GALVESTON — It was just days before Christmas 1988. I had spent more than a decade working for Children’s Protective Services, and my husband and I remained childless despite both usual and unusual efforts to have a baby.
That year, though, Santa had an extra gift in his pack for us. Our son was born one week before Christmas, but spent his first days of life in a foster home.
It was both humbling and ironic, considering I had spent much of my professional life placing children in foster and adoptive placements.
As years passed, all of those factors no longer bear great weight on how we became a family through fairly extraordinary circumstances — just that we did.
Saturday, families who have formed under even more extraordinary circumstances will join Children’s Protective Services and members of the legal community to finalize and celebrate adoptions across Galveston County on National Adoption Day.
Lawyers for the families, along with Judge Jan Yarbrough and Associate Judge Suzanne Radcliffe, will be donating their time to preside over this significant event in the creation of new families and bringing much-needed permanency to many lives.
Most, if not all, of these families have come about through remarkable and often tragic circumstances.
The tragedy lies in the early days of children being separated from their family of origin because of circumstances beyond their control.
Most of those circumstances become a distant memory as families redefine themselves; at least for one day, they put those details behind them and celebrate as a family unit that has overcome a past and is looking forward to the future.
Seven months after we brought our son home, we celebrated the legal finalization of our new family.
Twenty-one years later, we count our blessings to have had this opportunity to be a family, and we never forget the birth and foster parents who were a part of our history and always will be.
Bless them and all of the new families created through National Adoption Day.
Trudy Deen Davis lives in Galveston.
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