One Mom's Love
Brenda Barker lives with Faith ... and Grace, Joy, Melody, Samuel, Daniel, and Andrew
“We have this basket in the laundry room that is filled with socks. (My children) come and dig them out, and about once a month, someone will sort them,’’ Brenda says with a laugh. Such an easy sense of humor comes in handy, particularly when you’re the mother to seven children.
Melody, 8, especially loves when her mom teases her. “She calls me funny names and tickles me,” she says.
Each of her children gets special moments with Mom. “The toughest thing is making sure everyone’s needs are met. But it’s really a joy. Each one is different and unique. I just love sitting and talking with them, seeing all their different gifts,’’ Brenda says.
Indeed, a large family can be a challenge, but it’s one for which she and her husband, Ken, would go to the ends of the earth. Because they did.
Twins Faith and Grace, 15, are from India. Joy, 11, is from China. Sam, 9, and Andrew, 8, are from Latvia. And Melody, 8, and Daniel, 4, both are from Vietnam.
The couple from Brentwood, Tenn., didn’t set out to become the parents of seven children. “No way,” laughs Brenda, whose personal success with international adoption led her to work in the field and become an outspoken adoption advocate. “We struggled with infertility for five years and then started looking into adoption. We didn’t start out and say, ‘Why don’t we adopt seven kids?’”
When they began looking into both U.S. and international adoptions, the first babies available were Grace and Faith, twins from India. “She (the mother) had several children and they were very impoverished,” Brenda says. “It was really where God led us,’’ she says of that first international adoption in 1988.
The family grows
Ken, from a family of four, always had expected to have two or three children, but once he and Brenda went to India to get their girls and saw poor children begging for food, things changed. “She just wanted to adopt all the orphans in the world,’’ Ken says of his wife.
Still, caring for twin girls was a challenge for the new parents. “It took us a few years to recover,’’ Brenda says. When the twins were 4, the Barkers decided to adopt again.
Joy joined the family about a year later, a new arrival from China. “Then I said, ‘What about a boy?’ and we adopted Sam—he’s 9—from Latvia when he was 3 months old,’’ Brenda says. Samuel, who had a cleft lip, required five surgeries in the first year he was in the United States.
Brenda heard a missionary speak about how some children with cleft lips were killed in other countries because of superstition that they were possessed by demons. Brenda, whose own son’s lip had been repaired, was moved by the plight of those children to adopt again. “I thought, well, we can take one more,’’ she says. The Barkers asked for a child with medical needs. After they had waited for awhile, a boy from Latvia without medical needs was up for adoption. So Andrew joined the family in 1994.
Although the wait often is shorter than for domestic adoptions, Brenda cautions that international adoption can be costly, from $12,000 to $20,000 for travel costs, Immigration and Naturalization Service fees, and donations to orphanages.
Paying parents for a baby is illegal, says Brenda, who is the southeast director for Children’s Hope International, an international adoption agency. Last year, she won a congressional award—Angels in Adoption—for her work there. And in 1997, the Barkers were named Family of the Year for Tennessee by state Family and Children’s Services.
Facing challenges
But frightening days would lie ahead for the happy family. That year, Sam was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia, the most common form of childhood leukemia.
“We were devastated,’’ Brenda says, recalling the days she spent at the hospital with her ill son. But Sam, who most likely would have died had he remained in Latvia, completed treatment and appeared to be in remission.
With an 80 percent to 90 percent cure rate, the family believed Sam was out of the woods and decided God was leading them to adopt again. Brenda, whose growing family had led to her work at Catholic Charities adoption services, had by then joined Children’s Hope International. When that agency began arranging adoptions of Vietnamese children, Brenda saw it as a sign that they should adopt again.
This time, they asked for a sibling group, and Melody and Daniel joined the family in 1999. They were told the girl and boy were brother and sister, but later learned they were cousins.
Just a year and a half later, the family faced the nightmare of Sam’s relapse and the knowledge that a bone marrow transplant was his only hope.
“It was hard. But I have a great husband and we tag-teamed a lot,’’ she says of the return to days spent in the hospital, while still juggling the needs of six other children. “It was really difficult. It was really hard on Melody … She was new to our family and that was really hard on the whole group,’’ Brenda says.
Melody already had experienced much pain in her young life. “She had lost both parents, (and) she had been in the orphanage for about six weeks. Her birth dad had died, and her mother placed her for adoption. She had lost a lot.”
During that difficult adjustment, Brenda was spending all of her time at the hospital with Sam. “It really allowed Ken to bond with them,’’ Brenda acknowledges, adding that her mother came from Texas to help, too.
“I was going, ‘Okay, God, this is really more than I can handle.’ I know it is with the grace of God that we keep going,” Brenda says. Sam received a bone marrow transplant earlier this year, but he must stay home, and out of public, for a year to protect his immune system. That means Brenda and Ken, senior editorial director at Word Music, take turns working from home to stay with Sam.
“We do have a great life. It’s not necessarily the life you would pick, but that’s all right. He’s worth every bit of it,’’ she says of Sam.
Happy times
Otherwise, things are back to normal—as normal as life gets in a family so large they had to add an extra seat to their Suburban to get everyone in the same vehicle.
Brenda and Ken are handling their challenges, both financially and logistically. “I’m very organized. We’ve always been frugal, and I do work full time,’’ Brenda explains.
And though Sam’s illness is always there, happy times are abundant in the Barker household. Melody, the only child old enough to remember her life before adoption, says life in America with her new family is “really fun.”
The Barkers try to make sure their children learn about their various cultural heritages—Melody likes to wear a traditional Vietnamese outfit—and hope they eventually can take each child back to his or her birth country.
Despite busy schedules, Brenda and Ken make a point to spend one-on-one time with each child. Joy prefers to simply sit and talk with her mother. Grace and Faith love to shop. Andrew likes his parents to attend his soccer and baseball games.
“You can’t be everything to everyone,” Brenda says. “I think parenting is going with your heart. Your heart is usually right.”
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