Adoption fills home with boys, faith, family

PALMER — While one of his boys vacuums his room and the other sits at the kitchen table playing with Legos, Scott Godwin fries sausages and vegetables for lunch and his wife, Kelly Godwin, talks with a visitor.

It’s really the perfect picture of domestic life in the Mat-Su Valley. And it’s hard to imagine that just a few short years ago, this house was empty.

Actually, it wasn’t even really a house. When the Godwins made the decision to adopt Rodney and Michael — a pair of brothers who had been in foster care since leaving their village in the Bethel area — the place was a garage. They converted it to bring the boys into their lives.

“We had to make room for these guys so it was quite the process,” Scott said.

Scott has a child from a previous relationship, but Kelly, who herself was adopted, said she didn’t want to have kids of her own.

“I just knew because I was adopted I knew I was called to pay it forward,” she said. “I said ‘I don’t want children of my own, but I want to adopt.’”

The couple has been together for more than a decade but for a lot of that time Kelly was running her own group home and Scott was working on the North Slope. It really didn’t seem like there was room to bring in two boys.

Kelly said she knew she was called to adopt two brothers — that’s the word she uses, “called,” because she said she believes this was God’s plan for her. She and Scott bring a deep faith to their life with Rodney, 13, and Michael, 15.

“God has revealed to me numerous times, ‘Kelly, all you have to do is love them and lead them to me.’ When you take that approach there’s no heaviness,” she said.

Scott said he believes their faith gives their sons a moral foundation upon which to build. He said he also thinks it has opened their hearts. Rodney recently pointed out the family chore schedule and noted that with just a few more boys they could each take a day of the week — Godwin’s 12-year-old biological son and a fourth boy, a foster child, also lives with them.

“I said, ‘what, you want another boy in your room?’ He said, ‘yeah, they can’t be annoying though,’” Scott recalled.

Before Rodney and Michael arrived, Scott’s son, Chase, was living with his biological mother. Soon after, Kelly recalled, Chase started struggling in school and his mother came to live with the Godwins, where he has since blossomed. Then, a few months later, they brought in a foster child.

“We went from zero to four in like eight months,” Kelly said.

Taking on so much so quickly has been challenging, the couple says. Both Rodney and Michael have numerous counseling and doctor’s appointments to coordinate. The foster child — who is anonymous in this report because of state privacy rules — was in a therapeutic foster home right before moving in with the Godwins and is still working on a few rough edges.

“It’s been good though and they’re really good with one another,” Kelly said. “They’ll tell us if one of them oversteps.”

She said the boys do lots of things together — they go swimming and to the park, they ride bikes and play video games.

When Rodney and Michael arrived, she said, they’d spent years in the system being housed, rather than parented. They weren’t very well supervised.

“I remember them with Legos they had no clue how to use their imagination whereas Chase has such an imagination he can play with paper,” she said. “They didn’t know how to entertain themselves at all.”

Chase showed them how to do all of those things. Scott said the boys also lacked a lot of other skills.

“Splitting kindling, building a fire — essential things that you learn how to do in Alaska — they had no clue about any of it,” he said.

Kelly said she thinks her professional life has prepared her for the challenge. Her group home provides services to seniors and adults with disabilities. She said it’s taught her patience and flexibility, how to set consistent boundaries and think a few steps ahead of her charges. All of those things are key parenting skills.

Scott said they’ve become something like fostering advocates. They work with other foster families and speak at fostering events. They’re setting up a panel to try to work on changes to laws affecting foster parents. While their experience working with the system was great — everyone on team of therapists and social workers helping with Rodney and Michael seemed to have an interest in seeing them succeed — there are certainly horror stories about the system.

“We get reports of parents that are saying, you know, just, they’re not getting call backs and social workers aren’t showing up,” Scott said. “We don’t have that. We have an amazing team that cares and has a vested interest.”

Overall, Kelly said, the rewards of adopting have been immense. Giving a kid a normal, stable environment to grow up in changes them but it also changes society.

“You’re changing who they marry, what kind of a career they have and how they will raise their children. So it’s generational,” Kelly said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.