couples start off wanting. Private agencies charge fees just to let parents know such an infant has become available. (When anyone contracted with a state agency or working for DSS does so and gets caught, that’s a different matter.)
Hutton’s mom, a teacher, and dad, a lab technician, jumped to the head of a queue because money changed hands. This fast track is not open to everyone in Coalton. Would-be parents in Coalton who can find a way to be first when a baby is up for immediate adoption will do so; often this involves personal connections rather than money, as was the case in the story that opens this chapter. Those who can’t get to the top of the list by using these means can do so by fostering, while praying for adoption to become a quick option.
Hutton’s delighted parents conceived four years later, presenting him with a little brother. The boys grew up on the outskirts of the city where Hutton’s mom graduated from university, surrounded by brick houses and professional families who knew Hutton was adopted. Did that affect the family dynamic, internally or in the minds of the community? Hutton considers the question carefully before answering.
“Not the community, no. I mean, our church, our neighbors, everybody knew I was adopted. We lived in the suburbs, so it was no big deal. There were several other kids around me who were adopted. I wasn’t some anomaly challenging the social order, so to speak.”
Internal to the family, it wasn’t so much that being adopted didn’t make a difference as that the brothers didn’t care that it did, or allow it to. Dad was Dad. Mom found it harder not to favor the bio brother, but now that the boys are fathers to their own families, “We laugh about it when it’s just us. Yes, there’s a difference; we just don’t care that there’s a difference.”
As Hutton comments about growing up in the suburbs, he nods to his wife, Kim, who is sitting next to him in the bookstore while he tells his story. Kim is also adopted, but her childhood spent growing up in a back hollow of Coalton was very different from Hutton’s—and the next chapter in the larger story of adoptions in Coalfields Appalachia.
2
A Different Kind of Love Than I Wanted
Deep down, part of me always wanted to adopt. Watching my son grow up alone because we couldn’t have any more, it crossed my mind a lot. One day my wife said, “A friend is looking for someone to adopt her grandbaby because her son is in prison for fifteen years and the baby’s mom doesn’t want him at all.”
In my mind were fears like: Oh, they will get our hopes up and then change their minds, and there will be nothing but trouble the whole eighteen years from the biological parents, and I guess there’s no such scenario as a normal couple just wanting to give up a baby from an accidental pregnancy.
But word came that the dad wanted us to have this baby because he couldn’t take care of it, and the mom was a wild child living the fast life. She used drugs, and she just didn’t want the baby. It was Super Bowl night when we got a call that said she was going into labor. We threw a few clothes together and hit the road. I got to hold him soon after he was born. He was screaming his head off—little did I know that would be a way of life—but what I most remember was how bright pink he was. I thought, “The pink panther!”
I was so excited to hold him but still really cautious of getting attached for fear of the mom changing her mind. She actually was holding him and feeding him quite often. I remember seeing that and thinking, I knew this was too good to be true! She is going to change her mind!
But she didn’t, thankfully. I had a lawyer there with the legal papers. If we hadn’t been there, Social Services would have taken him due to the drugs. When our son was born, they found in her system THC (which is Pot), Meth, Cocaine, and LSD. And that’s how I got my son.
—adoption dad
THE ROAD from fostering to adoption can be an arduous journey. It’s not surprising that some find the yo-yo activity of courtroom appearances and parental-rights visits excruciating and hunt for ways around it, as Hutton’s parents did. Others have that decision thrust upon them.
While Coalton isn’t big on expensive private adoptions, it has a fast-track equivalent often found in rural areas: the hand-picked mom.1 These private-but-mostly-unpaid transactions stem from parents who know they won’t be allowed (or don’t want) to keep their babies; often the birth mom or her mother will choose someone they know to raise the infant in question. Based on interviews, the most common reasons for a birth mom’s willingness to give up her child here in Coalton are substance abuse and illness—usually cancer. In third place comes Mom’s need to finish college, and behind that, her new boyfriend’s refusing to raise another man’s kid. Children caught in the crossfire of this last situation are more often of elementary-school age than infants.
Being singled out for such an honor-cum-responsibility as raising your blood relation’s child pretty much bypasses the state system’s fostering plan and goes straight to “adopt,” yet it is fraught with social peril. The new parents may wind up entangled in a long-term and ill-defined relationship with people they probably know well and see on weekends—at church or in the local elementary school, since these adoptions are often in rural communities. While moms seeking a good parent usually turn first to their own sisters, mothers, or mothers-in-law, they don’t have to. Mom may also not be the one pulling the decision strings.
Appropriate relatives asked to take the baby may be eligible for assistance under KinCare. This program goes under different names in different states, but it’s the DSS family-first plan. Extended family foster the child while Mom (or sometimes Dad) gets it together. During this time, the child is not eligible for adoption. If Mom doesn’t mention members of her extended family when her children are taken, social workers try to track them down. Relatives who wind up overlooked during that hunt are eligible to bring litigation when termination of rights comes up, so it’s in the best interest of the state to find them if Mom doesn’t offer names.
One of the reasons that handpicked adoptions can get messy is their degree of informality. Another is how much harder it becomes to push a birth mom away or curtail her rights by court order when she’s the one who gave you the child. Coalton is a region fueled by a dying coal industry and a thriving kinship system, a place where at least some of the extended family are likely to live in the same vicinity. Coal isn’t king here; family is. A judge may say it’s okay for you not to let the bio mom see her child once she’s signed him over to you, but the community never will. And if the community includes her extended family, which it probably does, God help you when you bump into one of the home team at the gas station or grocery store, because they’re going to say something. Probably in a carrying tone of voice.
Hutton’s wife, Kim, was adopted by her birth mother’s boyfriend’s sister. Birth mother Kristin moved in with a guy—call him Jim—who didn’t want another man’s kids. Kristin “gave” her oldest daughter, Janice, to her grandmother and three-year-old Kim to Jim’s sister, Annette. (Annette and her husband would have taken Janice as well, but she had a different dad, and he wouldn’t let anyone but his former wife’s mother have her.) Kim’s dad was nowhere to be found, so boyfriend Jim signed the termination papers as her bio father. Which probably made the whole adoption illegal, but who was watching?
Appalachian kinship systems are complex, but Kim’s adoption staggered even the clan within which it happened; the whole extended family on both sides lived within twenty miles of one another in a community sprawled across a back holler (the regional term for a mountain hollow, or cove). Kim and Janice even attended the same church as their birth mom for a while—until Kim grew old enough to ask questions. Kim grew up knowing that her sister lived nearby but
