Picking Up the Pieces: My Journey Through Adoption

By Paula Charlebois

The story of our family’s journey from infertility to 14 adopted children with special needs. A story of hope, heart aches and miracles.

Paula Charlebois and her husband have fostered thirty children. They have adopted twelve of these children and are the permanent legal guardians of two others. Paula wanted to tell their story so that more people might consider this as an option when planning their families.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jun 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483412870

Book preview

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Chapter 1

The Beginning

M other, it’s just a word right? Wrong, it’s so much more than that. For some it’s a journey that begins quite easily. The act of a woman having relations with a man on a day that she happens to be ovulating, for others it’s much more difficult. At the moment of conception, you become a mother. Whatever you decide to do with that pregnancy, you are a mother. My question is, does a meth addict stop using because she discovers one day that she is going to be a mother? Does an alcoholic suddenly stop drinking? Does someone who never received love as a child suddenly know how to give and receive unconditional love? Sometimes. On the flip side of that, does a person taking a bunch of parenting classes and passing fingerprint checks and home studies suddenly make them a mother? I don’t believe so. I think that if you asked every woman when it was that she felt like she had truly become a mother, you would get many different answers. Some may say it was the minute they took a pregnancy test while others may say it was the first time they heard their baby’s heart beat or saw him or her on the ultra sound machine. Still others may say it was when they heard the first cry, or held the baby. My point is that while each woman technically became a mother at conception, that doesn’t mean that they felt it in their hearts yet. Sometimes it takes a while for it all to feel real. My sister will tell you that even as she was walking the halls of the hospital pushing my nephew in his little bassinet, she still didn’t feel like he was REALLY hers. It took her taking care of him day and night for a few months before it felt real. Did that mean that she didn’t love him? Of course not. She had gone through six months of bed rest and a complicated pregnancy to bring him into the world. I was there with her, trust me when I tell you that she LOVED him. It just took time for her to feel like she was his mo ther.

When Richard and I got married, we knew we wanted to have kids right away. It wouldn’t be quite that easy for us. We went through seven years of frustration over infertility treatments, watching other couples as they started families right on schedule. I would put on a happy face as I attended one baby shower after another for various friends and family members. When we would go shopping I would feel an actual ache in my heart as we passed the baby sections with all the adorable things that we could never buy for ourselves. Eventually we would just avoid that entire section of the store. It would take its toll on anyone. I don’t know when it happened but at some point we just gave up trying and moved on.

If someone said to me today that a miracle was going to happen, that I could go back in time and that Richard and I could start a family just the way that we originally planned to, I would say no thanks. I truly mean that. On our sixth wedding anniversary, I got very ill. I had been having terrible pains in my side all day. Richard was an hour away, still at work, when my sister finally insisted that I let our father take me to the emergency room. I had a long history of ovarian cysts that would rupture and sometimes needed to have surgery to repair the damage. Thinking that this was exactly what was once again happening, I finally relented and went in. One hour later, I was shocked to learn that after six years of trying, I was pregnant. And that I was having a miscarriage. After the Dr. and nurses left the room, I remember laying there in the dark. I started talking to God. At first I was angry. I asked God why something that seemed so simple, that came so easily to other couples, was just too much to ask. We were good people and always tried to do the right thing. We had several nieces and nephews that we were very involved with and we were in charge of the church nursery. All the years that we had been trying to become parents Richard and I had always seemed to have children around us. Somewhere along the way I had just decided that maybe this was where God needed us and that was just going to be the way it was. But that night I wondered. Why would he give both of us such a strong desire to parent children and then take the one and only baby we were going to have away? How could a loving God be so cruel? It was right then, lying alone in that dark hospital room, waiting for Richard to get to me that an overwhelming sense of peace came over me. In what should have been my darkest moment I suddenly started asking myself some serious questions. Which part of being a parent was it that Richard and I wanted the most? Was it the act of being pregnant or the moments that followed? I realized that what seemed to hurt the most was never getting to just be someone’s mom. To never be the one that a child reaches out to when they are hurt or scared or just needing comfort in general. To this day I know that God was with me in that room. He was opening my heart to a different way of becoming parents. I started to wonder about kids who were older and for one reason or another didn’t have their parents in their lives anymore. Did they feel the same pain, only in reverse? After a few days of thinking about all of this, I started asking Richard what he thought about it. He felt the same way that I did. It didn’t matter how we became parents, as long as we did. I prayed for a week pretty much all the time. At the end of the week I called information and asked for the number to child protective services. We had never known anyone who had adopted a child or even been a foster parent but for some reason I wanted to know what happened to older kids. Specifically older kids who never got to return home. The woman on the phone told me about a foster to adopt program that we could look in to and put us on a mailing list so that we could receive all of the information. When Richard got home from work I told him about the phone call and about one year from that day, we sat on a couch in Mesa Arizona and watched out the window of a group home as a small white car drove up and out popped a blonde headed eight year old boy named Jason. I squeezed Richard’s hand and felt my heart racing. This could not be happening to us. No way could this boy be ours. Something would happen and they would figure out that we weren’t good enough to be parents. That I wasn’t smart enough or experienced enough to do this right. They didn’t figure it out though and the very next weekend we were allowed to take Jason to a park for a couple of hours. Each week our visit time was extended and finally one month after we met him, Jason moved in. For the first time in our married lives Richard and I went Christmas shopping at the mall and didn’t have the sadness that had over shadowed our lives for so long when we would see all of the other couples there with their children celebrating. Little did we know that the whole time that we had thought that we had known exactly what we wanted in life, God had a much bigger, much more amazing plan for us than we could have imagined for ourselves. Little did we know that the whole time that we had been desperately trying to start a family a baby boy had been born into a very sad situation. That as we were crying out to God in anger and sadness, a child was crying out to God for a mother and father and that the only way that we would connect with each other was through the loss of our baby. That’s when I started using the phrase sometimes God will shake you up to wake you up. Richard and I had grown weary of fighting to have a child and had given up all hope. God needed to get our attention. Boy did he ever get it!

