The Children of Strangers

Each child’s arrival, Sue said, was “something that, after everyone’s settled, you miss, and you say, Oh, it’s time to do that again.”Illustration by Roderick Mills

When Sue Hoag was twelve, she read a book, “The Family Nobody Wanted,” about a couple in the nineteen-forties who adopted a multiracial posse of twelve children, despite having very little room or money. Sue thought it would be wonderful to be part of such a family, and she begged her parents to adopt. They had only four kids in their family, she pleaded—surely there was room for more. Her parents said no. But Sue kept thinking about the book, and by the time she was fifteen she had met her future husband, Hector Badeau, and by the time she was eighteen she and Hector had planned their family: they would have two kids and adopt two. By the time they were four years out of college and four years married, they had had the two kids and adopted the two kids and thought their family was complete.

But there were more than two children in the world who needed parents. There were so many children who, because they were too old, or too violent, or too traumatized, or unable to walk, or too close to death, or the wrong color, or had too many brothers and sisters, were unlikely ever to be adopted; and when Hector and Sue thought about what those children’s lives would be like without parents, lives that were already unimaginably difficult, they could not bear it. So by the time Sue was twenty-eight and Hector was thirty, they had had two kids and adopted nine, and by the end of the following year they had had two kids and adopted fourteen; and long before they adopted their last, twenty-second child, eleven years later, the four-child family they had imagined in high school was a distant memory, and something wilder and more explosive, more exhilarating and more crushing and unfathomably more complicated, had taken its place.

Terrible, painful things happened that they were not able to prevent—three children dead, two in prison, teen-age pregnancies, divorces. But there were also birthday parties and weddings and graduations; there were grandchildren and great-grandchildren, most of them still living in the same neighborhood, within a few blocks of one another and their parents, in and out of one another’s homes all the time, minding one another’s children. And every Easter and Fourth of July and Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s the children and the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren gathered with Sue and Hector in the big house they still lived in, although they couldn’t afford it, and ate a meal together. And though some were missing—three dead, two in prison—still, most were there, year after year, and, for everything that had happened, they were a family.

Twenty-two children didn’t seem as strange to Hector as it did to most people, because he came from sixteen. His mother, Delvina, was born on a farm in Quebec, and went to school through the eighth grade; his father, Philorum, left school in Montreal at nine to earn money chopping wood. Philorum married Delvina and moved to Barre, Vermont, in search of work, though neither of them spoke English. He found a job in the quarries as a stonecutter. Of their sixteen children, fifteen lived—the fifth died at three, falling down the stairs. Hector was the twelfth, born in 1956. They were poor: the most Philorum ever made was a hundred dollars a week. The younger boys slept six to a bed.

Philorum was a harsh father, strict and unloving. He drank a lot, and was often gone all weekend on a bender. When he came home, sometimes he beat the kids with a horsewhip or an electrical cord. By the time Hector was twelve, he had decided that he disliked his father, and that when he grew up he would be a father who spent time with his kids and told them he loved them.

The Badeau boys were known for hockey, but Hector was the best of them, the star of Spaulding High School. He had curly hair, and in high school he grew it out into a giant seventies Afro with a mustache to match. The coach wanted him to try out for the pros, but by then he had met Sue. He spotted her in the fall of 1973, playing field hockey. She was pretty—she had been crowned Junior Miss of Barre, and was first runner-up in the state beauty pageant.

In their town, Sue’s family seemed well off. Both her parents had gone to college; her father was an engineer for the state highway department, her mother was a dental hygienist. They led Brownie troops and Girl Scout troops and coached Little League. Their house was nicely decorated and exceptionally clean. Sue came from the kind of family Hector wanted to belong to. After six months, he knew that Sue was the girl for him.

Sue had always gone to church with her parents, but, around the time she met Hector, her ballet teacher started inviting her to Bible-study classes, and she started getting religious in a more serious way. To Hector, God had been someone you bargained with: you would obey his rules if he got you stuff. But he and Sue came to believe that the teachings of Jesus required them to support the oppressed, to care for the least, and to seek justice.

Of Hector’s siblings, only his sister Irene had gone to a four-year college, but Sue was going to Smith to major in child development, and she persuaded Hector to go to a four-year school, too. He went to New England College and spent a lot of his time drinking in a toga, but when he visited Sue at Smith he was well behaved, and they got engaged. They married right after graduation, in the summer of 1979.

The first thing they did was to take out a large loan to buy a Christian bookstore in Northampton, where Sue had worked while she was in college. They thought that having their own business would be a good way to have time to spend with their children. Hospitals nearby had begun to deinstitutionalize their mental patients, and there were a lot of homeless people wandering around, so Sue and Hector decided to set aside a room in the back of their store for them to sit in. They put out an ashtray and had a pot of coffee going all day. Occasionally, they took someone home to sleep on their sofa. They talked to the homeless people and discovered that a lot of them didn’t have families, and they wondered whether they would be homeless if they did.

