In honor of November being National Adoption Awareness Month, Portrait of an Adoption is hosting the fourth annual acclaimed series, 30 Adoption Portraits in 30 Days. Designed to give a voice to the many different perspectives of adoption, this series will feature guest posts by people with widely varying experiences.
By Ann Cser
December 8, 2009 was probably the absolute worst day in my life. If I live to be one hundred years old, I do not think that I would ever encounter another day that even compares.
I live in a relatively quiet neighborhood in the suburbs of Detroit. I work less than five minutes from home and was working the afternoon shift. That night, I had finished my work early. I had contemplated leaving early all night. Finally, I had less than a half hour to go, with nothing to do, so I packed up to leave. A coworker stopped me just feet from the door and asked for my help. I stayed to help her.
That night was the first snowfall of the year, and all that I could think of when I first walked outside was how beautiful it looked. I was running a little late because I needed to clean the snow off my car. My husband, Chris, called. When I saw whom the call was from, I assumed that he was worried because I was running late. I couldn’t understand him when he first spoke, so I asked him to repeat what he had said.
My heart stopped beating when he told me that he had been stabbed and gave me the name of the neighbor that had stabbed him. He asked me to call 911 and told me not to come home. I called 911 as soon as I hung up with him. I was relatively calm, because I thought that if it were really bad, he would have already called 911 himself.
Even though he told me not to come home, I arrived home before the police did, and I quickly ran inside. I won’t describe the horrors that I saw. I still have nightmares and suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). When the police arrived, I didn’t even see them carry my husband out of the house and into the waiting ambulance. I just saw them standing by the house with their guns drawn. I didn’t even notice that the fire engines arrived. After stabbing my husband, the attacker had turned the gas stove on, and the firefighters had to break windows to disperse the gas that had accumulated in our home.
Chris passed away about an hour after calling me. He had sixty-one stab wounds. Two medical examiners said that the wounds were consistent with torture. The police arrested the neighbor almost immediately, because they followed his footsteps in the snow.
Chris and I had been trying for over two years to become pregnant. It looked as if not only my dreams of becoming a mother were over, but my future life was over as well. I promised myself that I would live just long enough to see this monster get convicted. He did. He is serving a life sentence with no chance of parole.
I had struggled after the conviction to find a purpose to keep living. I am not a deeply religious person, but I truly believed that God had spared my life that night. I had always wondered exactly what would have happened if my coworker had not stopped me that night. She didn’t even need my help with a work issue. This feeling of being “spared” is what kept me alive the next few months.
I was a widow for just over thirteen months when I concluded that I was meant to be a mother. I relentlessly searched the Internet for options. I was forty years old and felt my biological clock spinning out of control. However, I still felt as if it would be a betrayal to my beloved Chris to have a child with another man. I came across a website for Michigan Adoptions. There were pictures of many children.
My heart sank when I saw pictures of two sisters that were currently in foster care awaiting adoption. My first thought was how I was being selfish for wanting to bring my own biological child into this world, when there are so many children out there that deserve to be loved and that have, one way or another, suffered the loss of their parents. Without thinking anymore, I clicked the contact button.
I was hesitant to tell my family about my plans to adopt, because I was not sure how they would feel about me adopting an older child instead of an infant. I found an agency and did the necessary training to become a foster/adoptive parent. My retired father went to every single one of the classes with me. I cannot express how great it was that my family was supporting me.
I was only interested in becoming an adoptive mother, not a foster mother. But the agency advised me to get a foster care license, so that when I was matched with potential adoptive children, they could be placed in my home immediately instead of waiting for them to be pre-adoptive. It took about a year before I finally got my foster care license.
The two sisters that I wanted to adopt had been placed in a home already. I explained to my adoption agent that I only wanted a girl. I feared that being a single mother, it would be difficult for me to properly guide a boy into manhood.
But my agent informed me of a brother and sister pair that she felt would be a good match. I discussed this with my family, and all of the males in my family offered without hesitation to be a surrogate father to my son. So, I agreed to meet with the children and the social worker at a local restaurant. As soon as I saw them, my heart melted. I knew right in that instant that these two children were the reason that God saved my life that fateful night.
I was told that the kids were skeptical about meeting me. So I made them some homemade treats (cake pops). Their smiles were so bright; it did not seem like we were meeting for the first time. Zach, nine, was a chatterbox full of questions. Lexy, ten, was very quiet and asked only a few questions. At one point, Lexy began to cry. I just wanted to wrap her in my arms and take her pain away. Zach tried to console her, and I could see immediately how caring he is.
They were moved into my house about two weeks later. I was the first person that they lived with that was not a biological family member. My son Zach became angry and lashed out at me. He did not understand why he could not live with his mother anymore. He had been subjected to some horrible treatment and was suffering from some emotional scars. My daughter was riddled with anxiety. She had stomachaches daily and vomited every other week. It broke my heart.
Even though our losses are completely different, I know exactly how it feels to suddenly lose the most important person in your life. I did my best to reassure them that they were in a good place. I let them know that it was okay to feel the way that they felt and that it was normal. I constantly wondered if I was doing the right thing, or if I was a good enough parent for them both.
I told my son every single night as I tucked him in that I loved him and he was wanted in my home. One night, he told me that he was never going to love me, and I was never going to be his mom because he already had one. I kissed him on the top of his head and said, “That’s okay, just as long as you know that I love you, and I will always consider you my son, no matter how you feel.”
My son struggled with his grades when he first moved in with me, and now his grades are excellent. He has made new friends. He has finally realized that he is not a bad kid and that he is a kind, wonderful kid. He still has his moments, but I don’t believe that it is out of the normal realm of behavior for a child his age.
When the adoption was almost complete in March 2013, I was fortunate to get both kids into a trauma-specific therapy program for children. They have blossomed with the therapy and finally feel comfortable in my home.
Zach first told me that he loves me in December, and now he ends almost every phone conversation with it. Neither one of my kids directly calls me “Mom”, and I’m okay with that, because it’s really about them and how they feel, not about me. But, they always refer to me as their mom, and when I ask why they did something kind, they will say, “Because you’re my mom.”
The day that I was scheduled to sign the final adoption papers, the children told the adoption worker that they had a surprise for us. They both decided, on their own, that they wanted to change their last name to mine. It was a complete and pleasant surprise.
In December of 2009, I never would have imagined that this is how my life would turn out. Three years after becoming a young widow, I adopted two wonderful preteen siblings and we became a family. These children and I have both lost significant people in our lives. Even though our losses are not the same, we are grieving. I’m not trying to replace their biological mother, yet they accept me as their mom. They are not replacing the void left in my heart from my husband, yet they fill my heart with love.
We have helped each other heal and given life back to each other. My daughter has turned into the chatterbox; she very rarely gets sick, and people say that she is my “mini-me.” My son, though he’s still holding on to some anger, has shown that his heart is pure gold. He now shows a full spectrum of emotions, and strangers remark on how much he looks like me.
While I would never dismiss the losses that we have had in our lives, I am certain that this is the absolute best outcome that any of us could have ever imagined. Not only did they give me my life back, but they also gave me hope. They gave me hope for my future and hope for this world.
Ann is 44 years old. She was widowed at 39 and thought her life was over. Two and a half years later, she became the mother to two preteens and it was then that she realized her life was just beginning.
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