Mother and Father can take down the pictures and store the rocking horse in the attic, pluck the magnetic alphabet off the refrigerator door. Maybe they can find some other use for the room with the yellow wallpaper. Or they could close it up and seal it like a tomb so they can go about their grieving for the merry little girl they love and are about to lose.
In the tidy backyard of the Cape Cod-style house with the cranberry shutters, Jessica DeBoer is having a picnic with her dog Miles. Her mother watches her through the blinds on the kitchen window. Everything feels so very normal. But the clock ticks loudly and the blinds all stay down and an answering machine screens the phone calls. Reporters keep calling -- and sad friends, and adoption experts -- and strangers who feel sorry for them.
When the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that Jan and Roberta DeBoer, a printer and a homemaker, had no right to keep the baby they have tried to adopt for more than two years, it lit a long, scorching fuse on a time bomb. The DeBoers were given a month to turn her over to her biological parents in Iowa, Dan and Cara Schmidt. This afternoon they have 26 days left.
"I sit here and count the stupid hours and the days and mark them off a dumb calendar as to my last moment, my last hour, my last kiss." Roberta sits in the forest-green dining room, sipping herbal tea out of a mug decorated with little footprints, hearts and the words IT'S A GIRL. How is she holding herself together? "People can't understand," she says. "They think I'm falling to pieces nonstop in front of Jessi. But I would never do that." And then Robby DeBoer breaks down, heaving and weeping. The cries are not plaintive, not whimpers, but sobs that send her body shaking and her voice coming from deep inside her. And she is angry.
"We let our government make irrational decisions for children to suffer and be condemned." She wants to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. "They're going to walk away just like Michigan did and say, 'Wish we could have done something but there's nothing to do because our laws dictate otherwise.' I wonder if they could take their little two-year-old kids and walk into a black forest and just leave the child and walk away . . . And not feel the pain . . . How not to feel the pain . . .?"
In this case, everyone feels the pain. Here are Jessica's two sets of parents, those who conceived her and those who have raised her, fighting a passionate battle over who gets to keep her. Then there are all the other adoptive parents in the U.S., many of whom have been watching this ghastly spectacle unravel in the courts and go to sleep wondering whether their precious child will stay their child. And finally, of course, there is Jessica, the one party to the case who has most at stake and the smallest voice and is at the mercy of judges whose rulings at times have seemed little better than suggesting that she be sawed in half.
A LEGAL LABYRINTH
Cara Clausen was 28 and single, working in an Iowa shipping factory, when she got pregnant three years ago. She had just broken up with her boyfriend Dan, a trucker, to start dating Scott Seefeldt -- so it was Scott's name she put on the birth certificate when Jessica was born. Two days later, Cara waived her parental rights and put the baby up for adoption.