Unplanned Family Finds a Way to Make Things Work

Unplanned family finds a way to make things work; Mother of seven chronicles their life together in conjunction with adoption month

New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal
Page: B6 Section: News Byline: By Erin Dwyer For the Telegraph-Journal Source:


Donna Gillis Spalding always dreamt of adopting a child - a dream that grew from her volunteer work in a Cape Breton orphanage when she was 16.
But she never imagined she and husband, Howard, would adopt seven children - all from different racial backgrounds.
"This was a totally unplanned family," she said.
Today, Spalding is launching her book, Roots, Wings & Other Things: A mother's true stories of transracial adoptions, in conjunction with National Adoption Month.
The book, published by Ontario's Rain Publishing, is coming out at a time when adoption officials in the province are once again encouraging people to consider adopting older children. It's also coming out at a time when Madonna's adoption of a Malawi boy made headline news and stirred debate about the ethics and merits of transracial adoptions.
In her book, Spalding offers an internal glimpse into an interracial family, and one of the first in Canada. Transracial adoption was not permitted in Canada until the 1970s. With little Canadian research on the success of transracial adoptions, according to the publisher, this book begins to fill the gap by providing anecdotal evidence that they do work.
Spalding said she wanted to demonstrate that a family does not have to be white, middle class with two children to be normal. She wanted to tell others that family is more important than race of culture.
"The controversy over transracial adoption usually focuses on the importance of children being raised among people of their own race," she writes. "Although we recognize the value in that point of view, we believe that having a family, regardless of one's race or traditions, is more important that not having one.
"Transracial adoption is not exploitation; it's just practical," she adds.
But Spalding has a second message. At a time when international adoptions are popular, Spalding said, there are many older children here in the province waiting for a good and loving home.
According to recent statistics from the province, more than 600 children - most of them between the ages of three and 12 - are in care needing permanent homes.
"In terms of bonding, it is just as easy to bond with an older child as a younger child," she said. "But with an older child, we had to back off being the parent. We had to let the children talk, and let them tell them this is a good place, and then let them wait until they were ready."
Having never forgot the orphans she worked with as a teenager, she decided early on she would adopt when she was married. She even made it one of her criteria for finding a husband - something Howard Spalding agreed to before their wedding in 1964.
A year after their biological son, Jade, was born, they proceeded with their first adoption - a three-month-old boy African-Canadian boy named Jason. For several years, they raised their two boys while attending classes at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, where both were pursuing their undergraduate degrees.
On the day of their graduation, instead of attending the ceremony, they drove to Cape Breton where they adopted Aleta, a two-year-old girl of First Nations descent. In the same foster home, they laid eyes on a white, African- Canadian girl. At the time, Megan was not available for adoption, but a year later the four-year-old was adopted into the Spalding home.
When Howard began practising law in Saint John, one of his first cases involved the adoption of two siblings of Chinese-Canadian descent. The adoption fell through and soon Jessica, 5, and Scott, 8, joined the growing Hampton family.
When Jade was 13, he brought home a 13-year-old boy named Angus.
"You've been bringing kids home all my life, now it's my turn," Spalding recalled her son saying.
Angus, of Acadian descent, lived with the family for two years before deciding he wanted to be adopted, becoming the seventh child in the family.
Nadine, who was of Canadian-Jamaican descent, joined the family as a 20-year- old, old enough not to have to go through the formal adoption process.
Growing up, the children did experience racism, Spalding said. But because so many of them came from different cultural backgrounds, they could rely on each other.
"The fact there were so many of them in the same situation, it really wasn't that big a problem. They could relate to each other and they formed a pretty strong unit. They could defend one another pretty readily, and did."
While most parents don't know what problems their children will encounter in life, Spalding said, she and her husband had the advantage of being able to identify some. They knew the children - some of whom had experienced physical and mental abuse before being adopted - might encounter racism, have difficulty in developing a sense of identity and difficulty accepting the concept of family.
"We knew we had to make them into really strong individuals. So we didn't sweat the little things."
While they didn't drag them to cultural centres, Spalding said, she and her husband encouraged their children to investigate their ethnic backgrounds just as she encouraged them to look up their biological family.
"In the end, it is family, not race, which matters," she said.
All of the children attended university and became professionals. During a week this past summer, three of them were married on the family homestead in Hampton, planning their weddings so they would coincide. At one wedding, there was a sweet grass ceremony and native drumming. At another wedding, the couple jumped the broom - an African-American marriage rite.
"Our children have grown beyond our beliefs and values, having to a large extent developed unique values and beliefs of their own," Spalding writes in her book. "But in the end, what we will always share is that common root system that wound its way through the years, nourishing each of us as we grew individually, and as part of a larger family."