Creating a family: How one local couple made adoption work.

There were times when Lisa Morales wondered if her family would ever get through it all.

Eighteen years ago, she and her husband, Gilbert, adopted two children – a newborn girl first and then a 2-year-old boy. Both children, Josey and Mario, came with completely different histories.

The day Lisa and Gilbert stepped foot in the adoption agency, they hoped to find a boy that could round out their small family of a mom, a dad and the baby girl. The couple had already met two other boys living in foster care. Those meetings took place on separate occasions over the course of a few weeks, but as Lisa puts it, the couple just didn’t click with those boys.

But a special moment occurred when they met Mario. Mario recounts the story with pride, as do his parents. They’ve told him the tale again and again.

“I was sitting at a table and I guess Josey came over and tried to get on a chair next to me, so I helped her up,” Mario says. “That’s one of the reasons why they decided to adopt me.”

It was a pivotal moment that set in motion their life together. For Lisa, Mario’s gesture was a sign of sweetness and tenderness she had failed to see in the other foster children. It was a goodness that was not learned, but inherent. It gave her hope that she could suture whatever wounds he had suffered in his two and a half years in and out of the foster care system in Shasta County.

“It was not a desperation to start a family,” Lisa says, “it was a love for children – a different kind of love.”

Within months of finalizing the adoption, the family would move to Monterey County. Mario didn’t know it then, and neither did the Moraleses, but life as they knew it would change drastically. And so would their perception of what creating a family would be like.

Considering Mario’s troubled background – it included being bitten, burned with cigarettes and abandoned by his drug-addicted birth parents – the Moraleses were not fully prepared for what was in store for them.

Lisa learned Mario was first removed from his home when he was just 6 months old, after his birth mother abandoned him at their home in Redding. Neighbors called authorities to report a baby’s wails emanating from an empty home, and Mario was placed in the foster care system for the first time.

He kept getting reunified with his birth parents. But he was removed from their home five more times due to ongoing abuse.

In a stunning twist the Moraleses didn’t realize until years later, Gilbert Morales – then a firefighter-in-training – responded to the call resulting in Mario’s sixth, and final, rescue from his abusive home. Gilbert Morales was on the scene the night Mario needed immediate medical help due to a painful but curable medical condition that had gone untreated by his family.

Five months after that rescue, the Moraleses began the process to adopt Mario.

“I didn’t know what the damage to his heart was. Knowing that I would have to be patient to heal his heart was something I didn’t prepare for,” Lisa says. “I thought I could just be me, love him and everything would be fine.”

But that love would eventually teach the family about patience, how to learn through trial and error and the importance of establishing a support system outside of their tight-knit family.

Like the Morales family, the adoption system itself requires more than love to function. The system is groaning under the weight of a fast-growing number of neglect and abuse cases, and it takes a complicated support network to keep the system working.

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For the Adoption and Permanency Placement Units division of the Monterey County Department of Social Services, finding permanent, safe homes for foster children is the main focus.

Those brave enough to want to become adoptive parents must first become foster parents to prove they can meet the child’s physical, emotional, educational and social needs. The screening process also serves as a buffer period for the county – and future parents – to determine if they are able to handle the responsibility.

But it also gives birth families a chance to straighten up and get their children back, a process called reunification.

As adoption caseloads for the county get heftier, officials continue to struggle with a shortage of foster families. Some of that has to do with the stigma that comes with caring for a child with a traumatic past.

For the Moraleses, Mario’s sweet manner came with intense outbursts of anger and an inability to communicate about his deep-rooted troubles. Even though he may have been too young to remember the abuse he endured as a baby, it stayed with him – and the emotional barriers he put up became a challenging obstacle for the family.

Now, at the age of 20, Mario says he wants to become a firefighter, following the footsteps of his adopted father. He wants to give back to the community that has served him throughout his life, beginning with the Moraleses, who did something that dozens of children who end up in the county foster care system every year need: They took a child home and raised him.

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“We will tell [prospective parents] everything we can about the child’s situation so as to meet the child’s needs and safety,” says Christine Lerable, the program manager for the Adoptions and Permanency Placement Units.

Once a caregiver is deemed fit to handle the task, and it’s determined the child is unable to return home, the parental rights of the child’s biological parents are terminated – a necessary precursor to the California adoption process. Then the child can be legally adopted by the new family.

The Morales family went through the same process. They too had to become foster parents before being able to adopt their children.

