Category: Adoption

by Diana Day

On that hot Haitian morning, Nancy Connelly, with her family right behind her, ran up the steps of the orphanage to get to her babies.

Bam, bam, bam. She remembers the sound of her feet hitting the tile steps.The humidity sucked the air out of her lungs. She saw some older kids playing at the top of the stairs, the sound of them getting closer as she ran.

She thought of stopping to greet them, but her desire to see twins Seth and Amara again, to hold them, was too great.

The Connelly family, Nancy, husband Scott, and their children Iris, 9, and Drew, 5, zipped into the orphanage’s baby room.

The room was a “sea of cribs,” Nancy said, “And it was overstimulating. I wanted to acknowledge all my friends’ kids … mainly, I just wanted to hold my kids.”

Understandably, the family all differ on the details of what happened in the next few emotional moments. Did Nancy go to Seth first, or did she go to Amara? Maybe Iris picked up Amara first, but maybe it was Nancy who picked up Amara and then handed her to Iris. Nancy said Scott looked overwhelmed, and she handed Seth to him.

“It was all a blur,” Nancy said. “I meant to remember every detail of it, and of course I didn’t.”

Nancy and Scott do agree that one of the nannies was holding 18-month-old Seth when they came in. The nanny said to Seth, “There’s your mommy,” and Seth started shaking his head, no-no-no.

After an hour or so with the babies inside the orphanage, Scott had to go outside for a break from the oppressive heat. But Iris never needed to take a break.

“Iris stayed up there the whole time both times we went [to the orphanage],” Scott said. “She was holding infants that have died. There was one that died of AIDS the month after we got home. Seeing [her with the babies] was my favorite part of the trip.”

The Connellys eventually went to the orphanage’s sitting room with Seth and Amara, the new members of their family. Amara appeared somewhat detached, though she seemed content to be out of her crib. But Seth was inconsolable.

“The nannies called Seth ‘the king,’” Scott said. They favored him, and he had more time outside of his crib than his sister Amara. The first few days with the Connellys were hard for Seth, and he “definitely wanted to be back at the orphanage,” Scott said.

“It was hard that day. It was hard that whole nine days [that we were in Haiti],” Scott explained. “There was a lot of crying. I felt bad for Seth. I thought, ‘Oh boy, this is going to be hard.’”

And that wasn’t even the beginning of the journey.

The journey of a lifetime (or two)

The trip from Southern California to Port au Prince, Haiti to bring Seth and Amara home was only one part of the adoption process. Nancy and Scott actually started the whole process in 2003 with discussions about adding to their family.

The couple, who met in 1987 and married in 1991, had always known there was a possibility they would adopt. After having two children by birth, they were considering whether to have another child or to adopt. Nancy had been looking into adoption on the Internet and would call Scott at work with updates.

He remembered when she called one day and mentioned, among other possibilities, Haitian boy-girl twins that might become available at an orphanage called For His Glory.

Before they hung up, Scott said, “Find out some information about the twins.”

Scott remembered Nancy asking, “Why?” He told her he didn’t know why. It was just something that came to him.

Nancy found out that the twins were from Cité Soleil, Haiti’s poorest slum. The birth mother was giving up the children – then known by birth names Jacqueline and Jacquelin, which are now their middle names — because of extreme poverty. They were her sixth and seventh babies.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. AIDS, political unrest, illiteracy and malnourishment are just a few of the dire problems that plague this island nation in the Caribbean. According to the 2005 Human Development Indicators put out by the United Nations Development Programme, the life expectancy in Haiti is 51.6 years with a 34 percent chance that a person will not survive to age 40. Ten percent of infants die being born, and 16 percent of the poorest children will die before they turn five. Almost half of the population is illiterate.

Scott had reservations about adopting from Haiti at first. He was mainly concerned about how having siblings of a different race would affect Iris and Drew in a society where people are not always accepting of multi-race families.

But, Haiti was more affordable for Nancy and Scott. And, they found out that the twins’ birth mother visited the orphanage once or twice a month, so it was comforting to know the children were loved. (At the request of the birth parents, Scott and Nancy have sent some pictures and updates since they came home with Seth and Amara.) Scott had also long been inspired by the closeness of his boss’ large family. Then, their neighbors had twins.