“It’s a pluot—an apricot that self-identifies as a plum.”

They had planned to wait a few years to have kids, taking time to pay off their loans for college and the bookstore, but Sue got pregnant a few months after the wedding. The child, Chelsea, was born in the spring of 1980. A few weeks afterward, two college students visited their church and talked about how they had spent a summer working for Mother Teresa. This seemed to Sue and Hector like a sign from God. They had planned to adopt the child who was, as Hector put it, “most in need of a home and least likely to get one.” And who could be more in need of a home than a destitute Calcutta orphan?

HECTOR: Sue and I, for better or for worse, we—

SUE: Act.

HECTOR: Just would come up with an idea and would do it. And it seemed like the thing to do, so we called the agency the next day.

SUE: We didn’t even call, we walked in. Walk-ins to an adoption agency!

The process turned out to be more complicated than they had anticipated. The social worker told them that foreign adoptions from India were difficult right then, but there were children from El Salvador, where a civil war had begun the year before, in need of families. Would they adopt one of those? Sue and Hector had not imagined adopting an older child, but they said yes. They adopted a boy, Jose. He arrived in bad shape. He cried out in terror if he saw a bridge or a dog; he sobbed at night and woke up screaming. Little by little, he grew calmer.

Six months after Jose arrived, Sue discovered that she was pregnant again. Money was getting very tight: sales at the bookstore were bad, so Hector got a job as a short-order cook at a diner at night, then started working the early-morning shift on the line at a factory. But, when the adoption agency called them, not long before the new baby was due, to ask if they still wanted to adopt a baby from India, they said yes. They also signed up to be foster parents and started taking teen-agers into the house. The baby from India, Raj, arrived; he had been born prematurely and had mild cerebral palsy, and, at four months, he weighed seven pounds.

In the beginning, Sue and Hector had both worked at home and in the bookstore. Then, after Isaac was born, Sue decided that she wanted to try being a full-time mother, and stayed home with the four babies. She hated it. In a real crisis, Sue was calm, but her self-control disintegrated rapidly when she was faced with smaller domestic challenges such as diapers or head lice. After a few months, it became clear that she was never going to try that again. She and Hector made a deal that from then on she would do all the paperwork and he would change all the diapers. And, over the years, it became clear that Sue, with her degree from Smith and her aptitude for public speaking, was better equipped to make money outside the house; Hector, who didn’t mind diapers and disliked having a boss, was better staying home. She looked at her mother’s life and he looked at his father’s life, and they both did the opposite.

SUE: He wanted to be around more, I wanted to be around less.

By this time, the money situation had grown so bad that they decided they had no choice but to move. It seemed impossible to be foster parents to teen-agers while trying to work several jobs, but they realized they could combine the two by running a group home. They got a job at a home for six delinquent teen-age boys, sold the bookstore, and moved back to Vermont.

They liked being surrounded by teen-agers, but the group home was depressing. In the two years they were there, twenty-three boys passed through—boys who had spent an average of eleven years in foster care. Some had been placed with more than twenty-five families by the time they were fifteen. Most of them, Sue and Hector knew, would never have a real family, and probably some would end up homeless. The more they thought about it, the more it seemed to them that foster care was a dreadful thing. A child who was kicked out of one home after another for his whole childhood—well, there wasn’t much hope for a child like that. They thought they should be trying to get other people to adopt. So they decided to found an agency.

It was at this juncture that their plan to have two and adopt two began to go awry. Chelsea, in a house with three brothers and five teen-age boys, began asking for a sister. Sue thought that they had enough children with four, but Hector wasn’t convinced, which was why, while their toddler Isaac was in the hospital recovering from a nearly fatal episode of spinal meningitis, they adopted an eight-month-old black girl from Florida who had fetal alcohol syndrome and had been born very prematurely, weighing two pounds. They named her Joelle. They also decided that Sue should get her tubes tied. It was their calling to adopt, and if they filled up their family with more biological children their mission would be compromised.

With the four small children, the tiny baby, and the three remaining teen-age foster boys, Sue and Hector decided to take a vacation. They couldn’t afford to stay in hotels or eat in restaurants, so they drove across the country for five weeks in a camper. They ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and drank Tang and camped in state and national parks for two dollars a night. They visited Yellowstone Park, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, the Great Salt Lake Desert, and the Cherokee Trail of Tears.

Their destination was an adoption conference in Albuquerque. There they heard about the fate of sibling groups: kids who would never be adopted because there were too many of them, or who would be separated into different foster and adoptive homes and maybe never see one another again. Soon afterward, Sue was leafing through Los Niños, an adoption newsletter from New Mexico, when she saw photographs of four siblings: two boys, two girls. There was something about them that pulled at her. Another group caught her eye, too—a group of six teen-agers—but she and Hector still had teen-agers from the group home, and six more would be too many. The four younger kids seemed to fit: Abel was ten, SueAnn was eight, George was seven, and Flory was five.

