Adoption: Giving Life … Not Giving Up

Megan made Bill and Lois Martin parents. She made them grandparents. She made them grateful for Kurt and Sheri Behme.

Kurt and Sheri, you see, are Megan’s biological parents. More than 20 years ago, they were young adults struggling to decide how best to handle Sheri’s unexpected pregnancy. She was still in high school; Kurt was barely out.

“I always just knew I wasn’t ready to be a full-time mom,” Sheri said recently, in the same Catholic Charities offices where she decided to put her baby up for adoption. Kurt, while acknowledging he was the father, had no formal say in the decision. “I definitely supported it,” he said. “We weren’t married, but we knew that we were going to be together forever.”

Theirs is one of hundreds of stories – more than 1,000 in all – that Catholic Charities has helped write over the past 76 years. “We are older than the Diocese of Evansville,” said Director Sharon Burns, “and we are honored to have been part of 1,054 adoption placements through 2012.”

Burns is reaching out to families across the diocese whose lives were changed through Catholic Charities’ adoption program to be part of an “Adoption Family Reunion” on Saturday, Aug. 3, at Evansville’s Bosse Field. The Frontier League Evansville Otters baseball team hosts the Florence (Ky.) Freedom in a doubleheader, and the reunion will include tickets to the game and a “Ballpark Buffet” before the first game, which starts at 4:35 p.m.

“Adoption involves multiple decisions to give life,” Burns said. “We want this reunion to serve as recognition for the many hundreds of those decisions we have been blessed to be a part of at Catholic Charities.”

Megan went to the Martins just a few weeks after Sheri delivered her first daughter – on her due date in a quick-and-uncomplicated birth. “God had a hand in it,” Sheri said. “I had a little bit of a backache, but basically had no labor at all. I think if the labor and delivery had been more involved, the adoption would have been much tougher. As it was, she was whisked away as soon as she was born.”

Burns recalled that, back then, babies routinely went to foster homes for a minimum of 30 days before final adoption. Before Megan left the hospital for her temporary home, however, Kurt made his way to the nursery for a quick visit with his daughter. “She grabbed my finger with her toes, and I’ll never forget how surprised I was by such a strong grip. Then, she grabbed it with her fingers.

“I knew … I had to get out of there,” he said, barely holding back tears. “I kissed her hand and left.”

Fast forward to March 10, 2007 … the next time Kurt got to kiss his first daughter’s hand. Lives happened – literally – in the interim. Megan Martin made it through school, not without some grade-school teasing about being adopted. “I remember we all talked about it at school,” she said, “and those who made fun of me actually apologized. It never came up again after that.”

Megan got a younger brother, also adopted by the Martins. Matthew is 21 now. She’s 27, married to Andy Wathen, and a mom herself – to Kylan (7), Katelyn (5), Kinley (2) and Khloe (10 months).

Kurt and Sheri, as they knew they would be before Megan was born, are married and have two more children: Alex (13) and Anne (9).

And they all have each other. Talk about one big, happy family….

Catholic Charities facilitated Megan’s request for the names and addresses of her birth parents after she turned 21. “I wrote the letter when I was 18,” she said, “and learned I’d have to wait three more years.” She’d been waiting quite some time already, her mind made up.

“As I grew older,” Megan said, “I just didn’t feel complete. I didn’t know where I came from … just where I was supposed to grow.” Lois and Bill supported the decision from the get-go. “Mom always told me I’d grown in her heart, just not in her belly,” Megan said.

When the time came and she’d written the letters, the response from Catholic Charities was as unsettling in some ways as it was exciting in others. “I really wanted to meet them,” Megan said of Kurt and Sheri, “and it turned out they only lived 10.1 miles away. I looked their address up on Google Maps.

“But there was no way I wanted to break up the four of us,” she said of the Martin family – her adoptive parents and brother. “I asked all of them how they felt about me making contact. If any of them had been reluctant, I never would have done it.”

They weren’t, so she did – and that first meeting with “where she came from” occurred right away. Kurt remembers parking, getting out, and doing something he’d dreamed of for more than 20 years.

“I’ll never forget Megan telling me about it,” Lois said. “She said, ‘When he came up, he said … the last time I saw you I kissed your hand, and I’m gonna do it again….’” He did, but remained mostly speechless.

“After he kissed my hand, he said ‘I don’t know what to do,’” Megan remembered. “I said, ‘Well, you could let her out of the car!’” Kurt had left Sheri in their vehicle with a huge floral arrangement for their first-born. “I never would have gotten out of there without his help,” she said with a laugh.

Today, two families that found each other through decisions to give life have bonded into one amazing group that includes biological and adoptive parents; biological and adoptive grandparents; multiple generations of brothers and sisters; even an aunt and uncle (Anne and Alex) who enjoy the same video games and TV shows as their nieces and nephews (sister Megan’s children).

“I always felt like one day this would happen,” Lois Martin said of the meeting that led to creation of an amazing extended family. “Deep down, I always wanted to thank (Kurt and Sheri) for giving us these happy years … and grandkids.”

“So many people in this world think of adoption as the decision to give something up,” Burns said. “Megan and her families are proof that adoption involves giving … but not giving up.

“I hope any adoptive family reading this will come to Bosse Field Aug. 3 for the Adoption Family Reunion,” she added. “We celebrate your lives and your families, and we invite you to come and celebrate with us.”

Tickets to Catholic Charities’ Aug. 3 Adoption Family Reunion are $7.50 each and include a Ballpark Buffet and ticket to the Otters’ doubleheader against Florence. Reserve tickets online at www.charitiesevv.org/adoption-reunion, or call (812) 423-5456. Any person – and family members – who was adopted, or who has adopted, through Catholic Charities is welcome to attend.