So, the idea of the twins from Haiti stuck. Nancy and Scott turned their focus to Seth and Amara.

“We just kind of kept in the loop on their status and how they were doing,” Scott said. He said he just knew it was right.

Every step is intentional

It took Nancy and Scott five months to assemble the adoption papers.

They started the dossier in February 2004, the same month that Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted from office. Nancy and Scott decided to delay submitting an important form called a 1600A, along with the first outlay of money, because they feared their paperwork would be lost in the coup’s chaotic aftermath. They decided to wait for the political situation to settle before filing the form.

Nancy learned how to navigate the ocean of paperwork and legal technicalities from her Internet adoption networks and extensive reading. Her own self-described “anal retentive” nature helped her keep track of the many details. But still, sometimes it just got to be too much. When the paperwork got overwhelming, Nancy said Scott would comfort her: “One paper at a time, honey.”

“Every piece of paper you get together for the dossier is one step toward changing your family,” Nancy said. “It’s such a conscious choice, every step of the way … That was the beginning of the roller coaster.”

Now that Nancy has successfully been through the adoption process, she volunteers as the adoption coordinator at For His Glory. Nancy, who is a trained doula — a woman’s birth assistant — said she has thought many times about the differences between birthing, helping women give birth and the adoption process.

“Believe me, the contrast is not lost on me. I am being a doula, but in a different way. I’m helping families being born by helping at the orphanage,” Nancy explained. “I have to give pep talks. It’s just like someone giving birth, it’s just a longer process.”

“Linda, the director [of For His Glory], is also a doula. Maybe we have the gift of encouragement, and that’s why we do what we do.”

Once Nancy and Scott turned in the dossier, it took a total of ten months for the process to be complete in Haiti.

In Haiti, the official certificates are beautifully handwritten, Nancy explained. But this is slow, of course. “If a copy machine is broken, you’ve added a month onto the process.”

And then there was the challenge of telling friends and family.

“You already have two kids, which everybody thinks is a perfect-sized family,” Nancy said. But there she was, telling people that she and her husband were planning to adopt outside their country and outside their race. And twins. She was sure everyone thought they were crazy.

In June 2004, a year before the Connellys brought Seth and Amara home, Nancy took Iris to Haiti to meet the babies and see the orphanage.

“We thought it would be a great thing for Iris to see and experience. Our social worker agreed, which ultimately gave Scott the feeling that he could let me take her with me. He was worried about her safety, but at that time Haiti was filled with U.N. forces, and it really was a calm and quiet time to go,” Nancy wrote in a follow-up e-mail.

“It wasn’t scary, it was just different,” Iris said of the time she’s spent in Haiti. “It was sad seeing people not having homes and stuff.”

Coming home

Scott really wanted a picture of his newly expanded family on that first day at the orphanage.

So, after a couple of hours in the sitting room, they went outside to take pictures and walk around a little.

Scott keeps one of the pictures on his desk at work. It reminds him how far they’ve all come.

Iris, Amara, Seth and Drew in Haiti; photo courtesy Connelly family

The nannies had lovingly groomed Seth and Amara – shoes and socks for both, a ruffly dress for Amara and cute plaid shorts for Seth. Nancy remembers that they had bloated bellies. The children at For His Glory have three large meals a day, so Nancy theorized that the bloating was probably caused by some other nutritional imbalance.

Amara was emotionally distant, and she was sick too. She had stuffed some cotton up her nose, and it had festered there, causing an infection. Seth had calmed down some, but he was still unhappy being away from his nannies.

“It was a shock,” Scott explained about those first few hours. “It was real — it was what we wanted, what we prayed for. It was the right thing, but it was just different.”

But the most harrowing part of the trip was yet to come.

The day before the Connellys left Haiti, the twins had their visa appointment. Nancy and Scott were advised not to come because there had been gunfire in the part of town where they needed to go. The morning of the appointment, Pierre Alexis, the Haitian orphanage director, and one of the nannies took the children while Nancy and Scott stayed with Iris and Drew at their hotel.

The appointment was only supposed to take a couple of hours, but Seth and Amara weren’t back until dinnertime that night.