HECTOR: It’s hard to explain. It was like instant love.

SUE: It was as if they already were our kids, but they were somehow not with us and we had to go get them.

“I think he’ll miss all this when he retires.”

The four children had moved around a lot. For a while, they were living in a group home, but the group home separated boys and girls, so that the sisters and the brothers rarely saw one another and could not be sure that the other two were still living there. The girls were separated, too, because Flory slept in the baby room. At night, SueAnn would run to the baby room and hide under Flory’s crib to make sure that nobody took her away in the night. Then they were taken out of the group home and placed with foster parents, one after the other, about four in five years. They didn’t know why they kept moving—whether it was because they’d been bad, or because four children were too difficult, or because that was just the way things were.

FLORY: Family members were always trying to adopt us, but the courts wouldn’t let them. I don’t know why.

SUEANN: I don’t think they actually ever took any action.

FLORY: Maybe.

SUEANN: To be honest.

They weren’t sure why they were taken from their mother; they had heard many stories and didn’t know which one was true. Abel, the eldest, remembered that, for a while, they and their mother were living in a car. The state told their mother that she had six months to get her children back, and then another six months, and then another six months, but she hadn’t had much schooling and didn’t know how to fill out the necessary forms or how to make it to her court hearings; she might not have been able to read the letters that the state sent, telling her where her children were and who was taking care of them. Or maybe she could have done those things but just didn’t want her children back. A few times, the children were taken to see her at a McDonald’s, but then those visits stopped.

When the children first met Sue and Hector, they knew two facts about them: that they wanted to take all four of them, and that they wanted to adopt, which meant that they would never have to move again. They met in a hotel in Albuquerque and went swimming in the hotel pool, and George threw up in the pool and then SueAnn threw up in the pool, but otherwise it was a fine day. They arrived in Vermont in the middle of winter and it was freezing cold and they saw snow for the first time.

There was something about the difficulty of new children that Sue loved. Right at the beginning, everything was a challenge. How soon would the child feel that this was his family, not just another foster home that he’d get kicked out of in a few months? Would he get along with the other children? There was always the risk that things would go badly, and this risk drove and excited her: she felt a rush of energy that she didn’t feel at other times, because nothing was harder than this, and this was what she was good at.

SUE: It was almost like a high, that new time, getting to know them and the challenge of finding the right school and the right this and the right that. It’s something that, after everyone’s settled, you sort of miss, and you say, Oh, it’s time to do that again.

New children were particularly difficult, but everything was difficult, and she and Hector liked that. They never wanted an easy life. They were always exhausted and always broke, and they seldom had any time alone, but they knew that they were needed: they could give love and food and shelter to children who needed those things and who loved them back. They were doing God’s work. Their days were crowded and unpredictable, and charged with fervor and purpose.

To manage nine children, they had to be organized. Sue was, as Hector put it, “chart-oriented.” There were chore charts and laundry charts; there was a prayer schedule posted on the bulletin board that listed who was to be prayed for each night. Sue put together a “Badeau Family Handbook,” in which she wrote down the family’s values, rules, and systems, divided into several sections: Spiritual Life, Emotional Life & Relationships, Education & Mental Development, Physical Health & Well Being, Life Management. Each year, just before school started, every child would get a copy of the handbook. There would be a family meeting and Sue would go through it, page by page.

  1. We will celebrate special times in each person’s life like birthdays and anniversaries and try our best to make each person feel special and loved.

  1. Each week, Mom will take one kid on a Friday night “date” and Dad will take one kid on a Saturday morning breakfast so we can have one-on-one time and develop our relationships with each other.

Around this time, articles began to appear about the family in newspapers, and they began to win prizes; with this attention came criticism. Some people thought they were saints; but others thought they were publicity-seekers, or weirdos, or had some kind of psychological disorder. Some thought they were addicted to acquiring kids to fill some need, the way others were addicted to shopping. Some thought that they were presumptuous, to imagine that they could be good parents to so many. Even the people who thought they were saints couldn’t understand why they did it. Sue tried to explain.

SUE: Suppose someone trains for years so they can climb Mt. Everest. You watch a documentary about their life, and you learn that they had to give up many things, they didn’t even go to their own mother’s funeral, and you think, What is wrong with that person? Why would they make those sacrifices and not live a normal life in order to pursue this goal that seems so ridiculous? I can relate to that feeling. But then think, Why can’t I just accept that person? They’re driven to do that; that’s their calling; that’s important to them, just like what I do is important to me.

Hector’s mother had been against his having a large family—she wanted him to have a better life than she’d had. But she loved the children, and she would babysit, no matter how many kids there were. Hector’s brothers and sisters were another matter. Most of them believed in blood, Hector thought; a collection of black and Hispanic and Asian children did not seem like a Badeau family to them. They couldn’t understand why Hector would go out of his way to find children with mental and physical flaws. They didn’t spend much time with Hector’s family. Sue felt that her mother was bewildered and intimidated by all her children; she couldn’t understand why Sue had chosen a life like that. Her mother said: You cannot save the whole world. Is that what you think you’re doing?

