Nontraditional Parenthood’s Joys and Challenges

Today’s families may be created in wondrous ways--through adoption, high-tech medical procedures and surrogacy--each with challenges and obstacles. In “Parents at Last,” Cynthia V.N. Peck and Wendy Wilkinson, both parents who adopted children, explore parenting through the narratives of 32 couples and singles who have created these nontraditional families.

While “celebrating adoption and the new pathways to parenthood” through text and photographs, the book (Clarkson Potter, $27.50) also addresses such ‘90s issues as how to explain that Daddy was a sperm donor or why a child has two mommies and no daddy.

Peck and Wilkinson have split the text into four parts--”In the Beginning,” “The Wonder Years,” “In the Parenting Trenches” and “Pioneers Share Their Wisdom”--depicting the stages of growth in these families, some of whom are new parents and some of whom defied the social mores of decades past by parenting as singles or adopting biracial children.

There is a decorated Air Force colonel who, at 68 and retired, adopted a 7-year-old boy from a Siberian orphanage. He says, “No medal or commendation could ever equal the gift of a son . . . for me, all else in my life has paled into insignificance.” There’s a gay couple in Los Angeles who fulfilled their dream by adopting two foster sons.

There’s a New Mexico couple who adopted six children from four countries and later founded Rainbow House, an agency that seeks loving families for orphaned or abandoned children around the world. Another New Mexico couple, having adopted two Russian children with medical problems, helped found the Yabloka (“apple,” in Russian) Children’s Fund to provide desperately needed medical aid and supplies to orphanages and children’s hospitals in Russia.

Maryland Congresswoman Connie Morella, a strong children’s advocate, and husband Tony suddenly found themselves with nine children between the ages of 10 and 20 when her sister died of cancer in 1975, and the Morellas adopted her six.

Co-author Peck was a single woman in her 30s when, in the early ‘70s, she decided to adopt. She went on to adopt seven children and raise nine, all on her teacher’s salary. Peck says, “Together we’ve opened doors I never knew existed.”

Other parents recount the frustration, pain and expense of fertility treatments and procedures such as in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination. Jay and Brook Dougherty of Los Angeles opted for adoption after five disillusioning years trying to conceive. She writes, “I found the biggest, the best, the most expensive doctor in all of L.A., who promptly shunted me over to his wife, a beginner with the bedside manner of a lizard.” She found that, having committed to adoption, “all the hand-wringing that goes on over having to have your baby biologically ends up meaning zero.”

Having lost one of their four biological children to cancer, Robert and Evelyne McNamara of San Jose decided to adopt when “enough time had passed for all of us to be clear that this new child would not be a replacement but, rather, a joyful late addition.” They felt “reborn as parents” after adopting two Chinese orphans.

Alice Mathias, daughter of composer Oscar Hammerstein, recalls the “outright hostility” she and husband Philip encountered when, in the early ‘50s, they adopted two Asian American babies. Once, a child on a playground pointed to their daughter, demanding, “What race is she?” To which Alice replied, “The human race.”

Connie Bracktenbach and Vicky McGregor of Colorado, lesbian partners for seven years, are parents of Emma Bracktenbach, conceived by Connie with donor sperm. The child calls Connie “mommy” and Vicky “mamma.” Vicky’s greatest fear: “That some parents at Emma’s school won’t let their children play with her . . . they will never know us and how much we truly love Emma.”

The afterword is by Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s International, an adoptee who grew up in a less than ideal home. Advocating for adoption of special-needs children, he writes, “Even if it’s a long and bumpy journey, adoption can be a pretty decent solution to a heartbreaking problem.”

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