Kelly:
Welcome and thank you for joining us on the Birth Mother Matters in Adoption podcast with Kelly Rourke, where we delve into the issues of adoption from every angle of the adoption triad. Kelly is the executive director, president, and co-founder of Building Arizona Families Adoption Agency in Phoenix, Arizona, the Donna K. Evans Foundation, and the You Before Me campaign. She has a bachelor’s degree in family studies and human development and a master’s degree in education with an emphasis in school counseling.

Kelly:
When you went to Arizona for the third time and this time it was successful, what emotions were you feeling? I mean, it had to be like every emotion imaginable.

Guest:
I remember I did get choked up at the airport gate asking to get on the plane. I was trying not to cry. I was like, “I think my baby’s being born, but I don’t know. Let’s just go find out.”

Guest:
I definitely ran down the airport in my socks and got immediately into the boarding line.

Guest:
I probably just spent the entire flight in prayer because, you know, I don’t know how anyone…

Speaker:
Adopting without a strong faith—it is such a leap of faith. Whether you believe in the Creator or not, it’s a leap of faith because you really don’t know anything, and it’s scary.

Kelly:
Do you think it was your faith that got both of you through up to the point of your daughter being born?

Speaker:
Oh, sure. Two disruptions. And I mean, some people stop after one because it’s just too emotional, too difficult. The fact that we went through two and continued to pursue the dream of adoption…

The book of Ephesians talks about how God has adopted us, and that passage comes so alive when you go through adoption. It also makes you realize how badly God wants everyone as His child. At that point, I was so desperate to be a mother. I was like, “I just want any baby. Give me a baby. Can I raise your baby?” I just wanted that so deeply. And suddenly those passages made such sense—the deep yearning, the desire to have a child.
That’s the only reason we could have kept going. There’s no way I could have continued without faith in it.

Kelly:
One statement—I’ve been doing this for over 20 years in the adoption world. Not to mention, I was adopted and I have adopted. But I’ve been working with families for 20 years. And the most classic line is…

Kelly:
You’re going to wind up with a baby that you are meant to have.

Speaker:
Oh, for sure.

Kelly:
You subscribe to that. I regularly tell people I have the child I would have given birth to.

Speaker:
You’re smirking over there, but you know it’s true.

Kelly:
She and I have the same personality. We are fighting our way through this life together now. If we can just stay on the same side, it works better. But yeah, she’s definitely the child I would have had. She’s hilarious.

Speaker:
One of the downsides of disruption is it can either put a lot of strain on someone’s marriage or it can actually bring you closer. How did you get it to bring you closer and not put strain on your marriage?

Kelly:
Well, it starts with Speaker and I are just best friends. We start out, we’re just friends. And then after that, we can talk about hard things if we need to. And we do. But we just keep on. It’s not an option for us. I guess the straight answer—it’s not an option for us. That’s always been our outlook on marriage: we will work through this, whatever it takes.

Speaker:
And it sounds like you both had a very strong marital foundation going into this.
Kelly:
Yes, I think so. I’ve had married couples come to me and say this is really taking a toll. Any advice that can be given—maybe like we maintained date nights once a week, or we stepped it up and did X or Y, you know what I mean, just to keep things going. Because it can be really hard. In a lot of ways, a disruption is like a death.

Speaker:
Yes, and that is incredibly hard on a marriage.

Kelly:
We’ve had friends that have gone through both miscarriage and disruption. We’re blessed. We have not had to do both. But they have said it is a very similar grieving process.

Speaker:
We just kept living.

Kelly:
You can’t put your life on hold in any part of that process. Maybe when you’re getting close to the due date—sure. But you just got to live. You can’t put anything on hold in that matter.

Speaker:
But it was a good time to, like I said, learn a new hobby, repaint rooms, clean out the house, and do all the things that a typical nesting woman would do.

Kelly:
So you’re at the hospital, you’re holding your daughter. Speaker shows up.