“Honey, can you get me that antelope?”

After Abel, SueAnn, George, and Flory arrived, there were no plans for more, but a few months later a tenth child sneaked in, almost by accident. A white woman in Vermont who had had a baby with a black father wanted to give him up for adoption but didn’t want him to be in a family with only white people. She read about the Badeaus in the newspaper and decided that she wanted them to adopt her son. Sue and Hector told the children that they were going to fetch a new baby who was half black, half white. When the baby, Todd, arrived, George looked at him and said, I thought you said he was half black and half white. Sue realized that he had expected the baby to be striped, like a zebra.

Some months later, they received a new issue of Los Niños and saw that the six teen-agers they had noticed before were still there, only there were fewer of them—the two oldest had aged out of the system. Now the six kids stood almost no chance of staying together in the same family, and the older ones might never have parents at all. Who else was going to adopt six teen-agers? They decided to try for them. The social workers said no. Hector and Sue were too young—barely ten years older than the oldest of the children—and too white. It seemed like a bad idea to bring six black kids to Vermont, and into a family that already had ten children. But Sue said to the social workers: Ours might not be the ideal family for these kids, but isn’t it better than nothing?

The teen-agers were from Texas. Their mother was illiterate; she married their father when she was sixteen and had six kids in seven years: JD, Fisher, Lilly, Renée, Tricia, and David. One night when David was a baby, he had such a high fever that their mother took him to the hospital, and when he came back he was deaf and couldn’t talk. Their father drank a lot and was in jail a lot. He believed that his wife cheated on him while he was in jail, so when he got out he beat her.

He started molesting Renée when she was five. He didn’t touch her sisters, only Renée. He told her that he was teaching her how to be a woman. It happened in a little room at the end of the house. There was flowered wallpaper on the walls, and there was a chair in the corner. The door was white. Renée said her mother knew what was happening, she would clean her up in the bathroom afterward, but she spanked her and told Renée it was her own fault.

Their father messed around with other women, too, and one day he messed around with another man’s woman and the man shot him dead. After that, their mother left. JD was twelve, and decided to avenge his father’s death and kill the man who had killed him. He knew who the man was, and the man was going to get out of prison after a few months. He would kill him then. But the first thing was to find food. JD and Fisher left to go out and hustle. While they were gone, Lilly stole and begged food and made sure the younger kids kept going to school. No one was paying the electricity bill, so the house was dark.

They had an idea where their mother was, because people in the neighborhood had seen her around. JD knew that she got a check at the end of the month; when that time came, he told everyone to get in a taxi. They found her, but she wasn’t happy to see them and asked what they were doing there. JD told her they were hungry. She took them to a grocery store and bought them some food. She stayed for a couple of weeks and then she left again. After a few months, somebody reported them to the state, and the six of them were split up. David was sent to Santa Fe to a school for the deaf. Renée was abused in a foster home and said she wanted to kill herself, so she was put in a mental hospital in Amarillo. Tricia’s foster parents locked her in a closet. Sometimes when Tricia was riding on the school bus she would look out the window and see her mother on the street. She would scream to her, “Mama!” and her mother would say, “Hi, Patricia,” and keep on walking.

Sue kept badgering the social workers. At first, she and Hector were permitted to adopt only the youngest of the six, David, who was thirteen. When they went to pick him up, they persuaded the social workers to let them take two more as well—Renée, who was sixteen, and Tricia, who was fifteen.

RENÉE: When I first met Hector I’m, like, you got an Afro like a black man! Tricia goes, “Renée, he black, I think he’s black and white.” I said, “Tricia, I don’t think he’s black and white, I think he’s all Caucasian.” And she goes, “No, he had to have some mix, you see his ’fro?”

TRICIA: It was freezing. It was December, and they were driving us from the airport, and I remember my dad driving up to this old abandoned house, and I’m sitting there, Oh, my God, these white people are going to use us for slaves, I’m so scared! I started crying in the back. And Hector was, like, Oh, stop crying, I’m just joking, this is where we live, over here.

At first, it felt to Tricia like a group home. She liked having all the little kids around—she liked doing the girls’ hair and playing with Barbies—but they didn’t feel like brothers and sisters yet. The thought of calling Hector and Sue her parents was strange.

But the kids were always doing something, sledding or playing sports or running around in the grass outside the house, and getting their clothes and shoes and toys mixed up, and if you were in a fight with one person there were eleven others to play with, and, for the most part, it worked, they were happy. The following winter, Sue and Hector invited the three older kids—JD, who was nineteen, Fisher, who was eighteen, and Lilly, who was seventeen—out to visit.

