|  A CHILD OF THEIR OWN
The adoption process may be
emotionally and financially
stressful,
but the rewards last a lifetime
By JASMINA WELLINGHOFF
Photography LIZ GARZA-WILLIAMS
Adoption is certainly not a new
thing, but like everything else in
our society, it has undergone
changes in the last couple of
decades. Babies are no longer adopted
under an ironclad cloak of secrecy, international
placements are common, and singles
have joined the ranks of adoptive parents.
Below are the heartwarming stories
of four families who found happiness
through adoption, each in its own way.
DETERMINED TO BE A MOM
When you walk into Michael and
Debbie Leal’s house in northwest San Antonio, you know right away that a child
reigns over this household. Toys have pretty
much invaded the living room, and
there’s also a separate playroom complete
with a wide train track and a child-size
engine to ride on. All that belongs to the
Leals’ 2-year-old adopted daughter, Sarah,
who on this particular day is eager to tell
her visitor that “Sea World is closed
today” and that she’s not happy about it.
Not all words come out perfectly clear, but
for her age, she is expressing herself
remarkably well.
Her parents are understandably
proud. Sarah has
not only changed their
lives, but she has quite simply
become the center of it. “I needed to be a mom
somehow,” says Debbie,
40, an information systems
analyst at USAA. “I was
determined about that.”
Like many couples today, the newlywed
Leals let a few years pass before they
started thinking about starting a family.
When they did, they were surprised to discover
that nature was not exactly cooperating.
They subsequently sought help from
infertility specialists and underwent treatments,
including artificial insemination,
with little success.
“The next thing to try was in vitro fertilization,
but that’s an expensive procedure
that still might not have worked,”
explains Debbie. “I was already 35 or 36,
and Mike is eight years older. That’s
when I first asked Mike if he would consider
adoption.”
He wouldn’t at the time, but soon
came around because he saw how much
his wife yearned for motherhood. Though
they visited an orphanage south of the
border, the couple essentially “sat on it”
for another year before calling Adoption
Affiliates (AA), an agency they had already
checked out a year earlier. Before long,
they found themselves in a seminar with
other prospective parents, listening to
birth mothers and adoptive parents talk
about their experiences. Still a bit “leery”
about the whole thing, Michael was eventually
convinced by the testimony of two
couples who had also undergone several
failed inseminations and told the group
that adoption was “the more sure thing.”
“After the meeting, I started to think
that this was indeed the opportunity we
were looking for,” says Michael, a math
teacher. The Leals chose AA partly because
it specializes in domestic adoption of
infants and partly because “they seemed
so nice and supportive.”
Foreign adoption never crossed their
minds, says Debbie. The couple submitted
their formal application package, which
included a sort of scrapbook about themselves,
describing their family in words and
pictures. Such books are shown to birth
mothers, who get to choose their babies’
adoptive homes.
And then came the waiting. “We tried
not to bug Janus (from the agency) for a
while, but it was hard,” says Debbie. After
one false start, the agency finally called 12
months later to inform them that a 22-
year-old woman who was about to deliver
in Austin had picked them from among all
others. The moment they had been anticipating
for so long had arrived! Debbie met
the birth mother only once. As it turned
out, she had other children with her
boyfriend and felt she could not take care
of yet another one.
Following the birth, the infant spent 30
days with a temporary foster mother until
legal proceedings for termination of
parental rights were completed. When little
Sarah finally made it to her new home,
Debbie couldn’t quite believe that she was
actually hers to keep. “I would look at her
in the crib and go ‘Are you sure she’s
mine?’” she recalls. “But after about a
week, I relaxed. OK, she is mine!”
Still, another six months had to pass
before the legal adoption process could be
finalized. (See box). During that period,
their household was investigated by a
social worker, and they had to file reports
every time they took Sarah to the doctor.
Today, the little girl, who is of Hispanic
parentage, like Mike and Debbie, is
looked after by her grandparents while
Mom and Dad are at work. Her framed
pictures alone and with various family
members adorn the walls of the Leals’
house. As the only child in their extended
family, Sarah is hardly lacking attention.
Even during our visit, the moment she
started whimpering, Michael left the conversation
to play with her on the floor.
Despite the initial contact with the birth
mother, the family no longer communicates
with her beyond sending periodic
pictures through AA. She looks at them
but returns them. So, essentially, theirs is a
closed adoption of the more traditional
kind, which clearly suits everyone involved.
