Sunday, May 09, 1999

Mother and son match hearts

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Wounded child, woman with calling adopt each other

BY JOHN JOHNSTON
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The Rev. Linda Oliver walks with her adopted son. (Michael E. Keating photos) | ZOOM |

        The questions come more often now. Linda Oliver says answering them is the hardest part of being a mother.

        “Why do I have to do this?” asks her 5-year-old adopted son, who every night must apply thick cream to the hairless parts of his head.

        “Because the doctor said we need to take care of the grafts,” she tells him.

        “Why do I have grafts?”

        “Because you were burned.”

        Today is their fourth Mother's Day together, their third since the adoption was finalized. She is single, a chaplain at a Cincinnati hospital. She adopted the boy after he was removed from his birth family. Together, they do what other mothers and sons do: visit parks, bake cookies, play games.

        But in the last six months, her little boy has become more aware. He asks more questions. Linda is honest with her answers, while trying not to give more information than he needs.

'I felt God called me to be a mom,' says The Rev. Linda Oliver. 'That was as strong as my call to ministry.' | ZOOM |

        “Where did this happen, Mom?”

        “In your birth family's home.”

        “But where in the home?”

        “The bathroom.”

        “But where in the bathroom?”

        “In the bathtub. Remember when you came to me, and you were so scared about getting in the bathtub?”

        She always knew there would be hard questions. Questions about the skin grafts; questions about his biracial background. She knew there would be additional surgeries for her son. She knew she would have her hands full with this child, who is hyperactive.

        More than anything, she knew she wanted to be a mother.

        A little boy needed her. And Linda Oliver needed him.

        “I was not the only one adopting,” she says. “He adopted me, too.”

A mother's story
        She is 49, a tall woman with short dark hair and brown eyes, framed by glasses. She was born in West Virginia, but grew up in eastern Hamilton County, where her family moved when she was 7.

        In high school she felt called to the ministry, but she wasn't quite sure what direction to take. When she was in her 20s, something happened that helped her decide: Her mother became ill and spent most of the last 18 months of her life in Christ Hospital.

ABOUT ADOPTING

An information meeting for people considering adoption is 6-7 p.m. Thursday at the Children's Home of Cincinnati, 5050 Madison Road, Madisonville, west of Red Bank Road.   Topics will include international adoption and special-needs adoption. Last July the Children's Home began handling some of Hamilton County's special-needs adoptions under contract to the Hamilton County Department of Human Services (DHS).   Special-needs children include those with physical, mental or emotional problems; older children (age 6 and up); minorities; and siblings who must be adopted together.   DHS now has 105 special-needs children awaiting homes. About 80 percent are African-American; nearly 75 percent are part of a sibling group.   For information call the Children's Home at 272-2800 or DHS at 632-6366. The adoption Web site for Hamilton County at www.hcadopt.org includes pictures of children.

        Linda, who is an American Baptist, chose to become a hospital chaplain.

        She has worked at Christ Hospital for 13 years. As pastoral education coordinator, her students include seminarians, pastors, lay people and nurses. They want to learn about pastoral care, or how to help people deal with grief, or how to communicate with people who are dying.

        Always, she pictured herself someday having a family. But she never married. And as she grew older, she eventually had to face that she would not bear children.

        “It was painful,” she says. “It took me a long time to come to grips with that.”

        And yet, “I felt God called me to be a mom. That was as strong as my call to ministry.”

        And so about six years ago she began to consider adoption.

        She approached private adoption agencies, but few doors were open to a single woman in her mid-40s. The Hamilton County Department of Human Services (DHS) was more receptive. The agency deals with special-needs children, many of whom have been victims of abuse, neglect or abandonment. Often, they are older and developmentally delayed.

        Linda attended adoption classes, and in the summer of 1994 the agency assigned her a social worker, Andrea Hudson. Her job was to do a home study, get to know Linda Oliver, and determine what type of child she might accept.

        Ms. Hudson describes Linda as open, honest and compassionate, and says she was “very in tune to the types of kids that we serve.” Ms. Hudson is now adoptions manager for the Children's Home of Cincinnati, which in July began handling special-needs adoptions under contract to DHS.

        With the home study complete, in late 1994 Linda began feeling a sense of increasing urgency. She envisioned a child out there, somewhere. A boy. By March 1995, she was waking up in a cold sweat, almost a panic. “God,” she would say, “I know you've got this boy for me. How do I get to him?”

A son's story
        In the spring of 1994 a 10-month-old baby arrived at Shriners Burns Institute. His face was badly swollen by third-degree burns caused by dousing his head in water. It's unclear for how long, or how hot the water was.