JD: I was curious about what they were all about. This is my brothers and sisters these people were going to have. His name is Hector so I’m thinking someone Hispanic, and all of a sudden I meet this light-skinned white dude, I’m thinking, What’s that about. And also wondering, Is this really gonna stay? I was wondering if they bit off more than they could chew.

At the end of that visit, despite the fact that JD was already an adult, and Fisher and Lilly were in their senior year of high school, they decided to leave New Mexico to join the family in Vermont.

SUEANN: They made me give up my room. I was the oldest girl and I had my own room finally, once in my life. My dad was, like, Don’t worry, some day you’ll get your own room again. And I did, eventually.

FLORY: But I loved them.

SUEANN: We loved them.

FLORY: They used to braid our hair.

SUEANN: They used to do our hair and play music and dance, they were so much fun.

LILLY: I felt like they were my brothers and sisters. I mean, they were kids I didn’t know, but they were in the same boat as me and they needed somebody to love, too. They needed a big sister. I felt I had to protect them.

All the teen-agers were nervous about being black in Vermont, but Fisher and Lilly were wildly popular in high school. Lilly was a track star, and Fisher was cool and good-looking.

FISHER: I was popular. It went to my head, I won’t lie to you. All the little white girls saw I was the best dancer in the school, and I was the only black guy.

Years later, Lilly noticed that nearly every one of her brothers and sisters had married or paired off with someone of a different race.

When Lilly first joined the family, she asked Sue how she knew she could trust her. Sue said: We have made a commitment to you. That commitment is just as serious to us as our marriage vows. We are making a promise not only to you but also to God, and it doesn’t matter what you do, you are our family, we are your parents, and we’ll all be in this together.

To Sue, such a promise was unbreakable; but it was odd to think about parenthood in those terms. To many people, the love of a parent for his child should be urgent, primal, beneath thought. That love should come from longing; from a selfish clutching for happiness, not from an altruistic promise to help. It was not just that altruism was not enough; altruism seemed antithetical to what a parent’s love should be. A parent might sacrifice himself for a child, but because he was driven to do it, not out of duty. The love of a parent must be selfish or it was worthless.

To Sue and Hector, self-sacrifice came easily. To live a moral life in the usual way, resisting temptation and embracing righteous difficulty, was not hard. But they knew that what was required of them was more complicated than asceticism. To sacrifice pleasure for duty’s sake was to get everything wrong. To fulfill their parental promise they must feel delight; they must take pleasure in their children or their efforts would be useless.

RENÉE: It took me two and a half years to trust my dad. I didn’t want him to touch me. I used to wake up having nightmares and they both would come in, and he’d be standing at the door, and I’d say, What he want? I didn’t mean to say it like that. And he goes, Sue, is she O.K.? My mom would rub my back and say all right, you safe, you safe. Nobody can’t hurt you, nobody can’t touch you like this no more. And I would cry and I would see him, I would see my father Hector standing at the door and tears coming out of his eyes and he goes, What kind of man would do that to his own daughter.

I had to sit back and watch how he was with my brothers and sisters. And I wasn’t warming up to him, but I would hug my mama all the time. And he goes, She not ready to hug me yet, is she? My mom goes, No. He’d be saying, When is she gonna hug me, Sue? My mom goes, Not yet. Give her time. Remember. He goes, All I want to do is hug her and let her know she’s safe in my arms.

Finally, one Christmas, Chelsea goes, Renée, let’s go hug Mom and Dad. She goes, You been here for two years, come on. I said, Uh-h-h, should I hug him or should I not hug him? And Chelsea and Flory say, Come on! Hurry up! Then I hugged him. I said, Dad, thank you for my gift. After I got done hugging him, I looked at him, I said, Are you crying? He goes, Yeah. I’ve been waiting for this hug for two years. I said, I know. I’m sorry it took me two years to trust you.

The trouble with running an adoption agency was that Sue and Hector were confronted every day with photographs of kids who had no parents and might never get any. They kept pictures of these children stuck on the refrigerator at home, for the family to look at when they prayed for them in the evenings. One of the photographs was of a tiny doll-like black girl in Texas named Alysia, smiling and reaching out over her crib. She had severe cerebral palsy and was expected never to walk. One day, Hector told Sue that every time he prayed for Alysia the words “She’s ours” came into his head. They decided to adopt her.

Their health insurance covered only eight sessions a year of physical therapy for Alysia, so they brought the whole family to the eight sessions so everyone could learn the exercises. Night after night, the children stood Alysia on the dining table and walked her from one to the next, using a yardstick as a railing. Within a year, she had begun not only to walk but to dance.

The next year, 1990, their agency received a referral for a four-year-old white boy who’d been shaken as a baby. The shaking had blinded him and left him with brain damage that would prevent him from developing past the stage of a six-month-old. If he wasn’t adopted soon, he would be placed in an institution. The social worker who referred him told Sue that she felt in her gut that the boy was a Badeau.