The Leals had to tighten their belts for
a while to pay for AA’s $25,000 service fee— a high figure, to be sure — but what
people often don’t know, they say, is that
this amount includes
expenses agencies incur in
providing counseling as
well as medical and sometimes
housing needs for
birth mothers during pregnancy,
in addition to legal
fees to free the child for
adoption.
But cost be damned!
Sarah is such a joy to them that the couple
is ready to embark on a second adoption
journey. Meanwhile, every day, they find
themselves looking forward to coming
home to spend time with her. “It’s the
greatest thing,” says Debbie.
 THE LEBANESE CONNECTION
When Maureen Arnow first enrolled
her adopted son in day care, the teacher
there made an offhand remark implying
that adoption was “the easy way to have
a kid.”
Oh no, it isn’t, thought Maureen.
Lady, you don’t know what you are
talking about!
Like the Leals, Maureen and her husband,
Tom, did not immediately rush to
have kids after they were married. Life was
busy, and on top of that, Tom had a philosophical
objection to bringing a child into“this violent, ugly world.” By the time
Maureen’s maternal drive had overcome
all other considerations, her biological
clock was unfortunately winding down.
Again, like the Leals, they spent several
years in infertility treatment before considering
adoption. But unlike the Leals, they
chose to get a child from abroad through
private channels.
“We knew we were on the edge of
being too old to go through an adoption
agency (which often rules that parents
must be under 45), so we looked into
other possibilities,” says Maureen, a nurse.
Both she and Tom, a computer engineer,
were over 40 at the time.
Then it took another year or so of
uncertainty, hope, overseas travel and
thousands of dollars before a baby was
placed in their arms. The first hopeful attempt did not pan out when the birth
mother decided to keep her child. But
then, through her doctor, Maureen heard
that the pastor of the St. George Maronite
Catholic Church had announced during a
service that there would be a baby available
for adoption in Lebanon. The pastor
himself was Lebanese-born and had
learned of the baby-to-be-born from the
church’s archbishop in Beirut.
The Arnows rushed to submit their
application, complete with a home study
and all the relevant documents.
While they waited
for the church to approve
their request, the couple
also petitioned the
Immigration and
Naturalization Service to
permit them to bring their
future son into the United
States. It was a learn-asyou-
go experience with a little guidance
from two other couples who had followed
a similar route. The most nerveracking
part, though, was dealing with
the INS bureaucracy.
“After months of waiting, we finally
received a picture of the baby,” says
Maureen, handing us the said photo of a
newborn wrapped in “swaddling
clothes.” “My mother took one look at it
and said, ’You must feed him!’ The picture
made it all the more real. Up to that
point, it just seemed like a big fight with
the U.S. government.”
A month or so later, the Arnows flew
to Cyprus to meet their future son. But
again, it wasn’t smooth sailing. Hotel
expenses mounted as weeks went by
without word from the Lebanese orphanage.
When Tom contacted a priest in
Beirut, the man told him to go back to
America. Upset, they placed frantic calls to
a Lebanese San Antonian who had helped
them with the initial contact. It eventually
transpired that in order to protect the birth
mother’s identity, the nuns who ran the
orphanage claimed to have “found” an
abandoned infant, a situation that
required a police report. Because there
was none, the boy’s trip was delayed.
One day, the long-expected call came,
and suddenly they were face to face with
a nun holding a baby. In the red passport
issued by Lebanon, the child’s assumed
name was Georges Hanna Luca. He was
four months old.
Today, the Arnows’ teenage son is a
lanky, good-looking youth, a freshman at
Central Catholic High School. He has been
renamed David and brought up with a lot
of love. He has also been brought up in a
faith different from his parents’. As a condition
of adoption, Father Abdullah, the
former pastor of St. George, made the
Arnows promise that they would rear the
child in the Maronite Catholic tradition.
Even though nothing to that effect was
signed, Tom and Maureen have kept their
word. Maureen was raised a Presbyterian,
while Tom describes himself as “half-
Jewish, half-Baptist.”
“I felt that as long as we raised him
with moral principles, in whichever
church, he could later make up his own
mind about such things,” explains
Maureen. “We went to his church with
him, but we kept a certain distance.
Nevertheless, we have supported the
educational programs there in many
ways. Now that he is older, David goes to
church with a friend’s family.”
But mother and son occasionally find
themselves on opposite sides of certain
issues, such as birth control, for instance.