        “My guess is, pretty damn hot,” says Dr. Glenn Warden, the institute's chief of staff, who saw the boy when he came in.

        The burns covered an area from just above the nose upward over much of the head, more so on the left side than the right. His cheeks also were damaged.

        His airway had been burned, presumably because he had swallowed the same hot water that seared his face. Doctors inserted a tube into his throat so he could breathe.

        A week after the boy was admitted, Dr. Warden removed the dead skin. The next day, he took a rectangular patch of skin from the child's back, and grafted it onto the forehead and head.

        Typically, Dr. Warden says, skin from the scalp would be used on the face because it is a better color match. But too much of the boy's scalp had been burned.

        However, the doctor was able to take a small patch from the back of the boy's scalp and graft it onto his cheeks.

        Later, the child's eyelids were reconstructed.

        He was fitted with a mask. Made of clear plastic, it applied pressure to the wounds to decrease scarring.

        The boy wore the mask for a year. It came off only when he ate.

        “Remarkably, he's not scarred badly,” Dr. Warden says. “It's not thick and hard. The problem is the poor color match. ... You can see where his grafts are.”

        Most noticeable is a line that runs along his forehead. “There's probably not much we can do about that,” the doctor says.

        The child never returned to his family, which had a history of drug abuse and child neglect. Various stories circulated about who was responsible for the burns; ultimately the boy's birth mother was deemed responsible and was sent to jail.

        Concerned that the boy's birth parents might try to contact him, Linda has asked that his name not be used and his face not be shown in this article.

"It just felt right'
        In September 1995, Andrea Hudson and a half-dozen other social workers sat in a meeting of the DHS adoption unit's selection committee.

        After a judge severs all parental rights to a child, the committee tries to match that child with an adoptive family.

        When the committee considered the case of a biracial boy who had been burned on the face and head, Ms. Hudson spoke up right away: “I know somebody who can take this child.”

        “I knew (Linda) would not be deterred by his scars,” she says, recalling that day. “I knew she would immediately see past that.”

        He was 2 years old when Linda met him the first time.

        He wore a sleeveless red T-shirt, shorts, no shoes. He shyly clung to his foster mother, who had cared for him for 15 months.

        Linda brought a basket of fun things, but her puppet scared him. Then she glanced at notes the foster mother had given her, and saw that he liked Barney, the purple dinosaur.

        Linda took a xylophone out of her basket. She played Barney's theme song: “I love you, you love me ... ”

        “He turned around and looked at me,” Linda says. “I can still remember that look, (like) "You know that?' There was something there that was the seed for our becoming a family. It was a very powerful moment.

        “I was like a new mom wanting to smell him, and count the toes, not that I did those things. But I wanted to get every essence of him that I could to take with me.”

        Before she left, he sat on her lap and gave her a hug.

        Two days later, he visited Linda's home in eastern Hamilton County. Overnights at Linda's soon followed. Ms. Hudson had set up a six-week “transition period” of visits, but that was pared to four weeks because everyone agreed this was a good match.

        “I never went into it with (the idea), if this works, fine, if it doesn't, I can back out,” Linda says. “I never had any of those feelings. It just felt right.”

        On May 20, 1996, a Hamilton County magistrate was prepared to stamp the papers that would make the adoption complete. But there was an interruption.

        “I want to do that!”

        Linda watched her boy, two months shy of his third birthday, climb into the magistrate's lap and stamp the papers himself.

"A lifetime of questions'
        That summer, Linda and her babysitter bought pool passes. The night before her son's first visit to the pool, Linda packed his bag with a towel and other items.

        “He was so excited about going swimming,” she says.

        The next morning at breakfast, he looked at her with fearful eyes, and asked, “Mom, is the water gonna be hot?”

        “That just did me in,” Linda says, tears welling up in her eyes.

        “I knew that question was only one in a lifetime of questions that he would have.”

        Someday, when he is older and better able to understand, he will find some answers in a life book that social workers prepared for him. The book deals openly with problems within his birth family, while maintaining a hopeful, positive tone.

        There are photos of his African-American biological father, and his white biological mother, his foster mother, his social workers. And Linda Oliver, whom he began calling Mom right away.

        The life book explains that his mother was sent to jail for causing his burns; and that he spent five weeks in Shriners Burns Institute.

        It also says, in part: “... although your birth parents loved you ... they were unable to give you the care you needed to grow up to be healthy, happy and safe. Your birth parents were also unable to provide the special medical care you needed.

