Local parents, youth gather to celebrate adoptions

By GREG JOHNSON
Frontiersman.com

WASILLA — The scene at North Bowl was typical for a snowy Saturday — an icy parking lot out front, dozens of warm and happy bowlers inside. For Paul Raphael-Crume, Saturday’s outing was also a celebration of family.

After about eight years with their foster family, 15-year-old Palmer Junior Middle School student and his twin brother, David, were adopted by their foster mother, Shelley Crume. The adoption was final Nov. 1 and marked a milestone moment for the Raphael children.

And another local family also adopted the twins’ sisters — 16-year-old Tiffany and Florence, 11. There are also two younger siblings who have found permanent homes. It’s a story that’s not uncommon for those attending Saturday’s celebration of adoption, put on by the local Office of Children’s Services and Alaska Center for Resource Families.

For Paul and David, their adoption put an official close to a decade of being in state custody, said Dawn Adams, regional adoption specialist for OCS.

“As soon as they knew they were adopted, so many behaviors ended and they really started excelling at school,” she said. “It’s like their lives stopped being on hold. Academically, they’re performing. Behaviorally, they’re improving. With Tiffany as the oldest, she felt such a strong sense of responsibility for her siblings. She was so emotional at their adoption and you could see that relief for her, that she could see her brothers are taken care of.”

For Paul, his adoption “makes me really happy,” and he isn’t embarrassed or shy about sharing his thoughts. “It’s cool being adopted and being in a family that actually wants to be with you. I’m really glad. For me, I know we’re safe and we have parents who care for us and they’ll meet our needs as a family.”

Shelley Crume fostered the twins for eight years before formally adopting them, although she says that, “I feel like they adopted me, I didn’t adopt them.”

She said she knew for years she wanted to adopt the boys.

“The heart speaks,” she said. “I think for foster care parents, sometimes our hearts are bigger than our brains, but it’s a wonderful, beautiful thing.”

Youths like the Raphael siblings have happy endings to their biological family instability. Others, like Job Corps students Purtricia Blunt, 21, and Slade Martin, 23, spent years in the foster care system before aging out.

Blunt was 5 when she was placed into foster care, and over the course of the next 13 years had about eight foster homes when she wasn’t being bounced back and forth among other family members.

“They’d have me for awhile, then they didn’t want me, so they’d take me someplace else, give me back and I’d be abused again,” Blunt said. “I was shuffled.”

Seeing the younger children at Saturday’s celebration “makes me so happy,” she said. “But it breaks my heart, too, to hear some of the stories of kids jumping from foster home to foster home. All they want is that forever family.”

Martin has created his own family of close friends and associates, he said. He was in the foster care system for 14 years and lived in 24 foster homes over that time.

“Adoption means permanency, it means family, it means you’re not bouncing around from home to home,” he said. “It means stability.” I think it’s great all these little kids are being adopted, but for the youth who are older, it can be hard. A lot of adoptive parents want a younger child, but there are tons and tons of middle-aged kids and teenagers who need permanent homes.”

Although patient to explain what growing up as a ward of the state is like, Martin said he can relate to others who have been through it like he has.

“My friend coined the term ‘fosterlogical,’ because you have to be in it to understand it,” he said. “Those friends are my family.”

As much as finding good homes is a blessing for children, adoption is also a blessing for the adults who take them in, said Shantel Worch.

Worch and her husband adopted Tiffany and Florence, and also foster other children.

“My husband and I couldn’t have children and this was a way for us to have children and have a family,” she said, adding that adoption “means that my kids have an opportunity in life, that their dreams can come true.”

While Saturday was an opportunity to celebrate adoption at the local level, more needs to be done, Adams said. In the case of the Raphael siblings, they all found permanent homes, but as Alaska Natives, it would have been ideal to find Native families to adopt them.

“We want our children to be able to keep their identities, and the Valley is a world of primarily white faces,” she said. “It would be nice if at least their homes reflect some of their Native culture.”

Along with having fun bowling, the families also gathered for lunch and shared some of their adoptions stories.

That’s an important part of the celebration of adoption, said Betsy Woodin of the Alaska Center for Resource Families.

“No two families are the same, that’s what makes it so cool,” she said.

Contact Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.