In the For His Glory newsletter, Linda Kohn, the American orphanage director, published the following account of what happened that day:

While Scott and Nancy Connelly were in Haiti in early June about to take their twins, Seth and Amara home to the US, our staff had to take the children downtown without their parents to get their visas, as it was so unsafe the parents could not join them. The gunfire rang out and Seth, Amara and our staff had to hide out in a safe house for several hours before they could return the children to the hotel. On the eve of their freedom from kidnappings, killings, starvation, etc., the children had to experience one last terrifying event before they could rest safely in their parents’ arms on the AA flight bound for America.

Hunkering down

There was an unexpected five-hour layover in the Ft. Lauderdale airport because of an airplane problem. Still shell-shocked, the Connelly family deplaned and settled in to wait.

Iris remembers the time passing fast, but it was an eternity for Nancy.

“For Iris, it was just fun, running around the airport,” Nancy said. But she was worrying about many things, including about whether the last-minute schedule change would prevent family members from being able to greet them in the Long Beach airport.

“I needed the emotional support by that time. It was totally survival mode by then,” Nancy said.

But still, she was very thankful to finally be back in the United States and on familiar territory after the difficult days in Haiti. After staying an extra four days in Haiti because of paperwork delays – they got through with enough clothes because of Nancy’s overpacking — and then after the last day of violence, Nancy was out of steam.

Mainly, they passed the time just letting the kids play. Amara had somehow learned to walk a little in her crib – Nancy described it as a sort of “Frankenstein walk” — and Seth could manage a few steps. But, as kids do, the four children found ways to have fun.

The airport was also Nancy and Scott’s first taste of the world of public opinion regarding the changes to their family. Scott was holding Seth as they got off the plane, and the first comment he heard came from an African American woman who said, “What are you doing with that black baby?”

This made Scott wary, but there were no more negative remarks after that, Nancy said. In fact, “People seemed to be going out of their way to smile at us.” One woman even mouthed the words “beautiful family.”

Once home, the Connellys made a cocoon around themselves for awhile and didn’t go out much. They figured that the best way to make Seth and Amara feel safe was to stay put.

Scott remembers setting Seth and Amara on the grass outside for the first time. Some of Nancy’s relatives came to visit, and they all went outside.

“Amara’s a toucher, and she was touching everything,” Scott said. He found the twins’ happy explorations comforting – a sign that Seth and Amara could indeed venture out of the house and still feel safe, connected.

Drew, formerly the youngest in the family, faced a big adjustment. Nancy remembers that Iris recharged her batteries by retreating into her room for a short time and creating a world for her Barbies, but Drew had a harder time at first.

“[Drew has] grown into his role as a big brother,” Scott said, but he had to work through it. Scott has recently been thrilled to see Drew looking after his new siblings, or spontaneously running to give them a hug or kiss.

“That was the hardest part for me, seeing Drew struggling,” Scott said. “But now looking at it, … it definitely has made him stronger.”

Amara, Iris, Drew and Seth at holiday time, about six months after their homecoming; photo courtesy Connelly family

Attachment issues have been at the forefront of Nancy’s and Scott’s concerns. They are vigilant and observant, trying to gauge how well Seth and Amara are adjusting.

Nancy had done a lot of reading about attachment issues before Seth and Amara came home. But she said that reading the material before the children came was very different than actually dealing with attachment issues when they were really present.

“I expected to feel the same way about [Seth and Amara] as I did about my birth children. And I don’t, you can’t. They were not born of me,” Nancy said. “With adoption, it’s different. … And once I came to peace with that, I didn’t feel as guilty. I didn’t feel like a bad person.”

Scott knew that it might take time to feel a deep connection to the family’s new additions. But “in the last month, I haven’t been thinking about that too much. I have been having that comfort – they’re ours, they’re really ours.”

He relishes coming home from work and hearing four children running and calling to him. Seth says, “Daddy-o, Daddy-o!”

And it takes time for the adoptees to attach, too.

Seth, formerly bonded to his favorite nanny at the orphanage, has now bonded to the family. But Amara still sometimes exhibits some of the detached emotional state Nancy and Scott saw in Haiti.

Amara received good and kind treatment at For His Glory, Nancy said, but she was still “hurt by virtue of being in an orphanage.”

