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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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Clark County couple give thanks for 5 kids adopted from foster care

By , Columbian staff writer
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Gary and Michelle Fowler spend time with their five adopted children, from left, Jeramiah, 8; Cortana, 5; Daniel, 15; Elijah, 3; and Kara, 4. &quot;For a whole year we didn't get any sleep,&quot; Gary Fowler said.
Gary and Michelle Fowler spend time with their five adopted children, from left, Jeramiah, 8; Cortana, 5; Daniel, 15; Elijah, 3; and Kara, 4. "For a whole year we didn't get any sleep," Gary Fowler said. But he added that he's probably happier now than ever before. Photo Gallery

To learn more about adoption, visit: www.dshs.wa.gov/ca/adopt

o Nearly 10,000 Washington state children live in foster care and approximately 1,500 are eligible for legal, permanent adoption.

o Each year, across the nation, nearly 25,000 children age out of foster care without ever finding a permanent home and family.

o The average foster child waits more than two years for legal adoption; nearly 20 percent wait five years or more.

To learn more about adoption, visit: www.dshs.wa.gov/ca/adopt

o Minority children, older children and children with health problems or disabilities are particularly difficult to place.

o Sibling groups also are hard to place, but the benefits are great for the children, who have a continued sense of remaining with biological family.

Michelle and Gary Fowler like to say that their five-year plan to give back to the community grew into a 20-year plan when they weren’t looking — because they were too busy chasing kids around.

They moved to Vancouver from Oregon in 2000. They had three children between them from previous marriages, but those kids were all growing up and moving on. “We just got bored,” Michelle joked.

There’s a serious truth underneath the joke, though: Her own mother adopted nine children, and Michelle was closer in some ways to the adoptees than to her biological siblings, she said. It got her accustomed to home life being something of a circus, she said, and it helped her see all the things a family can be.

“We’ve always loved having kids,” said Gary Fowler. He said the couple used to run “Camp Fowler” every summer; all their relatives dropped off all their kids and for one week it was sleepaway camp at home. “There were 15 of them and they really loved it,” he said. “We have a ton of nieces and nephews.”

The couple decided to get into foster parenting. It was a way to help out with a world of needy children while maintaining some controls and conditions of their own — for example, at first they only wanted to take boys, and “not too young,” Gary said. (Girls are just so melodramatic and complicated, he said.)

But once fostering was underway, staffers with the state’s Department of Social and Health Services must have realized what a good thing they had. The Fowler phone kept ringing with special requests from desperate social workers and case managers: could they take this or that baby or young girl, just for a night or two?

“We didn’t want to adopt at first, we just wanted to help out in whatever way we could. But we ended up falling in love with the kids,” Gary said. “How can you say no when you’ve got an empty bed?”

“You learn so much about what kids need, you hear so many horror stories,” said Michelle.

Scary and fine

At first those horror stories both intrigued and repelled the Fowlers, who already knew how tough it can be to tend children who’ve been neglected and abused and are “processing a lot of trauma, grief and loss,” Michelle said. Ditto dealing with the biological parents, who can either be “scary” or “just fine,” Michelle said.

Given all that, the Fowlers’ particular path to adoption seems gradual and smart: they adopted the whole group of four young siblings and the older teen boy they’d already been fostering for more than a year. That way they knew exactly what they were getting into. The only downside was being at the mercy of the biological parents’ own ambitions and plans as well as the final say of the court system. That meant making a huge commitment of resources, time and heart — with no guarantee that the adoption judge would say yes in the end, Gary said.

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“The biggest challenge is not knowing if they’re going to be yours,” he said. “That is stressful. At any time something could happen. It could end in a return home instead of an adoption.”

Fortunately, all went well, the Fowlers said, and all five kids — ages 3 through 15 — became their legal children this summer. Relations with the original families are “open and great,” Michelle said. “We try to keep them all connected with as many of their biological family members as possible.”

Has it been an issue that the children are all black while their new parents are white? Only to others, they said. Some folks will walk boldly up in public places like the supermarket and start grilling them: Where did those kids come from? They’re not really all yours, are they?

“Yes,” Michelle laughed, “they’re really all mine.”

Kicks and slumps

What’s life like in the Fowlers’ Barberton-area home? “For a whole year we didn’t get any sleep,” Gary said. “I’d do it all again.”

o Nearly 10,000 Washington state children live in foster care and approximately 1,500 are eligible for legal, permanent adoption.

o Each year, across the nation, nearly 25,000 children age out of foster care without ever finding a permanent home and family.

o The average foster child waits more than two years for legal adoption; nearly 20 percent wait five years or more.

o Minority children, older children and children with health problems or disabilities are particularly difficult to place.

o Sibling groups also are hard to place, but the benefits are great for the children, who have a continued sense of remaining with biological family.

Things have smoothed out lately. The boys share one bedroom and the girls share another one. They play games. They watch movies. They root for the Blazers. They experience the usual insanity over getting up and out on time in the morning. Bedtime is even crazier.

And because Gary teaches karate for a living, the whole crowd does karate classes a couple of times a week. They’d just returned from a tournament when The Columbian stopped by, and the children were only too pleased to demonstrate some startlingly powerful kicks. Oldest brother Daniel put his shoulder into a thick foam body shield while his diminutive new step-siblings launched their feet at it like missiles. Only occasionally did a foot stay up in the air while the rest of the body went down. Everybody laughed — even Daniel, who absorbed an impressive amount of padded pummelling.

At 15, Daniel grasps what he’s endured and where he’s landed. He was too little to understand just how troubled his original home life was, he said, but being shuffled to three different foster homes in five years, and the death of his biological mother from a long-standing heart condition when he was in eighth grade, led to deep depression — what he calls “the slumps.”

When he met the Fowlers, he said, “I had this feeling that this was the right family for me. It was this brand-new feeling that someone wanted to take me into their life forever. They wanted me to be healthy and happy and give me clean clothes and stuff.” When the judge gave the final OK for this arrangement and gave him a hug, Daniel said, “everybody started crying” — including the judge and himself.

Daniel said he’s loving his new big-brother role for this gaggle of younger children.

“I have a lot of sympathy and empathy for people,” he said. “I used to have a lot of anger but it’s changing. Everything’s getting better.”

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