Speaker:
Yeah, she was born about 5:30 in the morning and I came in around 6 or 7 in the evening. So it was me and the baby hanging out for a bit.

Kelly:
I got the band. Carly said, “Don’t let the hospital hassle you. You have the band.” At one point, they said, “I don’t think we can let you alone with her.” And I said, “I have the other band. Yes, you can.” They said, “Well, we have to call somebody.” I said, “Then call them, because this baby is staying with me for right now.”

Speaker:
That was pre-COVID, so 2019.

Kelly:
Somewhere in the night, when I wasn’t sleeping well, some poor nice soul nurse said, “Would you like me to take this baby to the nursery so you can sleep?” And I said, “Yes, please.”

Speaker:
But then I started feeling like I was coming down with a cold. I said, “I’m not staying there with this baby right now because I don’t want to spread germs.”

Kelly:
So you got a little bit of practice with friends’ babies, I guess.

Speaker:
All the babies. I am a baby hog.

Kelly:
How did you do when it came down to holding yours for the first time? Did you feel totally comfortable or were you scared?

Speaker:
Oh, definitely nervous. It was a new experience. My experience with newborns was very limited.

Kelly:
He’s got a decent nephew too, but he had not been around a tiny baby.

Speaker:
When it was time for us to leave the hospital, I’ll never forget that day. I was just in disbelief that they were handing us this baby, and we were just… it was time to walk out the door with this baby.

Kelly:
He said, “Are they good with us leaving?” I said, “I got the band. They can’t stop me. I don’t know about you.”

Speaker:
It is a bizarre thing. Especially when you’re leaving with someone else’s child. It’s like, “We’re walking out with your baby. Hope you’re good with that.”

Kelly:
Okay, so you went home with the baby. Your family and friends found out you were now parents and you started settling into life as mom and dad.

Speaker:
That was the end of 2019.

Kelly:
As hard as 2019 was, 2020 didn’t faze me one bit. I was like, “Cool, I get to stay home and play with the baby.” I don’t know how I would have reacted to the pandemic prior to that, but 2019 was so bad I thought, “Nothing can top it.”

Speaker:
I didn’t know what to do with a newborn. That was a learning curve.

Kelly:
Then everything being closed was not helpful. But in the summer…

Speaker:
We got a message from her saying she was pregnant again.

Kelly:
That was July. I said, “Babe, you need to read this.”

Speaker:
By September, Carly popped up again.

Kelly:
We immediately said, “Yes, we would love to have the sibling,” even though we were not prepared to adopt again.

Speaker:
so quickly. So no hesitation at all, just jumping right back in onto the roller coaster. Right.

And this is something we had anticipated. We knew it was a very real possibility that there would be siblings, but we didn’t expect it that quickly. Not that quickly.

Kelly
Is this a full sibling?

Speaker:
As far as we know, yeah. Wow. Okay. And then, so we’re talking 14 months later—uh, baby number two was born, and we get out to Arizona unfortunately three weeks too early.

Yeah, that’s a whole other story—a whole other saga. Yeah, we were there three weeks before the baby was born.

There’s lots to do in Arizona, there’s—uh, yeah. But I had already done a lot of it, you know?

Okay, so on the fourth trip to Arizona, this time we all drove because we had a baby with us and we did not want to fly.

And I noticed she was having a bad attitude again. And I said, “Come on now.”

Kelly:

I said, “We’re in Phoenix again. This is the fourth time we’ve been in Phoenix in like two and a half years. It’s a long drive out there. I don’t like riding in the car.”

And I said, “No, come on. We have happy memories from Arizona now, too.”

Speaker:
And I said, “Yeah, we do. We do.”

We did. We took our firstborn to the zoo. We did all the things—waiting. And then they told us birth father is going to be in delivery.

And that took me by surprise.

Kelly:
Can we back up a little?