It concerns the couple that Amara will hold up her arms to be picked up by anyone. And at their church, well-intentioned people reinforce this behavior by picking her up, passing her around and ooh-ing and aah-ing over her.

They have good intentions, Scott says, but it’s not really helpful when Scott and Nancy are trying so hard to have the children bond to their new family.

Nancy was greatly comforted by a visit from a county social service provider whose doctoral dissertation was about attachment.

The woman said it was O.K., for now, to let other people hold Seth and Amara and comfort them. Nancy also found it helpful to hear that there will be time later to teach the twins discretion and caution.

Nancy said that when the social worker told her “attachment is a process, not an event. … The weight was lifted off my shoulders.”

The days behind, the days ahead

Besides the larger attachment issues, there were a host of other daily challenges. Both Seth and Amara had intestinal parasites; Seth is still struggling to overcome his.

Also, because they were fed so quickly in the orphanage, the twins wouldn’t chew their food and had to be taught.

And language.

“You don’t realize how important language is,” Nancy said. And then one day she was chatting with Amara while changing her diapers. At one point, Amara responded with a simple, “Uh-huh.” Nancy was struck by the power of this moment of understanding between a mother and a daughter who speak different languages.

And then there were moments of intense worry and self-doubt. Nancy said she sees this kind of thing all the time on her e-mail listservs.

People post questions like “Am I good enough to raise these kids?” and “Will they hate me for taking them out of their birth country?”

Nancy said she worries about these things too. She’s not Haitian, doesn’t speak the language, doesn’t know the intimate details of the culture.

“You can try. You can try, try try,”she said. Nancy and Scott do plan to take Seth and Amara back to Haiti sometime so they can see where they were born.

In spite of all the progress the family has made together, there have been some really tough days. Nancy looked to her e-mail companions for help but couldn’t really find evidence of people who were having as hard a time as she was.

At first, Nancy was reluctant to disclose her frustrations: “My big fear is that I don’t want to be a bad ambassador for adoption. … I didn’t want to be that cautionary tale.”

She decided to post a “candid e-mail,” and then the responses poured in. It turned out that many people were having the same experiences and just weren’t posting them.

Nancy also read a book called The Post-Adoption Blues by Karen J. Foli and John R. Thompson and said it helped her a lot.

Scott and Nancy agreed that they can even see themselves adopting again. They are already discussing it — a little. They also both agreed that they are pretty tired right now.

“It’s definitely hard work with twins, changing diapers and getting meals prepared. It’s definitely more work, but you know, I don’t even like to call it work. Whether you have four kids or seven kids, it’s what you do,” Scott said.

Scott said that it’s “amazing” to see how much his twins like to be together. They might be doing different things, but they do them close to each other.

Once Scott watched Seth put a hand on Amara’s shoulder and pat her back when she was hurt. “They definitely hang together,” he said.

Nancy said parenting twins has changed her concept of what’s “fair.” She said it’s very different from parenting one at a time. Nowadays, what’s fair is not always what’s equal, depending on the needs of each child, she said. She is also less likely to get involved in sibling squabbles, preferring to let the twins work it out themselves where reasonable.

Both Nancy and Scott speak proudly of the twins’ resilience in the face of such big changes.

“They’ve come a long way, and they still have a long way to go,” Nancy said.

Something as simple as romping freely in an open, carpeted American home with plenty of toys and books around or having older siblings to chase and tickle them is completely new for Seth and Amara, now nearly two-and-a-half. In the orphanage, their cribs were side-by-side, but they didn’t get out of them much, though they did have a few toys to play with.

In Nancy and Scott’s home today, Seth and Amara play in front of Nancy on two oversized balls. They roll their little bodies around or sit up and bounce, their little socked toes stretching to balance on the floor.

“I look at them in the grocery cart at Ralph’s, and I can’t believe they’re here after everything. They’re from another country,” Nancy said, shaking her head in disbelief.

“We’ve got a whole host of peeling back the layers and figuring it out ahead. It’s going to be a lifetime of that,” Nancy said. “I can only hope that [Seth and Amara] know that we went on our hearts and not in our heads.”

But, in the end, Nancy said, “It’s really the babies’ story to tell.”

Twins Seth and Amara now have a better chance to grow up to tell that story, their way.