new world
TESTIMONY

Sustained by a Fruitful Friendship
When they discover that they cannot have children, Naomi and Ken face their needs and decisions with the support of friends–so that, concretely, their desires were not frustrated but lived freely in relationship with the Mystery.
The certainty that grew inspired an open-armed welcome for a newborn baby.

by Webster Bull

Georgia Ann plays peek-a-boo. Each time she looks up from her father’s shoulder and meets a visitor’s gaze, a veil is pulled aside from a joyful mystery. Her eyes twinkle with mischief, pudgy cheeks redden, two lonely teeth gleam behind her lower lip. Georgia Ann does not look much like her mother, Naomi, and looks even less like her father, Ken. She is of mixed Colombian and Puerto Rican heritage, and they are not. But Ken is her father, Naomi is her mother, and you have only to see how she burrows her head back into Ken’s shoulder to understand that Georgia Ann is their daughter. Tomorrow is her first birthday, and before the night is over, she will take her first tentative step.
The first steps in this adoption story came seven years ago, on stage. Ken and Naomi met through a friend who suggested that Ken get back into theater after ten years, by trying out for a Passion play written by Fr. Peter Cameron. Naomi was on the audition panel that awarded Ken a small part, with a chance to understudy the lead. Exactly one year after their first date, Ken proposed, and they were married in the fall of 2004. She was one of ten siblings; he said he wanted ten children. Surely, it was only a matter of time.

Bitterness in the heart. In 2006, a doctor confirmed that the couple was infertile, a fact that confronts more than 10 percent of American marriages. Initially, Ken and Naomi were not inclined to face reality. A close friend in the Movement asked Ken, “I wonder what God wants from you?” and then told him, “Ultimately, the reason to bring children into the world is for Christ.” “Instead of remembering and sticking to these judgments and running forward with freedom,” Ken said, “I turned inward and thought, ‘Okay, God does not want us to have children so we’ll become a jet-setting couple who travels a lot, goes to restaurants, and just enjoys life. But, over time, I came to know that this is not what I wanted. I knew it was a reduction of my desire because it had bitterness in it.”
Both agreed that staying in front of their desire to have children was painful. Naomi said, “If it were not for Communion and Liberation; if it were not for Father Giussani; if it were not for my mother, either I would have ceased the process because I would not have been able to face the reality alone–it was too painful–or perhaps I would have continued, but I would have missed the best part along the way, i.e., the Presence of the risen Christ accompanying me.”
Like Naomi, Ken had preconceptions about adoption. He worried about being the father of a child who didn’t look like him: “I didn’t want to be reminded all the time that I had adopted.” Naomi thought that if she were to give birth to “flesh of my flesh” she would love the child more than an adopted child.