One time David even told his mom that
her religion “is not Christian.” And a few
close friends of the family were upset
about the arrangement, which they felt
was unfair to the parents. Tom and
Maureen, however, worried more about
David’s school behavior. While academically
gifted, he was diagnosed with
attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder
and has had his share of run-ins with
unhappy teachers and principals. “He
liked being the class clown,” says
Maureen, “and he had trouble keeping
his mouth shut in class.”
Asked about his interest in his native
country, David is a little vague, saying he
wanted to go visit, but Mom and Dad
wouldn’t let him. The parents explain that
this was during last summer’s war
between Israel and Hezbollah, not a good
time to wander around as a tourist. But
the family as a whole has developed an
emotional connection to the Near Eastern
country that at one time was one of the
most prosperous and pleasant places in
that part of the world. The Israel-
Hezbollah war that victimized the
Lebanese civilian population was quite
upsetting to them.
One thing that continues to worry the
Arnows is that they don’t have David’s biological
family’s medical records. So far he’s
been healthy, however, not counting allergies
that the entire family suffers from.“And he is more affectionate
than we are. He would
say to me, ‘I could use a
hug now,’” says Maureen
with a laugh.
 FROM RUSSIA
WITH LOVE
Love brought Olga
Prochazka to San Antonio,
but a different kind of love propelled her
more than a decade later to go to Russia
in search of a child.
The Czech-born Prochazka grew up in
Canada and later moved to the United
States, where she graduated from college
and eventually got a job with Bausch &
Lomb in Rochester, N.Y. In one of those
odd serendipities of life, she was sent at
one point to visit the company’s San
Antonio branch, where she met and fell in
love with a fellow employee. It was
goodbye Northeast and hello Alamo City,
for soon she was a married woman enjoying
the warmth of South Texas.
Unfortunately, she eventually discovered
that her husband, already the father of a
couple of youngsters, had no interest in
additional offspring.
“That’s one of the reasons we divorced
five years later,” says the vivacious blonde,
who could easily be mistaken for a
Russian. “I stayed in San Antonio, but I just
never found the right man to have children
with.”
So, a few years later, she started exploring
the adoption process. As a single
woman, Prochazka thought it would be
easier for her to get a child from abroad,
since local agencies “are really biased
against singles.” Working with the nonprofit
International Family Services (IFS) that
has offices in several states, she set her
sights on Russia. On its Web site, IFS does
its best to warn people about the “emotional
roller coaster” that foreign adoptions
can be, but that did not deter Prochazka.
She filled out and notarized 70 different
documents and waited — not always
patiently — a year and a half before she
became a mom. Among the required papers were medical reports, proof of
income, pictures of her house and friends’
testimonials about her character and
lifestyle. “It seemed endless,” she admits.
For her part, Prochazka made only
one request — that the child be healthy.
Eventually, short videos of available kids
started arriving in the mail, but each
child had obvious developmental problems.
She had everyone evaluated by a
U.S. doctor, using the video and the
sketchy health records sent from Russia.
Just as she was getting a bit discouraged,
the eighth video arrived, featuring
a little girl named Zukhra.
“She looked OK, she was walking and
running. So, I said, this must be it. I sent
the video to my parents, and they liked
her, too,” recalls Prochazka.
Of mixed Russian and Uzbek parentage,
the 2-year-old Eurasian girl lived in
an orphanage in the southern Russian
city of Astrakhan on the Volga River. Full
of expectations, Prochazka set out for
Russia. She now refers to this trip, as well
as a second one a few months later, as“an adventure,” her tone implying quotation
marks around the word. But it is
certainly an experience she will never forget.
To begin with, the Moscow hotel
where she spent a night looked like“Adoption Central,” crowded as it was
with Americans who had come to meet
their prospective kids. An overnight stay
in the capital was required by the Russian
agency even though it was never
explained why. Once in Astrakhan, she
was in for a few surprises.
“They don’t really tell you the truth
about the child before you get there.
The documents said that she could talk
and sing – not exactly true. She wasn’t
even toilet-trained,” says Prochazka,
still a bit angry about this lack of honesty.“Then I met with the doctor, who
gave me her medical history that she
summarized in a single page while I saw
her read from a thick book that she
wouldn’t let me have. Back at the hotel,
I called the doctor in the United States.
I was a bit hysterical, I have to say. Then
the next day I got to meet Zuki. She was
very shy, and she couldn’t talk much but
otherwise seemed fine. She was the
cutest little thing, all eyelashes. I was
very torn. After seven days, I said I
would come for a second visit. I left it all
to God after that. If it’s meant to happen,
it’s meant to happen.”