        “So your caseworker went to court to ask the judge if a new family could be found for you — a family that would love you and take good care of you.”

"Does it hurt?'
        It's a Wednesday afternoon. Linda and her son have an appointment at Shriners, where medical care for his burns is done for free.

        As they wait to be called, she watches him climb and jump and cavort around the indoor playground. He readily gives her kisses through a bubble window. Then he hears his name called, and he runs a zig-zag pattern to the exam room.

        He sits on a table that looks like a school bus as Linda tells a resident and two nurses that her son keeps asking when he'll have his next surgery. “He doesn't like his hairline back there,” she says.

        On his right side, he is bald to about the middle of his head; on the left, the baldness extends about three-fourths of the way back.

        Shriners plans to perform cosmetic surgery to move his hairline forward. Doctors will insert a scalp expander — a bag made of rubber-like material — that works on the same principle as skin that stretches during pregnancy.

        Over a period of months, salt water will be added to the expander, stretching the part of his head with hair. Then the bag will be removed, and the stretched portion of scalp (with hair) will be draped over bald areas.

        The surgery has not yet been scheduled. Doctors want to be sure the boy fully understands what will happen and is cooperative, because a needle will be used to inject the water, and no contact sports are allowed when the expander is in place.

        Nurse Debbie Gulden shows him photos of someone with an expander.

        “Does it hurt when they take (the bag) out?” he asks.

        “You're asleep when they take it out,” she says.

        He points to stitches. “Would it hurt when they take them out?”

        “Usually not,” she says.

        He wants to know if his mom will be there. Yes, Linda says.

"She is special'
        In stores, sometimes, Linda will notice someone staring at her boy. She responds by engaging the person in conversation. “Hi, how are you today?”

        Her son has picked up on that. “Mom,” he'll say, loud enough for the offending party to hear, “that man's staring at me.”

        “Oh, my goodness,” Linda responds, “he must think you're handsome.”

        Before he started kindergarten last August, Linda helped her son brainstorm responses to questions he might get about his appearance. Since then, teachers at the public school he attends have told Linda it has not been an issue. Children his own age don't seem to be nearly as concerned about the grafts as older children and adults.

        When he is asked about his grafts, he sometimes says he was burned. Or he says, “It's just me.” He knows he has the right to explain as much or little as he wants.

        Linda says he has not asked why his skin is darker than his mother's. He has not asked about being African-American.

        “I assume that will come. It may have come earlier if not for the burns,” she says.

        Two months shy of his sixth birthday, he plays soccer and hopes to play summer baseball. He enjoys his friends, likes to read, watches videos. Last week he learned to ride a bike without training wheels.

        He also likes school. “The first day, he got on the bus and waved goodbye to me,” Linda says. “I knew he was going to love the new opportunities. Transitions are not new to him. Somehow he has a coping mechanism that I don't have.”

        But she has coped. With being a single parent. With her son's deficits in hand-eye coordination and spatial perception. With his hyperactivity, for which he takes medication. With all the questions that her son has asked, and will ask.

        “I don't think there are many people who would have taken on this challenge. She is a very special person,” says Cindy Ramminger, a friend of Linda's for 20 years. Ms. Ramminger and her two teens share a house on the east side with Linda and her son.

        Life has changed so drastically for Linda that she says she can't remember what it was like before she welcomed her son into her life. “One of the things he has given me,” she says, “is a sense of really loving someone in a different way than I've ever loved before.”

"Jesus loves you'
        Linda does not perform ministerial duties in the Baptist church she and her son attend, so he had never seen her in that role until about four months ago. She took him to a chapel service for a group of women preparing for a weekend retreat. Linda was to be their spiritual director.

        For a while, he occupied himself by coloring and drawing. But then he saw his mother walk to the altar, where she took bread and grape juice, consecrated it, and prepared for Communion.

        As she turned around, the boy bounded up to the altar.

        “Oh, Lord,” she thought, “what do I do now?”

        For a few moments, she worried what the others would think. “I knew if I said "Go away,' that would not be an appropriate response for him. And that's not something I would envision Jesus doing.”

        So she put her arm around him, and handed him the bread. He held the loaf and she held the cup while the others took Communion.

        At the end, he wanted some, too.

        She could have let theology get in the way. Could have reminded herself that without a profession of faith, a child should not receive Communion. Instead, she was guided by her heart.

        She gave her son bread. He dipped it into the cup. She looked into his blue eyes and said, “Jesus loves you.”

        Then he held the cup for her, and she took Communion.

        It was a moment in time for a boy to see a slice of his mother's faith. And her love.

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