katie’s cries to know what to do to help her, the transition has been smooth.
“The fact that I came in with the expectation of it not being easy helped,” Carr said. “She’s done amazingly well. She’s happy, she laughs.”
And Patrick has made a great adjustment to his new sister as well.
“He hasn’t asked to send her back yet, so I think we’re doing OK,” Carr laughed. “He makes sure she has everything she needs. I think he’s thinks she is still scared.”
For more information about adoption, call Foster and Adoptive Home Recruitment at 846-5000. For more information about Holt International Childrens Services call (541) 687-2202.