Sue told the social worker that they weren’t adopting any more children, but Hector saw the boy’s photograph and wasn’t so sure. It would be difficult to feed him, getting the consistency of his food just right, and he was on a lot of medications. He bit people, so they’d have to be careful with him around the children. But Hector felt that they had done so much good with Alysia, who knows what they might do with this boy? So they brought him home. They named him Dylan. At first, Dylan cried a lot. But after a while he began to recognize voices and smile.

“That was just a simulation. Nothing can prepare you for the kind of monkey bars you’ll find in an actual war zone.”

TRICIA: My dad said I had to give Dylan his bath. I didn’t want to touch him because of the way his body was, and I kind of freaked out thinking I was going to hurt him. But they made me give him a bath, and—I knew he didn’t see me because he can’t see—I can’t explain it, but it looked like he looked at me in my eyes and something just came over me, this different bond that I’d never had before with him. It was like he was telling me, You’re O.K., I’m not hurt, just take care of me, don’t let me drown. After that, we had this little thing with each other. And that’s why I wanted to be a nurse.

The year after Sue and Hector adopted Dylan, a social worker asked them to adopt a Chinese-American boy named Wayne who had Sanfilippo syndrome—a disease, they learned, that made a child hyperactive and sleepless, then gradually destroyed his physical functions until it ended in early death. Wayne was three years old and had lost his hearing, but he could still walk. At first, Sue and Hector both thought that adopting Wayne was out of the question. They had too many kids already, and bringing into the family a child who was certain to die—it was a terrible thing to imagine, not only for them but for their other children. But they told the social worker they would think and pray on it. A few weeks later, they had become convinced that God meant Wayne to be their son. Three years after that, a friend called to tell them about Adam, a six-year-old white boy from Florida. Adam had the same terminal disease that Wayne did, but he also had fetal-alcohol syndrome and took medications through a chest port. He had been in several different foster homes, and he had been abused.

Each time Sue and Hector were considering adopting another child, they held a family meeting to discuss it. At first, Jose was the only one who openly questioned the need for more kids. He said, There has to be another family, our family can’t take every kid in the world. But usually the children were in favor. New small children were cute, new big children were exciting, new children of the same age were someone else to play with. This time, though, the kids weren’t sure.

TRICIA: We got to a point where we were, like, All right, Dad and Mom, you’ve got to stop adopting. Some of us got tired of it, we felt like we were helping taking care of everybody. I would feel bad because I would think to myself, How would I feel if they didn’t want to adopt me because they thought we had too many kids. But I would still feel like, that’s enough.

ISAAC: You can only stretch yourself so thin. We’d ask them, Are you sure this is something that you want to do, and they said it was something they needed to do, that if they didn’t help this boy then nobody was going to. And that’s not something they felt they could live with, I guess.

Sue and Hector told the children they would consider their opinions and pray on it. Not long afterward, Sue flew down to Florida to bring Adam home.

This was one of the ways that Sue and Hector weren’t like most people. Most people would think first about how an adoption would affect the children they had; but to Sue and Hector the need of the child who was still a stranger weighed equally in the balance. They never told themselves that because a child was a stranger he was not their problem: if they heard about a particular child who was suffering, they felt he was as much their problem as if he had been left on their doorstep. If they decided not to adopt a child—and there were many whom they did not adopt—it was because they felt that they could not be good parents to him for some reason, or because they worried that bringing him in would make everybody’s life worse. This was another way in which their mission was complicated: they wanted to help as many children as they could, but if they tried to help too many then they would do harm; and there was nobody to tell them where to draw that line.

Adam was different from Wayne. Wayne had been loved, and he was always laughing. Adam almost never laughed or smiled; when someone approached him, he flinched. He was stiff and bleak. Adam had a brother, a four-year-old named Aaron. Sue and Hector had tried to adopt Aaron, too, so the brothers could grow up together, but Aaron was small and cute and white, and the social worker thought she could do better for him. She told Sue that Adam was too damaged to even know he had a brother. But it turned out that Aaron was not as cute as he had appeared—he was so angry and difficult that his adoptive family sent him back after six weeks. His social worker called Sue and told her that if she still wanted Aaron she could have him. He was there to greet the bus that brought Adam back from therapy; as Adam’s wheelchair touched the sidewalk, Adam caught sight of his brother and smiled the biggest smile Sue had ever seen on his face.

Sue and Hector decided that, with twenty-one children, they had reached their limit. But then one day when Hector was out delivering firewood a woman told him she knew of a fourteen-year-old girl named Geeta, who had been adopted as a baby from India, but her mother couldn’t handle her and she had ended up in foster care. Hector told her they weren’t going to adopt again. But, not long afterward, Sue and Hector decided that the girl was meant to be theirs after all. Sue had always believed that they would have a second child from India.

