I was the youngest of 10 kids.
One of the memories was our biological father
holding a gun to our heads and saying,
"Which kid do you want to shoot first?"
And they would laugh. So the abuse was bad.
It was bad.
Not only physical, but sexual abuse, and
then my parents died when I was 10.
To me, it was the greatest gift I thought
I could ever have.
Little did I know that going into care,
it was probably just as bad when it came
to the mental abuse. Having all your
belongings in a trash can, going to a home
that you knew that you weren't loved or
really probably wanted. And then when I became
18, I was a senior in high school, and I
became homeless. The statistics were I
should have been a drug addict and
should've dropped out of high school but
I just knew my life was going to be
something different so I joined the
military.
I didn't join the military because I
loved my country. I was going in it
because I was hungry, I was cold, and
scared, and I had nowhere to go.
I made something of myself. I got out,
started working in an office, but I
really never told many people about my
story. And then I met Reece. We had a
beautiful home and an amazing relationship,
but I wanted to be a dad.
If you were gay, was two things that you
knew weren't going to happen. You weren't
going to be a parent and you're weren't going to
get married. We were seeing on the
horizon that marriage was happening and we
decided that we were going to adopt overseas.
Reece looked at me and said, "Now
explain to me again why we're not
adopting locally in foster care when we
do this?" He said, "You don't realize how
many kids you're doing a disservice to
by not telling your story."
So we decided that we would take any
child under the age of 5 and so we
put our application in and we waited. We
got a phone call saying that we have a
brother and sister. They were troubled
and they said, "The boy — he's a biter.
You sure — you got to make sure you want
this one."
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All four of them arrived at our home with trash bags.
I was absolutely shocked that after all
of these years that I had been in the
system carrying a trash bag,
these kids are carrying a trash bag. What
are we not doing to change this?
Then we started working on
being a family of six and we filed
adoption for all four kids and we went
in for the fight and it was a fight. We
went to trial. We were told we were unfit
because we were gay.
We were told we were going to turn the
boys gay. We were told that our house and
our home was not fit because we were gay.
The one thing that we did know is
that they needed to be loved. They needed to
feel safe. They needed to feel wanted.
I know I needed to feel wanted.
To talk about it now, I didn't
realize I needed to feel wanted.
We talk about what it's like
having two white dads and they don't
really care what the color of our skin
is. I can't tell them what it's like to
be black.
I can't tell them what it's like to be
gay. Even I'm gay, and I don't know how
to explain that. Alls can tell them is
how to be a good person,
how to love, how to respect each other.
To me, that's what's important.
"I came outside and I saw two baby goats."
We had found out that
Makai has severe alcohol fetal syndrome.
It was daily that Reese was having to go
to school because of Makai
and finally one day he was reading a
book and it said that if you raise a
child with alcohol fetal around water and
animals that it can help their frontal
lobe and the next thing you know we bought a farm.
"Kaley, Oreo, Peanut Butter, and Lizzie."
Three years ago, we came into this home and
Makai was just getting by. Now Makai
is so different. Makai is a chicken
whisperer and he always normally has a
chicken under his arm and my husband
only walks to the bus stop for him to
get on the bus and he stays all day at
school and my husband doesn't have to go
to school any longer and sit with him.
"Do you have a vocabulary test tomorrow?"
"No. No vocabulary test."
I'm really hoping that one day someone is going to
look at me and say, "You know what, Rob?
We're going to ban trash bags from ever being
given to a child in foster care."
So we decided that we were going to put
some cases together and we were to give
some local foster children a case.
"Then they'll take their blanket, they'll put the blanket in the case."
I felt like everyone had given up on me.
My country had given up on me, my community
had given up on me, but I want kids in foster
care to know that that's not true. That
we do care about them. We do love them.
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