Kelly:
I didn’t know if you were going to get to this, but at one point during that three-week period—
in fact, the week before our second daughter was born—
I was fixing to fly home because I needed to work. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the birth mom basically went AWOL.

Speaker:
She disappeared.

Kelly:
And so for me, that was significant because it just brought back the memories of the first couple of disruptions.
And it was a long few days, a long week of not knowing what was going to happen. That was tough.

Speaker:
I was standing strong. I said, “No, this is normal. Everything’s fine. It’s okay. This happens. Sometimes they get a little out of communication.”

Kelly:
I was like, “Speaker, y’all need to find her.”
And they were like, “We will find her. It’ll be okay.”
But yeah, it did send us into a panic.

Speaker:
The main thing I kept saying was, “She’s not going to disrupt. You already have one of her children. She chose you on purpose. She chose you again.
It would cause a tremendous rift if she were to do something like that.”

Kelly:
Okay, yes, these are all logical things. But emotionally, it opened that can back up for us because now we’re again trapped in Arizona just waiting.

Speaker:
So the second time around—now we’re fully in the pandemic, January 2021—the hospital was locked down. You could only have one visitor.
They bent all the rules for me. I came in, the security guard, the nurses—they all knew I was coming.

Kelly:
I got to the security station, and he asked, “Who are you here to visit?” I said, “I’m the adoptive mom for—” and he stopped me and said, “Right, go.”
I was walking through the hospital—everybody knew who I was. I came into labor and delivery; it was very bizarre.

Speaker:
The hospital staff was very kind and loving. We did have to stay in the same room that time, so that was interesting again.
I had already been in the hospital all night with her once before, so I knew all the quirks that were going to happen.

Speaker 1:
To just be loving and supportive. I will say this. I wish someone had told me how you are supposed to interact with a birth mother in that scenario. I’m not naturally super friendly. It takes a lot of effort. So I didn’t know.

How do you talk to this woman? What do you talk about?

I’ve told other people, it’s kind of like going to meet a relative you’ve never met before. It’s like that long-lost cousin or uncle or aunt that you’ve never actually met. So you kind of have a relationship with them, but you kind of don’t. So it’s kind of awkward, but you’re trying to build a relationship with this person.

And of course, there’s a lot of insecurities on my part because I need this woman to like me. I need this woman not to disrupt on me.

Speaker 2:
During her second pregnancy with you, were you guys talking a lot during this time?

Speaker 1:
We talked a lot on the first one. I don’t remember. I don’t remember.

We do have a good story on the first time. The very first time we talked on the phone, you know, we had been told, “Listen, sound excited, sound happy.” They were warning me. It was really to me. They’re like, “Don’t sound sad.”

And I thought I had faked it really good on the phone, but I had not. And so when we got off the phone, she said to her social worker, “They didn’t sound like they were very excited.”

And so then the social worker had explained to her what we had been through. And bless her heart, she was so understanding and empathetic towards us about what we had been..

Speaker:
Through that, the next time we talked to her, she was like, “You don’t have to worry about that with me.” You know, she was very—she was trying to be reassuring to us, which in the grand scheme of it is silly. We should be reassuring her. We’re here for you.

So the second time in the hospital, I said to her, “I am so thankful and so blessed that you thought of us, that you wanted us, that you asked for us, that you trust us. I’m so, so glad that you asked us for this second precious baby.” I said, “But girl, I’m getting too close to 40. You can’t keep doing this to me!”

So that’s a good question—what happens if there’s another sibling? I am going to leave that in God’s hands.

Kelly:
Did you, now, when you were able to take the second baby home from the hospital or wherever you were staying, did you do a visit with her?

Speaker:
Yes, yes. We got to—oh, I got to meet so many family members. So the first time we were there, I got to meet her mother, one of her brothers, two of birth father’s sisters. They were so kind. They were so sweet.

And I asked them if I could take pictures with them and the baby, and they all were like, “Yes,” because we made a book of our daughter’s Arizona family. These are your Arizona family members so that we can show it to her when she understands, like, “Look, this is…” you know, with their names and who they are.