And sure enough, a couple of
months later, she was back in Russia to
collect Zuki, whom she later officially
named Olga Mia Zukhra. The “adventure”
cost her close to $25,000, including
hotels, supplies, gifts and various
fees. Luckily, she was also able to deduct
$10,000 from her taxes that year. While
delighted to have her daughter,
Prochazka is critical of the way the
Russian agency handled things. Gifts for
the orphanage were expected both
times, and there were expenses every
step of the way, some of them totally
arbitrary, in her opinion. When she hesitated
to offer gifts the second time
around, her paperwork was delayed
until she caved in. Complaining to the
American agency would not have done
any good because, she explains, “it’s a
seller’s market. There are so many people
who want these children. The agency here is totally dependent on its
Russian counterpart.”
Yet she found ordinary Russians very
kind, especially to a woman with a child.
On the way back through Moscow, they
were surprised by chilly weather, so
Prochazka took off her own jacket to wrap
the toddler. People stopped to help her
with the luggage and offered her their
own coats. And unlike the Arnows some
12 years earlier, she encountered only
cooperative representatives of the U.S.
government. The embassy in Moscow
promptly issued all the necessary documents
for Zuki to get her American citizenship
upon her arrival on U.S. soil.
Now all of that is behind them, both
the good and the bad. “Zuki is a fighter,
she has a strong constitution,” says the
proud mom, “but she is still speech
delayed at 5. Next week I am taking her to
a developmental pediatrician to be better
evaluated. I had to wait nine months to
get an appointment with this doctor.
There are so few in San Antonio. Though
she can say simple sentences, she gets
frustrated because she can’t quite communicate.
But it’s getting better.”
Gregarious and cheerful, Zuki is popular
among her peers in kindergarten,
where she gets a little assist from the special
ed people. She loves movies and swimming,
says Mom.
On a recent vacation to Minneapolis,
where mother and daughter visited the
Minnesota State Fair and attended a taping
of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home
Companion, they snuggled up one night
to watch a movie together. Little Zuki
looked to her mother and chirped, “I love
you, Mommy!”
Prochazka laughs in retelling this little
anecdote, but rare is the parent whose
heart doesn’t melt upon hearing such
words. Hers certainly did.
“I am truly blessed,” she adds, summing
up her experience.
OPEN AND FRIENDLY
Sharon Loree also considers herself
blessed. She and her husband, Robert,
knew from the day they married that
children would be a blessing to them,“however they came.” But because
Robert had had testicular cancer as a
young man, they also knew that realizing
their parental dreams would be more
challenging for them than for the average
couple. Like others interviewed for
this article, they first tried artificial insemination— in this case with Robert’s
frozen sperm — but when that failed,
other options had to be considered.
Out of the blue, while she was still pondering
these options, a friend called one
day to ask her to lunch. He wanted to
know if she would be willing to adopt his
niece’s soon-to-be-born baby. Her
response was prompt: “Oh, yes!” The girl
was staying at the Methodist Mission
Home while awaiting delivery, and a meeting
was soon arranged.
“She liked us, and I started taking
Lamaze classes with her,” recalls Sharon, a
svelte blonde, who until recently worked
in marketing. “We even had a baby shower.
But it turned out in the end that she
wasn’t ready to give up her baby. It broke
my heart . . . she felt guilty about changing
her mind, so she found another mother
and baby for us, another girl she had
met at the home. Both girls had come for
a slumber party at our house while pregnant,
and we took them out to dinner.
Both were comfortable with us. Frankly, I
was ready to adopt both babies.”
That other girl was Misty, a 20-year-old
from McAllen who already had a son by
her then boyfriend but was still living with
her parents. While Sharon was ordering a
cookie bouquet for the new mom in San
Antonio, an emergency call came through,
informing her that Misty had gone into
labor in McAllen seven weeks prematurely.
It was all a bit surreal for Sharon, who
after a good cry caught a plane to the
Valley that same day. The newborn, to be
named Trevis, was in ICU, where he would
eventually spend 17 days. Sharon spent
her days in the hospital as well, watching
the infant and changing his diapers when
needed. The situation took an unexpected
turn, however, when Misty’s mother became emotional about letting the baby
go, suggesting that she would be willing
to rear him. That was hard on the Lorees.
“He was already my child in my mind.
I had already named him,” says Sharon.“My husband, too, had already established
a bond with him. The most touching
moment for me was when Bob
looked inside the incubator, and his eyes
welled up and he looked at me and said,‘My son!’”