A decision tree. By early 2008, still vacillating, Naomi had collected enough information for the couple to decide on the path they might pursue if they went ahead with adoption. An adopting couple in the United States faces a decision tree. Do they want a native-born child or one born overseas? Ken and Naomi chose the former. Now, they faced a second choice: use an agency or hire an adoption lawyer? The prospect of defining for an agency the characteristics of a child they were willing to accept (white only? male? female? disease-free? drug-free?) was unappealing. Wanting to remain open, they hired a lawyer, opting for the “open adoption” method, which takes, on average, nine to twelve months. This method called them to further openness with family and friends to whom they would send the appeal, and on whom they had been relying and would continue to rely for support, advice, and referrals. In short, the adoption process would blossom into a community affair.
At this point, Naomi felt like a young woman on the eve of her wedding–knowing everything involved but afraid to take those first steps down the aisle. She took her concerns to Giorgio Vittadini. “Do you want to be a mother?” he asked her. “Yes,” she answered. He repeated his question, and she repeated her yes. Vitta said, “You have a treasure and you are afraid to lose it.” To her, this meant that she had a great husband, job, and community, and she was afraid of losing these. “There was an immediate sense that I was revealed to myself,” she said, “and it was unsettling.”
This encounter was decisive. Ken took the initiative now, sending an e-mail broadly to many people in the Movement, explaining the couple’s situation and asking for help. The outpouring of support was impressive. People who didn’t even know them responded with suggestions and the promise of prayers. A priest in Africa asked them to consider adopting a child from his country. Vicky, a friend from  Uganda, went out of her way for them. Meanwhile, Ken was particularly struck watching Naomi embrace young women friends who were giving birth. She hosted a baby shower for one of them and attended several other showers, not out of a sense of duty, but out of joy. “She was a great witness to me,” Ken said.
The greatest expense was not legal, but promotional: adoption lawyers are legally enjoined from soliciting children from birth families, so adopting parents must get the word out. To Ken and Naomi, this meant advertising, and the costs were considerable. There were many false hopes, many calls from expectant mothers that didn’t pan out. Then the couple heard through the friend of a CL friend about a family in New Jersey. They made contact with the birth grandmother; a bond formed; and they urged the woman to contact their lawyer.
Time passed, and the grandmother did not take action until November 15, 2009, when she called Ken and Naomi to say that her daughter was in labor: “Please come to the hospital in New Jersey! We want you to be the parents of the baby!”
The couple had to move quickly, though no legal arrangements had been put in place. Naomi called her mother, “filled with anxiety. I told her of the situation and she responded with great joy.” Naomi expressed her fears, and her mother responded with a familiar question: “Do you want to be a mother?” When Naomi answered yes, her mother had the decisive response: “Well, Jesus is giving you a baby. Do you want it or not?”
One at a time, Ken and Naomi visited the neonatal intensive care unit where the premature infant lay in an incubator. When she saw the baby, Naomi thought to herself, “This is my baby!” Seeing his daughter for the first time, Ken thought, “This baby belongs to God, and I am her father.”

In Naomi’s arms. A long, trying week–tempered by calls to doctor and lawyer friends–passed before the couple could bring their daughter home from the hospital. Prayer and companionship were the pillars that sustained this uncertain advent. Then came the moment, required by law, when the birth mother physically placed the baby in Naomi’s arms. The young woman turned away abruptly and walked off without another word. Ken and Naomi named their daughter Georgia Ann, after Naomi’s mother.
Adoption law in New Jersey, where Georgia Ann was born, prevented taking her across state lines to the family home in New York until paperwork was finalized. So, while waiting, they stayed with Ken’s parents in New Jersey. Five days later, while changing Georgia Ann’s diaper, Naomi found blood in her daughter’s stool. Here again, a friendship made the difference. Naomi called Dr. Elvira, a friend and a neonatologist at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. Told the symptoms, Elvira said the situation might be serious, that it might be “nec” (necrotizing enterocolitis). Because they could not yet bring Georgia Ann across state lines to the New York hospital–one of the best in the country for neonatal illnesses–Elvira dropped everything to come to New Jersey. She pulled strings to have the baby admitted to the New Jersey hospital with the best neonatal ICU; then, once the paperwork was complete, she arranged for a transfer to Columbia Presbyterian. The New Jersey staff had resisted Dr. Parravicini’s  diagnosis of nec, but nec it was. If this condition is not caught early and treated with antibiotics, surgery is required; otherwise, the condition can be fatal. Georgia Ann responded well to antibiotics, and the chubby child who took her first step on the eve of her first birthday was clearly in the pink of health.
  Ken summarized his experience: “This wasn’t my idea of how I wanted my life to go. It was purely given to me. It really was like the Annunciation: ‘Be it done unto me according to Thy Word.’ By following everything that was given, we received a great gift, something more beautiful, bigger, better than I could have imagined.” Friends in their Fraternity group thanked him. Ken said: “When you see someone accepting what’s given and it’s beautiful, I think it gives everybody hope. I was struck that they were moved, that they were thanking me. It helped me to see that what we were doing was not just for us, it was for the Church. By accepting Georgia Ann, we were building the Church.”
The new parents were accompanied all along the ­­­way, most visibly by friends in the Movement. They were never alone.
As difficult as the circumstances leading to the adoption may have been, Naomi said, “Life was very clear then, during this drama of discovering and accepting Georgia Ann. I pray for that again. Life can become confusing when we become complacent. I pray for my life to always have that meaning because, when it does, I have no doubt in my mind. I waited and I watched. I knew Jesus was going to show us the way.”
She summarized the experience profoundly: “Jesus Christ truly is the Lord of all reality. That was very clear.”