The Gift of a Mother

This evening, I attended our Stake Leadership Training Meeting. They had two visitors speak to us. One was a lady that told us the story of her adoption in 1968. She is the stake liaison between the stake and LDS Family Services. We now have an office on the west side of town--used to have to travel to Mesa. We then listened to a fairly new (to the valley, anyway) adoption worker, Hannah Rawhouser. I wonder at her last name--never heard it before. She is from Georgia, or at least came here from Georgia. She is a little bit of a woman, reminded me of a couple of my daughters. She spoke about adoption and quoted the prophet, that every child should have a chance to have a mother and a father, and how if we follow the prophet, everything else just falls into place. On a side note, she explained that years ago when children were orphans in New York state, there were so many of them, that they put the children on trains headed west and put them on a platform at each station the train came to, and offered them for adoption, hence the term, "Put up for Adoption". She hates that term, as none of the babies are put up, put away, etc. She also spoke of girls that found themselves pregnant, were "sent off to school" for nine months, knocked out, gave birth, didn't know even what the child was, sent home and told never to mention it again. None of the birth mothers she works with really want to give their child away, they want to keep them, but the ones that do chose adoption are giving a gift of love to a family that can't have a child of their own.

She gave first hand examples of what happens: told of a mother that was going to keep her baby, told when the baby was due, the parents were going to marry, and the father was taking the discussions and had a baptismal date set. She told of several cases where the girls kept the babies, and spoke of the hindrance of grandmothers in the process, or people offering advice when they weren't even actually involved in helping the mother, etc. She spoke of her favorite birth mother to date. She was still in Georgia, and a pregnant black woman contacted her for information. She had HIV, along with other serious health problems. The baby's father also had HIV. She was seeking to adopt the child. Hannah had two families willing to take a child with such a risky health history of the mother. She told the birth mother if she wasn't serious, she didn't want to contact the family as six months before, they had been promised a little baby, got involved with the birth mother, was there at the birth, and the mother decided to keep the baby. She said they grieved, just as if their baby had died it was so hard on them. The birth mother said she was "for real" and to contact the family. Hannah got tears in her eyes as she spoke of attending the birth mother's funeral six months later, along with the adoptive mother and father. She said they were the only white people there with ALL of these many, many black people. She said the family just took them all in and loved them. She said the birth family just loved the adoptive family and vice versa. That little baby was going to have grandmas and great grandmas and all kinds of family to love and support her, and they embraced the white adoptive family as if they were their own kin. The little baby's middle name is Hannah, by the way. I just had to write about it, as it just touched me to my soul. The little baby did not have HIV by the way, and will hopefully live a long and happy gospel centered life in a home with loving parents. While Hannah spoke, I had this heavenly vision of that eternal family, black interspersed with white, white hugging black, color fading and not an issue; and all part of Heavenly Father's plan.