To help families ease into their new family dynamics, the county offers ongoing financial support, something of an incentive to recruit foster families.

Also in Monterey County, there aren’t huge adoption fees like there are in most international adoptions or in adoptions handled by private agencies.

Yet for some foster youth, hope of landing in a safe, loving home or returning to their biological families grows dimmer as they grow older. Some age out of the system when they turn 18 – sometimes without the skills to make it on their own.

The county offers these foster youth a chance to remain in the foster care system until age 21, to provide them with additional time and support in their transition to adulthood, which includes helping them find work, registering for college or getting them vocational training.

In 2014, there were 11 teens who aged out of the system. That count more than doubled last year, with 26 foster youth being unable to find a home by the time they reached 21.

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Most children who end up in the county’s foster care system have been neglected or abused in some way, says Lerable, who oversees the adoption caseload.

In 2014, there were 54 children adopted in the county, compared to 77 adoptions finalized last year – nearly a 30-percent uptick in just one year.

Lerable says it’s rare when the county receives a call from someone who wants to give up their newborn child for adoption, but such was the case for Josey, the Moraleses’ first adopted child.

The spike in adoptions last year is attributed to more children not being able to reunify with their birth families, or close relatives, Lerable says. This could be for a number of reasons, but a rise in drug addiction is believed to be the link.

“I was an adoption worker years ago, and I feel like we have some of the same problems as before, but they are more severe now,” Lerable says. “Meth is a very difficult and prevalent issue in the county.”

But just because a parent is a drug addict, it doesn’t mean the child will be separated from their families, Lerable says. There needs to be evidence of neglect or abuse for the county to intervene.

“There would have to be a certain danger and harm to the child if we are going to go out and meet with the children and parents,” Lerable adds.

Eighteen years ago, Mario was one of those children. His birth parents, in the throes of severe drug addiction, began abusing their baby. In one instance, a babysitter called authorities to report bite marks and cigarette burns on his tiny body.

When county officials receive a report of suspected child abuse, they are legally mandated to first try and reunify the family, a process that in some cases can take up to 18 months. This gives parents time to attend counseling and address behavioral issues that could lead to a child being removed from their home.

County Social Services administers a couseling program called Pathways to Safety, designed to keep children safe in their homes – and out of the child welfare system. About 300 families in the county benefit from it every month.

But Lisa believes that emphasis can easily backfire. “They should’ve never placed [Mario] back with his family. [His birth mother] proved over and over again she couldn’t take care of her kid,” she says.

Mario’s abuse did not lead to criminal charges, but Lisa says his birth mother was jailed for unrelated crimes while she and her husband were in the process of adopting Mario.

Carol Bishop, co-founder and director at the Kinship Center, a nonprofit offering adoption and foster care support services, says it’s important to keep the children in their environment and close to friends and family during the times they experience hardship. She says this helps ease the brutal transition of being removed from their home – even if that home was an abusive one.

“It’s helps them maintain some type of connectedness with the adults and people who did support them,” Bishop says.

When reunification with families is unsuccessful, foster parents come into the picture. Last year, the majority of foster care parents were not related to the children. And as the caseload increases, it becomes more apparent that there is a shortage for foster families, Lerable says.

“There is never this huge waiting list of families where we can say, ‘OK, who are we going to choose?’ Sometimes we barely have one possibility,” she says.

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Monterey County post-adoption services are at the core of helping families maintain permanency. For the Moraleses, those services were crucial in helping them overcome the countless behavioral hurdles they faced with Mario.

“When I was in the foster care system, I guess my brain got hard-wired in a certain way,” Mario says. “I didn’t care for the world and it still haunts me and I still struggle with the fact that sometimes I am very selfish, but I try to step back and analyze why.”

Research by the Institute for Family Studies shows that at the start of kindergarten, about one in four adopted children has a diagnosed disability – twice the rate of children being raised by both biological parents. The same study says adopted children are significantly likelier than birth children to have behavioral and learning problems growing up.

Bishop says the adoption honeymoon phase for most families lasts about nine months. When Mario turned 4, two years after being adopted, the honeymoon phase ended. Soon after, the family witnessed his behavior changing. Some incidents seemed unimaginable: Mario would eat out of the garbage and manipulate people by lying and making up scenarios to get what he wanted. One time, when he was a teenager, Mario wanted a doughnut but his parents were unwilling to give him sweets; Mario went to a grocery store, told a stranger he lost his wallet and needed money to get home in order to get a doughnut. The man turned out to be an off-duty sheriff’s deputy, and took Mario back to his parents.

