You take it on faith
You take it to the heart
The waiting is the hardest part
— Tom Petty, “The Waiting,” 1981
PORT ANGELES — Snug in her mother’s lap, cheek resting on her shoulder, Cameron Phimpakan Baermann looks as though she was born right here.
But Cameron, 2, arrived here just last May, on a jet from Bangkok, Thailand. Her mother Jackie Baermann flew to an orphanage there to bring her home after a three-year wait.
Those years felt very long. But Baermann and her husband Tom had endured the wait to adopt a child before, so they know something about patience — and gratitude.
When the Baermanns married, they knew they wanted kids. When their hopes of conceiving a child weren’t realized, they heard plenty about in vitro fertilization. But they also knew, Baermann says, that it wasn’t for them.
The couple instead went to Adoption Advocates International, the agency in Port Angeles that has found families for 4,000 children — from Ethiopia to China — since its inception in 1983.
They hoped for a healthy baby girl and were told that their best chances would be for a baby from China.
Yet because of politics and paperwork, two and a half years would pass before Baermann would board the plane, and then travel to an orphanage in Guangzhou where she was to meet her first daughter.
Dylan Zu Yan Baermann, now an outspoken 5-year-old, is well-traveled. She went with her mom to Thailand this past Mother’s Day to meet her new sister, Cameron. Back home in Port Angeles, this family of four relishes the simple pleasures of growing up in a small town: Dylan recently learned to ride her bicycle — without training wheels — and to roller-skate, and every Monday, her dad takes time off work to play with his two daughters. They go to the park and, every single week, to Chestnut Cottage for lunch.
For Baermann, 39, the bond between mother and child is made out of love, not biology.
“You just feel,” she says, “like this is your child.”
Yet the waiting period for an international adoption is not for the frail of heart.
“There’s not a lot that can be said. I did a lot of journaling, a lot of crying,” Baermann remembers.
The second time around was a little easier for Mom and Dad, since they had Dylan. But when they brought Cameron home, life was not so easy for their older daughter. She had been an only child for about three years, so having a sister was “a trauma,” Baermann says with a smile.
These days, she feels, life is about the same as it is in any households with little kids: It’s loud. The girls have a lot of energy. Fortunately, there’s a trail nearby that goes down to Morse Creek, and a lot of play dates to go on.
Through it all, Adoption Advocates has provided support, from its own staff at the office on Peabody Street and by connecting the Baermanns with other adoptive families nearby. The agency conducts some 300 adoptions per year, 240 of them international, said acting codirector Gay Knutson.
Adoption Advocates finds families for children from Ghana, Burkina Faso, Uganda, Thailand, the Republic of Georgia and China, as well as from Layla House, the orphanage it operates in Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis Ababa. The agency also conducts adoptions of children who are in Washington state’s foster-care system.
The adoption fees are expensive, Knutson acknowledges, but they include the plane fare, and the parents’ stay for a week or more in the country where their child has lived. Thailand is the least costly at $12,000 to $13,000, while a Ugandan adoption can cost as much as $20,000. A domestic adoption is another story: the fee is $800, and the state of Washington reimburses that.
Knutson, with adoptions director Susan Holmgren, is acting codirector of Adoption Advocates since founder Merrily Ripley retired Oct. 31.
Among her jobs is the home study, in which she visits a prospective family’s household and helps the would-be parents discern whether they are ready
to adopt.
“Our families are all over the world,” Knutson notes.
There are about 10 Adoption Advocates families on the North Olympic Peninsula — and Knutson has done home studies in Israel, Senegal, Australia and other faraway places.
“We’re kind of a big operation for a small town,” she says with a smile.
“We have a real need right now,” Knutson adds, “for families interested in special-needs children from China,” from infants up to age 3 and 4.
Many such children have problems that are quite solvable through surgery: they were born with cleft palates or cleft lips.
Baermann, for her part, says it meant a lot to her and to Tom, who owns Pacific Office Equipment in Port Angeles, to work with a local agency.
“The waiting was, hands down, the most challenging thing,” she adds. And “it is so worth it.”