Wasatch International
Adoptions
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A Child's Way Home
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Wasatch International
Adoptions |
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“But
they that wait upon the Lord shall Giving birth to three amazing, beautiful children was a dream come true for me. Adopting Abby in September 2002 was like the icing on the cake! I know my adoption journey began when I was an 8-year-old second grader. My family did not have a lot of money, but we did have a great love for children. I had grown up with foster children in and out of my house as well as the houses of my neighbors. Helping those in need was a way of life for my mother. She implanted in me a desire to nurture and care for needy children. I can remember her saying her dream would be to run an orphanage. In second grade, I wanted to make my dream come to life. I wanted a sister. I prayed, cried, begged, and pleaded with my parents. Having no resources to do so, my dream would have to wait several years. In 1990, I was blessed with my birth-daughter Ashley.
She is a very giving, loving beautiful little girl. My son Jared was
born in 1993,
and Andrew followed in 1995. John and I had always praye Funny thing is I still harbored that dream of mine on the back burner of my heart. When Ashley was a small baby, I shared my desire to adopt with a friend of mine at church for the very first time. Amazingly, she shared it was also a dream of hers as well. Little did I know then that God would lead both of us down that trail and both of us to Bulgaria! God’s timing is amazing! Both of John’s parents had passed away by the fall of 2000. We were in the process of beginning to sell their house when we were watching the news one evening as a special segment came on about an Atlanta family who had 3 biological children, and they had recently adopted 2 beautiful little children. Ashley and I were weeping at the end. At that moment, I felt God calling me to ask John about adopting. I cannot explain it other than it was a calling by God in His perfect timing. I looked at John who was crying as well and said, “Honey, if we sold that house, would you allow me to adopt a little girl?” Without even looking shocked John simply said, “Sure.” He is usually the reasonable, wise one in the family, and this simple answer surprised me, but it also gave Ashley and I the permission to begin searching for her sister! We spent hours on weekends pouring over information from various agencies and looking at possibly hundreds of pictures. I have to say I wondered how we would know when we found her. Someone had said to me, “You will just know. God will tell you.” So, as I looked, I waited to hear from Him. On Thanksgiving Day after a big turkey dinner, Ashley and I had spent five hours reading about agencies and looking at pictures. Finally, there she was!! We read about the little 8-year-old girl named Tzvetelina who was posing outside holding a bouquet of flowers. She loved math and drawing. She loved to play, sing, and pretend. Oh, my. Chills ran over me and tears flowed from me as I read the description of this little girl. It was describing Ashley! Even though she was a few years older than Ashley and I had started searching for, I simply said, “That’s her!” Ashley said, “Then you had better go tell Daddy you found my sister.” We received much more information about this little girl and papers to begin the process to adopt her all through December. During Christmas break as I prepared to go back to my teaching job, I decided to throw away all the adoption information and pictures and get this unreasonable notion out of my mind. I didn’t understand the process, and we didn’t have the money. I was a busy working mom. What was I thinking? Something I was forgetting here was that this was a calling from God! I tried to satisfy myself with worldly things for the next two months. I saved for a trip to Disney and stowed the money away in the bank. Maybe I will get a new sofa? What about a new car? In February we were looking at used vehicles. As I looked I became convicted and had to leave the dealership. In my heart I was questioning why I thought it would be okay to spend that much money on a car and not on a child. Not that I didn’t need a newer vehicle. My van was running smoothly on 127,000 miles! But God wouldn’t allow me to be content with a car. Late in February of 2001, I was walking to my classroom at the end of the day. God simply spoke to my heart and said, “If you don’t go get her, you will never know.” I had spent the past two months thinking about this little girl that I could barely pronounce her name. I had ached for her as I taught my own class of 7-year-olds, knowing that she was around their age. I would imagine her sitting in a desk in my classroom. I grabbed my podium that chilly February evening and surrendered to God’s calling to adopt her. When I got home, the first thing I did was call Wasatch International Adoption agency. They were the agency that would process our adoption. I spoke with Kathy Junk. I remember how our conversation began…”I feel this is a little silly. I already have 3 beautiful, loving children. Yet, I can’t get my mind off one of your children. I feel it is the silliest thing but I feel God leading me to find out about her.” Kathy lovingly shared with me that I was not silly at all. As a matter of fact, she shared that she too had biological children, 5, and that she had just returned from Bulgaria herself bringing home her son whom she had adopted. We were kindred spirits! I must have talked to Kathy for a couple of hours. I found out that Tzvetelina had been on hold by another family but had just recently become available again for adoption. Of course! God was holding her for us until I would willingly surrender to His will. We quickly began the process of wading through the mountains of paperwork. I was overwhelmed. John told me to think of the process as eating an elephant. You would only consume one bite at a time. So, each day I set one goal…either one phone call, one set of fingerprints, or one piece of paper. As God would have it, the money I had saved for our Disney trip was just enough to begin the process of our adoption. Two months into our paperwork process, we planned our first trip to Bulgaria during our school’s spring break. I have to admit I was very nervous. As we landed in Sofia, I was too exhausted to be worried. After a good night’s rest we made our way by van to the little town where the orphanage was located. I bargained with God on the way. In my nervousness I was asking myself, “What in the world am I doing here?” I told him that if I did not feel 100% certain about this when I met her, then I would have to break her heart, lose the money we had invested, and go home. A few minutes later in the van He put my racing mind at ease. Our attorney handed us a video of my future daughter. She stated her dream would be to be adopted and to live in America! God was working on me again! As we pulled down the dusty road of the orphanage, I saw row after row of dirty children, big and little, lined up waiting for us. Then, amongst the crowd I spotted her. I will always remember the first time I laid eyes on her. She was wearing a dirty Disney sweatshirt! God does have a sense of humor!! I