As he got older, he would shoplift. And sometimes, he would exhibit violent actions that made his family fear for their lives.

“Sometimes I would fear he would roam the house at night stealing things or grabbing knives,” Lisa says. “I would be afraid that I wouldn’t be able to wake up the next morning to see my kids, or God forbid, that my children would find me dead in bed.”

When these issues were ongoing, love wasn’t enough.

Bishop, whose experience on dealing with adopted children’s behavioral issues stretches more than 30 years, says raising a child who has experienced trauma is unlike anything a parent could ever prepare for.

“They will test and test and test until they fulfill their self-prophecy that they are not loveable,” Bishop says.

After numerous failed counseling sessions with different therapists – and friends and family telling Lisa to give up on Mario – she sought help from the Kinship Center. She says the nonprofit was the miracle they needed. 

“I found myself being judged and isolated and I retreated,” Lisa says. “People would think I was a horrible mother because of the things I had to do to keep my family safe.”

At the Kinship Center, the focus was on addressing the needs of the entire family, not just the at-risk child. The center also identifies, consults, trains and licenses families for adoption.“Their program is so committed to holding adoptive families together when broken kids are destructive within the home,” Lisa says.

The services at the nonprofit range from mental health treatment to family counseling. Because Kinship has a partnership with the county, there is a well-rounded menu of services for families struggling with their adopted children. (For more on those services, see sidebar, right.)

“We had to learn how to have a greater imagination than we ever thought possible,” Lisa says. “To be able to imagine what it’s like to be a child, someone you will never know what they experienced, and imagine what their world was like.”

Bishop says it is important for the child to understand the burden of change is not on them. “The parents are really the agents of change,” she adds.

Now, Mario recognizes the amount of distress he put his family through over the years. He says his outbursts were a way for him to express the trauma he did not comprehend – and still doesn’t to this day.

“I believe my sister got a chance to see the pain and anguish and mistakes I was making, and it helped her stay in the right direction,” Mario says. “It’s almost like she said Mario was what not to do.”

Josey, now 18 and living at home with her family, declined to be interviewed for this story.

The Moraleses found the miracle wasn’t love, but a support system outside of their family, and most importantly, the post-adoption services to teach them how to become not only adoptive parents, but unlicensed therapists and empowered disciplinarians.

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The idea of adoption is often romanticized: A family with resources finds a child in need of love and a home, and the happy ending writes itself. But Lisa learned first-hand that it’s not that simple.

“I feel like there are families out there who have a fight in them to help a child,” she says. “But be flexible, because this is not how the parenting system is supposed to go; you are trying to fix a broken system.”

Foster children have survival skills unlike those of a child raised in a normal home. They have coping mechanisms to protect themselves from the horrors and disappointments they have endured for too long. But willing caregivers can often help these children succeed. Mario did.

He graduated from high school, despite teachers and family friends believing he couldn’t, Lisa says. Now, he is pursuing an Emergency Medical Technician certificate at Columbia College in Sonora in hopes of becoming a firefighter.

But his past is never far away. He still struggles with the same issues he did when he was a kid, but he’s learned how to control it. Things have improved, and he seems to know how fortunate he is.

“My whole life I’ve been served by people, my teachers, family, friends, everyone sticking out with me through it all. They basically served me and I want to give back to my community,” he says.

As Lisa reminisces on the difficult times, she appears proud of the man she helped raise. She thinks back to the day she first met him and that moment at the adoption agency’s playroom.

“Mario exhibited that day a character trait he still shows today,” she says. “He is kind and gentle in spite of what the world throws at him.

“He wants to help – I pray he never forgets that about himself.”

After the Adoption

Services for adoptive families in Monterey County are available through nonprofits and county government.

Salinas PACT: A network, support and education group for foster and adoptive parents and relative caregivers. Free, experienced child care provided.

Family Ties: Three networking, skill-building, informative, recreational and support groups for relative caregivers.

Support Group for Birth Parents and Adult Adoptees: A networking and support group for birth parents and for adult adoptees.

Kinship Center: Three mental health clinics offer specialty mental health and counseling services to children and families touched by adoption, foster care, relative caregiving or legal guardianship.

For more information on these services and programs, visit www.kinshipcenter.org.