Chapter 2

Jason

S o did I suddenly become Jason’s mother the minute that we met? I think that to some degree I did. Richard and I both fell in love with him the minute that we met Jason and we just knew that he was ours. I don’t think however, that I had a clue what being Jason’s mom REALLY meant. I would soon find out.

It was a cold December evening the first day that our Jason came to live with us. My husband had been playing a video game with him and Jason had lost. We had no idea that Jason didn’t take losing well. He started screaming and ran out our front door. Thankfully we had a fenced in front yard so he didn’t get out in the street. He dropped down on the ground and started to scream. It was cold outside and there was a full moon with bright stars shining. Frost covered the grass where we were sitting but he didn’t seem to notice it at all. He just looked up at the moon and screamed. It was unlike anything that I had ever heard. Within that scream was every hurt, every disappointment, every painful moment that he had experienced so far in his life. It broke my heart to hear it and I didn’t know what to do. This was always where the parents of the kids we had always known would step in and take over. We had been waiting seven years at this point to become parents. We had taken all the classes where they tell you that kids will act out when they first come in to your home, yet nothing those teachers could have said would have prepared me for that first moment with Jason out on our front lawn. I had no idea what I should do. Since there were only two of us sitting out there in the freezing cold, I decided maybe I should just ask Jason what his thoughts were. Tell me what to do! I don’t know what to do!. Jason answered me between sobs. You are supposed to put me in a hold, duh! I had seen the staff at his group home when they placed out of control kids in a hold. The way they had done it in the group home was that one or more staff members would get the child face down on the floor and then would hold them there until they calmed down. It was only supposed to be used in cases where the child or others around him was in danger. The staff at Jason’s group home had overused it to the point where he no longer knew how to get mad or upset and then calm down without being in one. The times that I had seen the hold used had left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to be a kid and have so many different adults with that much power over my day. These were not people who were disciplining kids out of love or to teach them how to be happy functioning members of society. These were people who were being paid to babysit a bunch of boys who came from troubled pasts and had behaviors that were serious enough that they could no longer live within their families. No one was going to listen to them if they said that someone was being mean to them or was using the hold unnecessarily. Jason was not in danger that night. I was not in danger that night. There was NO way that I was putting that child in a hold. So I said it seems to me that if you can tell me that you need to be in a hold, you don’t need to be in one. And we sat there, side by side in the grass looking up at the stars and I prayed. First I thanked God for trusting Richard and I with the gift of this precious child and then I reminded him that it only seemed fair that since we had gone out on this limb we were calling parenthood, maybe he should help me out here and at least give me a clue as to what to do with our little ball of fury. After about five minutes I asked Jason again what his thoughts on what we should do were. I don’t think until that night that anyone had ever asked Jason what he thought about anything. He just looked at me for a long time with a puzzled expression. Never saying a word he eventually got up, offered me his hand and pulled me to my feet. I think that he appreciated that I admitted that I needed his help in this situation and for whatever reason, it helped him calm down. That was my first experience with being a mom. That night was the true start of our journey together as a mother and son because it’s not always about warm fuzzy feel good moments. Sometimes it’s when we are fighting the hardest and it feels like we are just spinning in circles that we are actually making the most progress. We just don’t always know it. From that moment in the grass until today our lives have been forever joined. I was his mom and he was my son and that