Many parents spend the requisite nine months preparing their homes and lives for a baby. But, for Stephen Wagner and husband Brian Sedor, the wait for their son, Colton, was many years, and many challenges, in the making.
The family will celebrate Colton’s first birthday next month. The Norristown couple adopted Colton through a domestic adoption that was facilitated by A Baby Step Adoption, a local nonprofit private adoption agency, which works with many same-sex couples.
Wagner, 32, a clinical social worker, and Sedor, 39, an automotive technician, have been together since 2006. Wagner said they discussed children early on.
“We always knew we wanted kids,” he said. “But we wanted to make sure to go through all the proper steps first.”
They bought a house in 2008, got engaged in 2009 at Niagara Falls and were joined in a commitment ceremony the following summer. They looked into several family-building options — surrogacy, international and domestic adoptions — and decided that the latter was the best fit.
But, they knew they’d need to save for the often-costly process.
“We created a baby fund and put any extra money into that. I took on a second job working part-time at night doing therapy and Brian was working six days a week. But, even after two years of saving, we were still really far from our goal,” Wagner said.
They applied for a wealth of grants, but Wagner said many of the programs restricted eligibility to heterosexual couples.
“We applied for every grant we could, but the reality is that there aren’t that many grants out there for same-sex couples,” he said. “There’s a lot of discrimination against same-sex couples trying to adopt, from a grant perspective.”
The couple was selected for a grant from HelpUsAdopt.org. And, their family and friends organized a fundraiser, which raised about $20,000 in just one night.
“We felt like we had to do it on our own for a long time; we didn’t want to ask anyone for help. But, facilitated by my parents, they put together this fundraiser for us because they knew how much we were struggling to save. And we had over 200 family and friends show up; even two of my kindergarten teachers came,” Wagner said.
The couple got connected with A Baby Step, which estimated that the whole process could cost about $50,000.
A Baby Step owner and adoption attorney Barbara Casey said the organization’s offerings include case workers for both adoptive parents and birth mothers, social workers, attorneys and support staff.
“It’s a special kind of organization because there are some organizations that are just attorneys or some just representatives for the birth mothers or the families, but we have it all under one roof,” Casey said.
Wager and Sedor continued saving as they began to work with the agency, putting together a complete profile on themselves.
“We felt like we were marketing ourselves; we had to give pictures of our house, our family, a lot of information about ourselves because that’s what the birth mothers look through to pick from. One of the reasons we went with A Baby Step over others is that we also got to see information on the birth mothers, so we could say, ‘Yes, send her our information’ and then she’d look through it. Most places you just send your info out and wait to be picked. We felt like we had more say in what would make a good match.”
But, getting to the point of a match wasn’t easy.
“It was a really emotional trip. You go through a lot where you submit your information and you don’t get picked. It was a continual let-down,” Wagner said. “We were actually matched at one point with a baby and mom from Florida and it fell apart. That was just devastating. There were points where we talked about if we didn’t know if we could continue emotionally with it.”
They ultimately decided to keep pursuing a match.
Their case worker called and said they were working with a mother who was specifically seeking a same-sex couple. Wagner said he and Sedor were somewhat apprehensive because of the spot in which the woman was in her life — she was incarcerated at the time — but they decided to go ahead and submit, and she ultimately selected them.
Over the coming months, they readied their home for their son, although Wagner said they had the nagging worry that it could still fall through.
“Because she was incarcerated, we didn’t even get to meet her until November and Colton was born in December. So we still had that anxiety that, at any moment, things could fall apart and she could pull out,” he said.
But, the woman gave birth Dec. 18, and Wagner and Sedor met Colton in the hospital, an experience that Wagner said came with its own challenges.
“The hospital had just recently changed its policy to allow adoptive parents in the nursery but, if they hadn’t, he would’ve been sitting there for three days by himself because the birth mom didn’t want contact with him after he was born,” Wagner said. “I feel like we’re really behind the times on adoptive rights. The first day we were there was really stressful but once we were able to personally connect with the nurses and they heard our story, that we had been trying for three years to get him, their attitudes toward us changed.”
The couple’s family and friends were waiting for them when they got home, and the family spent the next few months waiting to finalize the adoption.
“In Pennsylvania, the birth mother has 30 days to change her mind, so we had to wait the 30 days for the paperwork to be done,” Wagner said. “Then we had three months of a social worker coming once a month to check on him until the paperwork could be sent to the court for finalization.”
And, they ran into a number of obstacles during the waiting process — including getting Colton covered on health insurance, which required a copy of his birth certificate and his Social Security number, neither of which the couple could access yet, because the adoption wasn’t finalized.
“It was months of headaches back and forth asking for information we didn’t have,” Wagner said. But, on May 2, the paperwork was signed and sealed. “At that point, he was fully ours and nothing could be changed or altered.”
The adoption went through just weeks before Pennsylvania adopted marriage equality, but the state had allowed joint adoption by same-sex couples for years — and the couple also got legally married in Delaware shortly before Colton’s birth.
Casey noted that the judge her agency, which is based in Reading and Rosemont, works with has long been LGBT-friendly — and their work with same-sex couples has helped change other minds as well.
“In Central Pennsylvania, some of the people in the courthouse weren’t always used to families that, several years ago, were thought of as non-traditional, but which today are just part of the mainstream,” she said. “But one court employee came up to me and said that some of the people we’ve worked with just won her over and made her see that these are families just like any other families. She was just really impressed by all the love.”
That love, Wagner said, got him and his husband through the ups and downs of the adoption process.
“Patience is going to be the most important thing,” he advised prospective adoptive parents. “You might at times feel like giving up, if you’re feeling rejected or hopeless and like it’s not ever going to happen. But once it does, it’s amazing. Colton has been the best thing that has happened for me and Brian. If we had a stressful day, we come home and hearing his laugh and seeing his smile make everything go away. He’s worth all the pain we went through to get him.”
For more information on Wagner and Sedor’s journey, visit Wagner’s blog, https://babysedorwagner.wordpress.com/2012/09/. For more information on A Baby Step Adoption, visit www.ababystepadoption.com.