The next year, Hector received a letter from a group that was trying to resettle refugees from Kosovo. He told Sue that he didn’t even need to pray about it, he knew God wanted him to help. He reminded her that they had an empty room—a family could stay in that. He was taken aback when the family assigned to them was a family of eight—a mother, a father, a grandmother, and five kids. He figured they would still fit in the one room, however; it was a big room, and the social worker had assured him that the family preferred to live in close quarters. It would only be for a few months. Things worked out well with the Kosovo family, so a year or so later Hector signed up to host four boys from Sudan.

That was when they reached their peak: twenty-two children, plus the refugees. And then the numbers began to go down. Adam was the first to die—he was eleven. Dylan died next, on his twenty-fourth birthday. Wayne died a year and a half later, at twenty-five, having outlived his life expectancy by more than ten years.

The other trouble with running an adoption agency—beyond the constant confrontation with needy children they either couldn’t help or had to help—was that it didn’t pay for itself; they found themselves in debt. They didn’t have to live only on their earnings: some of the children came with adoption subsidies, the amount depending on the state the child came from and what kind of services he needed. A healthy kid might receive anywhere from two hundred and fifty to five hundred dollars per month; a severely disabled kid might receive seven or eight hundred. But that was never enough. Then Sue was offered a job in Philadelphia as an adoption caseworker. It would mean more money—she would earn about sixty thousand dollars—and living in a place where their children would not be almost the only non-white students in school. They decided to go.

They found a house in Mount Airy, a vast stone edifice that had been a bed and breakfast. Nobody else wanted to buy such a huge house, so they got it cheap. There were ten proper bedrooms, but Sue and Hector carved out more. Some of the closets were big enough to be bedrooms, they figured. Soon the furnace broke, and they started heating the house with the fireplace in the living room, a wood stove in the front hall, and space heaters elsewhere. This meant that most of the house was freezing, so they huddled together in the living room, where it was warmest, around the TV.

When they bought the house, there were four teen-age boys squatting there. They told the boys they could stay, and they became unofficially part of the family. Over the years, the family acquired more unofficial members—foster kids who came and went, a teen-age girl who was an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, friends of Badeau children who weren’t getting along with their own parents and came to live in the house, sometimes for years at a time. Sue and Hector never made any distinction between these unofficial children and the official ones. Sue felt that the ones who had been around the longest were part of the family, by means of an unspoken commitment formed over years of sharing family life, like a common-law marriage. Sometimes when Sue included these unofficial kids in intimate family occasions the official kids would object. What did family mean if everyone was included?

Sue was good at her job, and after a few years she was offered a new job doing training, advocacy, and policy work at the National Adoption Center. A couple of years after that, she was offered a fellowship at a foundation in Washington, D.C., working on foster-care and disability policy in the Senate. It meant that she would be in Washington five days a week, home only on weekends, but it would pay a lot better than the job she had, and she really wanted to do it. She persuaded Hector that it was the next stepping stone on God’s path for them—first the group home, then the agency, then her Philadelphia advocacy job, now this, each one allowing them to help more and more children. The foundation job was over after a year, but then Sue was offered a different job that meant staying in Washington for another year, and she took it. She also decided that she and Hector should write a book about their family, to persuade more people to adopt; they called it “Are We There Yet?”

HECTOR: I had all the energy in the world, and I guess I was in the frame of mind at that time that this is what I was supposed to be doing. As time went on, to be honest with you, I got a little envious of Sue. I was on 24/7, and I was resentful some nights when I was dealing with all the crap here and she could go to bed. But the hardest part, where I developed a little anger, was a lot of the time she came home and worked. I kind of liked her and wanted to spend time, and we both got the crappy end of each other. We were always dead tired, and even if we had a little bit of time there was always a kid interrupting.

When that job ended, Sue lived in Philadelphia again, but she was gone often, speaking all over the country. Sometimes she would come home, with all her training and her reading in the social-work literature, and tell Hector that he should be doing something differently, and he would feel that he had been in the trenches day in and day out, cleaning toilets and doing laundry, while she was staying in hotels, and he would yell at her, Don’t give me this textbook shit! I know what it’s like. If a child was screwing up, Sue always wondered how she could support the child better, and Hector thought the child ought to be punished, because if there weren’t any consequences the child would never learn.

JOSE: I think my parents were way too easygoing. Accountability was not very high on their list. It’s hard for them to punish kids. I think that’s one thing they really didn’t get right, and that’s why various scenarios happened over and over again in our family, like stealing, getting pregnant, getting in trouble with the law. It wasn’t drilled in hard enough that that’s not O.K., that there will be consequences.

Not long after they adopted the six teen-agers, the troubles began. First, JD got his girlfriend pregnant. Lilly went off to college, but she got pregnant and quit. Then Fisher dropped out of college and got sent to prison for reckless endangerment. He had a child with his girlfriend, then a child with another girl, then another child with another girl. Finally, he got arrested for beating up a girlfriend and got sent to prison for a long time.

FISHER: I have dreams of me being a different person. I keep having these dreams.