said to John, “There she is!” His reply was, “How do you know?” I simply said, “A mother always knows her children!” After a brief translation, she reluctantly came to us. The experience of seeing and holding her for the very first time is so paralleled to the moment I gave birth to the other 3 children. My heart was immediately so full of love and joy for her. I was now her mother! We spent the next 5 days getting to know our future daughter. We shopped together, ate together, played soccer together, laughed, and cried together. I will never forget the night our translator told her we were leaving the next day. Her shoulders drooped, and my tears flowed. It was the worst moment of my life up until that time other than the day I buried my beloved grandfather. I was shocked by my grief. I knew when I had gone to Bulgaria that I would have to leave her. I was going home to 3 other children whom I loved dearly. I never knew I could love her so much. The moment I saw her standing there in that Disney shirt and held her for the first time was her birth to me. Now, I would turn around and walk away and leave my baby behind. My heart was ripped!! I would like to say things went smoothly from the moment we got back into the United States. John was overcome with love for her as well and immediately dug in his heels and helped get the paperwork finished up. We mailed our dossier to Bulgaria on June 18, 2001. We left that day for a week on the beach. We needed that time to reflect on our future and look at pictures and reminisce. It would be the last moments of peace we would feel until over a year later. As we waited at home, we began to realize things were not as they seemed. Our paperwork was going nowhere, and we were no longer hearing from our Bulgarian attorney. Wasatch was wonderful during this time. There was never a moment that Kathy Junk or the director, Kathy Kaiser, did not return our calls. They were a gift from God! They endured my yelling at them on the phone and over emails with patience and sympathy as they tried to resolve our case. Back home, others questioned our decision. Some said, “Maybe this is God’s way of telling you it isn’t meant to be.” My thought was, “When does God ever guarantee that following after Him and being obedient to His calling will be easy?” There were members of our own family who told us we were being scammed. After all, as the months ticked on our daughter whom we now called Abby was approaching her 10th birthday. Her childhood was fast slipping away. John debated on getting on a plane and going over to Bulgaria himself to try to resolve the matter when our answer came to us. The lovely lady who had acted as our interpreter in Bulgaria had just finished up her law degree. We had fallen in love with her while in Bulgaria. She was very understanding and compassionate. Through correspondence with her and Wasatch she became willing to take on our case and finish it up. In March of 2002, we reassembled our dossier and resent it to Nina with Wasatch’s blessing. Nina began the process of translation and resubmitting our dossier. She was never too optimistic and always honest. She told us it could be a lengthy process. We were willing to “cross Hell or high water to bring our daughter home.” While I waited for Abby to come home, I read all I could find on adoption, particularly older child adoptions. I will admit there is nothing really positive out there on adopting older children. I think that is my motivation for sharing our story. I will say we went into this with eyes wide open expecting the worst! Finally, we were allowed to return to Bulgaria to pick up our daughter in September of 2002. Words cannot describe the emotions I felt. Honestly, as I write I cannot even remember landing in Sofia. I truly was dreaming! Abby certainly had grown. She was no longer a little girl. She was quickly becoming a pre-teen. I didn’t care. Upon picking her up from her director, I went into a restroom and changed her clothes and put a pink bow in her hair. I remember asking her if it was okay to put her dirty clothes and shoes with no soles hardly on the bottom of them in the trashcan. She simply said, “Okay.” She walked out of that restroom that day a new girl with a new family and a new lease on life. I would like to lie and say it has been “Okay” since that
day. She began testing us the night before we were to come home. All
of a sudden this sweet, obedient child would not do a thing I asked her
to do. I think it took me an hour and a half to get her dressed for bed
that night. I was thankful I had read all those books! The fact that we were seasoned parents and John and I are both “on the same page” when it comes to discipline was definitely a plus in this adoption. I would even say I feel it is almost necessary when adopting an older child. When she would try to trick me or lie to me, I would point my finger in her face and say, “I have been a Mommy for a long time. You cannot fool me.” She quickly learned that we were in charge! Adopting Abby has been the most rewarding experience of our lifetimes. I will say that her wait was the most challenging, yet as we live our lives day by day with her now we are allowed to see the hand of God on us and her and His glory is displayed in the beautiful person she is becoming. Because she was older when she joined our family, she remembers where she came from. She knows what her destiny was. She knows and shares with us all that we mean to her. We are able to talk about her birth family and her life with them. She is working on overcoming her bitterness over her abandonment and learning to appreciate the woman who gave birth to her and then released her so that someday we would be blessed to call her our own. Her sense of humor and her work ethic are incredible. She has taught our other 3 children by her willingness to be a helper. They have been rebuked by her attitude as I reminded them that she has a heart to help her Mommy because she waited so long to have a real Mommy. As Abby put it a few weeks ago, “In Bulgaria, you no work, you no eat!” Our whole country could learn by that philosophy! For the first 3 months of Abby’s life in America, we went nowhere with her but church and school. We wanted to show her what was truly important in life…God, family and an education. Thankfully, she embraced our plan. As we approach our one-year anniversary of her homecoming, I reflect on how we have all grown. My children have been stretched to give and love even if it isn’t being returned to you at the moment. They have learned first hand that love is long-suffering. They are learning to not be selfish. They have found there is more to living than just “me, myself, and I”. It is showing in other areas of their lives. Adopting Abby was like holding a mirror up to our family. Through the long process of waiting and our transition period, we saw who we really were. Some of it was good. Some of it needed fixing. Our three biological children learned that if they are held up as an example to others, then they had better be that example. I learned that when I think my patience has ran out God gives me more. If we follow our dreams and God’s calling, the blessings will be more than we could ever imagine and measure here on this earth. Abby’s Mommy, Denise Turner |
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