And so I got to meet all of them. And then the second trip, I got to meet birth father. He was very polite to me. He’s very tall—I didn’t expect that. He’s very tall, which I’m like, I’m glad, because the girls are going to be tall. So I was excited—they got some height in them!

And we got to meet some other relatives. At the meetings in our house, we just use adoption like, “Hey, you know, this is a thing. You’ve got a lot of friends who have been adopted. It’s normal that you have two families that love you.”

Kelly:
Just part of your family lives in Arizona. We don’t try to make it into anything. It’s just kind of a neutral thing.

Speaker:
I think she said to me the other day something about wanting a brother. And I was like, well, we’ll let the Lord handle all that.

Kelly:
Looking back now, now that you’ve gone through two disruptions and two placements, what do you wish you could have told yourself going through those disruptions?

Speaker:
It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay. Yeah, it hurts. It stinks. It’s awful. But it’ll be okay.
You know, she was a great baby. She was a very spicy toddler. We’re working on our big girl status right now. Doing a little better.
She blows me away with how amazing she is as a kid.
And I call our second baby our bonus baby. We have our baby and our bonus baby.
The bonus baby is a total comedian. She is hilarious and beautiful and just a total trip.
Everything about my life has never gone according to any plan I have ever made.
So I don’t know why that surprises me when it doesn’t again.
But again, that’s faith, right? That things will be okay.
And we will be okay with whatever the things are.
Because you can’t control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude.
So if I had to go back to talk to myself, part of it would be like, stop sulking. Get over it.
Yes, grieve. Grieve appropriately. Take the time to grieve because it is like a death. And that’s okay.
It’s okay to grieve that.
And it’s okay not to have to explain it to everyone in your family because they’re not going to understand it at all.
No matter how many times you’ve tried to explain this process to them, they’re not going to understand it. And that’s okay.

Kelly:
What do you think?

Adoptive Dad:
I would tell myself back then that it’ll be okay. I think you said it best. I don’t think I have anything else to add.

Kelly:
Do either of you have any advice for adoptive parents that are either going through a disruption or maybe have just been through one and they’re really struggling with it?

Speaker:
Find your adoptive friends. If you don’t have any, you can find some through BAF. I’m sure they can connect people.
Find your tribe because the people who have already gone through there, they understand and they’ll cry with you and they’ll pray for you over the phone.
They’ll strengthen you through it and tell you, listen, yeah, I understand.
It still bothers them too. It still bothers me. It’s a scar on your heart and it’s a permanent scar.
But like all grief, your heart gets bigger and your grief goes in the box until, you know, sometimes the box gets opened, but you will get through.
But it is finding a therapist that actually understands adoption and then finding your tribe that have been there, have done that and are currently raising their children because they’ve gotten to the other side successfully.

Kelly:
You guys have an amazing story. I hope you realize how powerful it really is.

Speaker:
Thank you. It’s a good time to adopt. And here’s why I say this.
I think in previous generations, adoption was so hush-hush because it was probably usually either unmarried women or teenagers, and it was the shame on the family.
So everything about adoption was hush-hush, shame, shame, don’t talk about it.
That’s not the case anymore. People are shocked when we told them, no, in the profiles, it’s like 99% adult women. It’s not teenagers.
It’s adults who are just at a horrible crossroads of circumstances and choices, and they are now making this brave selfless choice.
That I can’t imagine the scar on her heart.
With all the DNA stuff, you’re never going to keep a secret anymore.
So it’s a good time now to let the love shine.
It’s not, oh hush, secret, secret — your mom’s really your aunt or your mom’s really your grandmother.
It’s none of this stuff anymore.
It’s — you have two families that love you. One who made a very hard choice.
It’s more about the love. Let’s learn from these circumstances and not repeat them. And let’s make better choices. Build family in that way.

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