As Casey Douglas nears adulthood, she learns that she has an unusual health condition and will therefore not be able to have children.
For Casey, this news was a blow. In a blog post she wrote for Love What Matters, Casey noted that as a pastor’s daughter, she had to have enough children to fill an entire seat for Sunday service.
Casey lived her life feeling different from most young women until she met her future husband, Peter. Casey noticed that Peter didn’t care that she couldn’t have children biologically, and the two eventually became husband and wife.
The happy couple felt from the start that God wanted them to serve others. In this capacity, Casey and Peter become volunteer youth pastors in their church, helping children from low-income families get a good start in life. After three years of mentoring young people in their community, Casey and Peter felt they had to do more and decided to become adoptive parents. However, in their twenties, Casey and Peter encountered a mostly negative reaction from the older people in their lives. Undeterred, the couple began taking classes at Child Protective Services to prepare for their future as adoptive parents.
In the nine months it took Casey and Peter to get their foster license, the couple became the subject of more ridicule in their community when they announced they would only be adopting children over 13 years old. The couple wants to raise someone else’s children, and they note that adopted children usually come from difficult backgrounds.
Despite all these comments, Casey persevered, later telling her friends that she often cried in her future children’s rooms for fear that they would never know the love she had for them.
When Casey and Peter got their permits, they were told that a special child needed to be placed in foster care. By the age of 16, Randall had been passed on from parent to parent his entire life and lived with abuse and neglect. Casey and Peter welcomed Brandal into their home and the teenager cried for the kindness he showed her.
“He looked at me and said, ‘I’ve waited my whole life to be treated like you,'” Casey wrote on his blog. I had never had real parents before.”
As the three grew closer, Randall worried about what would happen once he turned 18 and became a legal adult. One day, Randall bursts into tears, begging Casey to let him stay even after he is an adult. After taking Randall, Casey promised she would always be his mother.
The three legally became a family on January 10, 2019. When Randall took on the names of Casey and Peter, the three told a judge that they would always love and care for each other. Randall is now living a life he never thought possible. His favorite hobbies are baseball and fishing and he also shares on his Youtube channel.
Speaking of adoption, Casey says, “Parenthood came to us in a really unconventional way, but it was more than I could have ever hoped for. In two years, Randall has come a long way and continues to grow every year. day. Boy whose dream was to smoke weed and live alone And now he’s a new person.”
Being a parent doesn’t always mean raising a young child and helping him grow into an adult; It can also mean that you come into someone’s life at any time and help them become what they really want. There are still different stories of other people who have also been adopted as “adults”, so to speak, and how their lives change due to adoption.
Rebecca Masterson, for example, also adopted her son Johnny at the age of 18, changing her life and that of her children. Of her kids, she says “those two define me, they’re my life’s work. Which is funny because those kids weren’t on my to-do list.”
Somehow they happened. “While adoptions aren’t always unplanned (most often quite the opposite), for some people adoption may not be on the radar until they meet a life-changing orphan in need. .
Parents who raise and nurture their family, no matter how their children are part of it, are truly some of the most generous and loving people there are.
