Parents to All

Parents to All

It all came down to one tense night and one very difficult decision in 1994. Melvin Dortch’s sister Sharron had been diagnosed with cancer and given less than a year to live. As a single mother, what would become of her eight children, ages 6 to 14?

Melvin and his wife, Jackie, who had been married two years, had a small, two-bedroom house in Atmore, Ala., (pop. 7,676) and both worked full time.

“I thought we could take two of them, maybe three,” Melvin recalls. But Jackie told him bluntly, “If you’re not willing to try, and these are your blood, I might as well pack my stuff and go home. We’re going to have to do this because I’m not going to see them separated.”

For Freddie Miller, the Dortchs’ decision was an answer to prayer. As a volunteer for the American Cancer Society, she and several other women had taken turns driving Sharron to her doctor’s appointments, and had grown well-acquainted with the kids.

“When I heard that they were going to take them all, I said, ‘Thank you, Lord’ because this is what their mother wanted,” Miller recalls. “I couldn’t believe it really because I couldn’t conceive of anybody taking on that many children not ever having had any.” But the Dortchs weren’t just any couple.

“It was a real adjustment to go from just two to ten in the house,” Jackie acknowledges. Suddenly she found herself doing three loads of laundry a day and trying to coordinate schedules for her new brood. “We only had one bathroom at first, and when we got up in the morning, it was like chaos.”

From the first time the children met Jackie, a mutual bond took hold and grew. “They were interested in everything that Jackie did, and she would teach them,” Melvin recalls. “The boys sort of hung with me and the girls hung with her. It didn’t take me long to see that we probably could do this,” he adds.

Aided by generosity from the community, they purchased a compact five-bedroom, two-bathroom home, which makes good use of every available inch of space. “This house is a dream,” Melvin says. “It’s exactly the way I pictured. Of course, it’s had a lot of wear and tear and traffic.”

Melvin admits he’s the worrier of the family, offset by Jackie’s steady optimism and resourcefulness. “I’m up all through the night thinking ‘What are we going to do next?’ or ‘How are we going to do this?’ And the next morning, Jackie will say, ‘I think what we’ll do is this.’

“My biggest worry is not the kids or the bills. It’s her. She goes constantly. She says, ‘We’ve got to keep things going.’ She never says, ‘Look what I’ve done.’ She doesn’t think that way.”

Her greatest reward, Jackie says, is “seeing their faces and to see them blossom. They’re all doing pretty good in school. They’ve got a chance now and I tell them that they can be anything they want to be. I say to them, ‘Listen to yourself. Don’t listen to other people.’”

Daughter Lenada, 18, recalls how she’d joined a club at school, and later wanted to get out. “But (Jackie) told me I had to stay in it. She wanted me to learn what it meant to stick with the commitment I’d made.”

When Jackie became a surrogate mother, she “didn’t think about on down the road. I was thinking about the moment—giving them a stable place that they could call home. If someone had told me when I was 20 that this was what I would be doing, I would’ve probably said, ‘Not me.’ Now we’re Aunt Jackie and Uncle Melvin to even the kids’ friends,” acknowledges Jackie with satisfaction.

Nearly seven years into their commitment, Melvin is pleased that the children are doing well and a new addition to their cramped quarters is due to be completed soon with the help of benefactors. “We do a lot of praying and being thankful,” he acknowledges.

“They’ve done a miracle,” is how Freddie Miller puts it.

Michael Nolan is a frequent contributor to American Profile.

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