Indeed he was. A few weeks later,
Sharon flew back home with the still tiny
infant, who officially became Trevis Robert
Loree less than two months later.
(Normally, a six-month period must pass
before an adoption is finalized.) Still, the
parting wasn’t easy for Misty, who
promised not to interfere with the adoptive
parents if she could somehow stay in
her son’s life. Thus was born an open,
friendly relationship between the two families
that to this day includes visits back and
forth, pictures and e-mails, as well as a lot
of generous help that over the years the
Lorees have given Misty and her family.
As Misty married and had other kids,
the visits grew less frequent, but she still
stays with the Lorees when she comes to
San Antonio. Sharon produces photo
albums full of pictures of Trevis’ biological
relatives and printouts of e-mails she’s
recently exchanged with Misty. “We are
still very close, but there have been times
when I wished it hadn’t been that close,”
she admits. “There have been trials and
tribulations along the way The problem
was that she wanted me to fix her life’s
problems. Well, I love her and I tried to
help, but she kept getting into messes.
She has a job now, and things are better.”
As for Trevis, now 14, he thinks of the
Lorees — and the Lorees’ younger son,
Kendall — as his family and of Misty’s
clan as friends. However, he is close to
his older full brother, who frequently
comes to visit. Ever the generous souls,
the Lorees have promised to pay for the
older boy’s college education, too. They
also continue to send Christmas presents
to Misty’s other children.
A high school freshman, Trevis shares
with his lawyer dad a passion for golf and
is, in fact, “a phenomenal golfer” himself.
The family often travels with him to the
various tournaments he plays in. Kendall,
on the other hand, prefers fishing, so
Mom has bought a little boat to go fishing
with him while the other two golf. But
when both kids returned home from
school the day of our visit, they chatted a
bit with us, then plunked themselves on
the living room couch to watch TV — a
familiar domestic scene. Though their
mother describes them as temperamentally
quite different, at this moment they are
a picture of brotherly harmony.
Does he consider himself lucky to have
been adopted? we ask Trevis. “Very! I am
one of the luckiest boys in the world to
have been adopted into this family,” he
replies seriously.
THE ADOPTION PROCESS
If you are thinking about adopting a
child, you can choose to go through an
adoption agency or make private arrangements
with someone who wants to place
her child for adoption. The main advantage
of the former is that an agency will
help locate an available child for you. In
either case you will need an attorney.
“You need a lawyer because you have
to file a lawsuit in district court,” says
attorney Margaret Priesmeyer-Masinter,
who handles adoption cases as part of
her family law practice. “There are
essentially two parts to it: the termination
of parental rights of the birth parents
and the application for adoption by
the adoptive parents.”
Birth parents must sign Affidavits for
Voluntary Relinquishment of Parental
Rights and provide a medical history, but
it’s up to you as the adoptive parent to
file the petition for the termination of
rights. A judge approves the final Order
of Termination. If you are working with
an agency, this step is often handled by
its staff and included in the overall cost
charged to the adoptive family.
For the second part, however, you
need to retain a lawyer whether you are
working through an agency or not. At
that point, the adoptive parents are designated
as conservators of the child, who
is transferred to their home for a period
of six months before the process can be
finalized. During that time a social worker
will conduct “a social study” — also
known as “a home study” — to make
sure that the environment is safe and
healthy for the child.
Prospective parents must fulfill a
plethora of other requirements, as well.
But that’s where the law and the agencies
differ somewhat. For instance,
legally, any adult can adopt, regardless
of age. Agencies, however, usually
have age limits that make it harder for
older people to fulfill their parental
dreams. “Birth mothers select older
couples less often,” explains Janus
Couve, the executive director of
Adoption Affiliates (AA), a respected
nonprofit agency that specializes in the
domestic adoption of infants.
Furthermore, an agency such as
Couve’s may have additional requirements
beyond the medical and criminal
history reports demanded by the law. AA
expects prospective parents to participate
in educational sessions, for example,
and to compile a booklet about
themselves — complete with photos —
that the birth mothers can peruse before
they choose the family they would like
their baby to go to.
Most adoptions today are at least
somewhat “open,” says Couve, meaning
the birth and adoptive parents know
of each other and often meet at least a
few times.
Interstate adoptions, special circumstances
or contested cases are more
complicated, says Priesmeyer-Masinter,
and usually call for additional legal measures.
If everything checks out, the
lawyer will file the final papers for a
court hearing.
“I like to do adoptions,” says
Priesmeyer-Masinter. “Most are happy
occasions when everyone, including the
judge, is excited and smiling.”
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