Tricia was raped and had a baby, but Hector took care of the baby and Tricia graduated from high school. Renée got pregnant and moved back home. These were bad things, but Sue and Hector felt that they’d had so little time with these kids before they were grown that there’d been only so much they could do. Then SueAnn got pregnant at fifteen. Sue and Hector’s fury was terrible: they raged at SueAnn and SueAnn wept. Had she learned nothing from the way her sisters had blighted their chances? Had she heard none of the Christian teachings they had tried for so many years to instill in her? SueAnn allowed some family friends to adopt her baby and went to college.

But then Flory got pregnant at nineteen. Geeta got pregnant. SueAnn got pregnant again and quit college. Geeta got pregnant again. Alysia got pregnant. Flory got pregnant again. Alysia got pregnant again. Each time, Sue felt that the failure was hers: if she’d been a better parent, it wouldn’t have happened. She told herself this was a stupid way to think, she was playing God, she couldn’t possibly control everything, but she felt it all the same.

FLORY: I was sleeping on the couch one night when I was pregnant because I was uncomfortable up in my room, and I woke up to my mom crying over me. That was the only time I seen her break down. But she did it while I was sleeping. She didn’t do it to my face or tell me that she was disappointed in me.

Hector and Sue weren’t naïve; they talked to the children about sex and contraception.

JOELLE: I don’t remember the sex talk. I remember a talk maybe, but I kind of have a short attention span and my mom can talk a lot, so if she was talking about it maybe I just was zoned out by the time she started talking about that.

Hector and Sue had even got some of the girls on contraceptives at age fifteen—the kind of contraceptives that you didn’t have to remember to use, shots in the arm, implants—because they were worried that this would happen, but it happened anyway.

For a long time, Chelsea and Joelle were the holdouts. Hector was sure they would be careful: they were both in college, they had ambitions—Chelsea wanted to make films, Joelle wanted to be an actress. But Chelsea got pregnant a year or so after she graduated, by her long-term boyfriend, and then Joelle, while still in college, did, too.*. When Joelle told Hector she was pregnant, first he shouted at her, then he started to cry, then he left. He went to the train station and bought a ticket and all day he rode the train, all the way to Trenton and back, and all over Philadelphia, and for hours and hours he sat in his seat and cried. At first he raged at God. Why couldn’t they get even one of their kids to wait until they were married before they had children? Why had every single one ignored what they had taught them about the importance of raising kids in a stable home?

Then Hector heard God reminding him of John 8—“Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone”—and he remembered his own sins and was ashamed. He thought about how Joelle had been born at twenty-seven weeks, weighing two pounds, and that it was a miracle she was alive at all. He thought about the funny things she’d done when she was little, and about how tender she’d been with Dylan and Wayne. He thought about how hard she’d worked to get into college, and how she was about to graduate, and how it was small of him to feel humiliated at the thought of her walking across the stage with a big belly. At the end of the day, he went home.

A few years later, something much worse happened. Alysia’s teacher at school called Hector to tell him that Alysia said she was in love with her brother Abel. The teacher had determined that something sexual had happened between them. Abel was twenty-eight and Alysia was sixteen, though because of her cerebral palsy the teacher claimed she comprehended at a third-grade level. Hector thought about what a good kid Abel had been, how he’d tried so hard in school and always followed the rules.

ABEL: It was a really bad time in my life. I was going through divorce. What I did was illegal, mostly because of her age and because she had cerebral palsy. They said that she comprehended at a third-grade level, but, if you knew her, nobody thought that. I felt like I let the whole family down, but it wasn’t like I attacked her or nothing like that.

Family loyalties were split. Even Renée, who had been sexually abused by her father, couldn’t bring herself to condemn Abel completely.

RENÉE: I started crying, because I think that somebody did that stuff to him. Somebody touched him like that, that he thought it was O.K. to do that to Alysia. But she did some stuff, too, I can’t put all the blame on him.

There were social workers and doctors and psychologists. There were lawyers and police. At the end of it, Abel was sentenced to seven years in prison.

HECTOR: I almost left. I almost left. I almost just walked away from everything. It was the worst thing that could have happened to us. I was so naïve, because it happens—I’d heard about it in other families and thought, That doesn’t happen in my family. But it did. I was so totally unaware. I felt like such a failure. Where the hell was I? How did we not see the signs? There must have been something there and we failed to see it. I just felt, screw this, I’m done. I can’t take this anymore, somebody else can take over. I wanted to beat somebody up. I don’t think I’ve ever had a breakdown, but I was close to one then.

Alysia was assigned to a therapist who tried to remove her from the family. Alysia hated that therapist, so another was found, who suggested that she keep a diary. She wrote in the diary, and wrote poems, and studied dance, and those things helped.

Sue became more depressed than she had ever been. Sometimes she felt that her whole life had been a mistake; that she had misheard what God was saying to her; she wasn’t supposed to be doing this at all, she was the wrong person. At other times she felt that she had heard just fine, and she raged at God.

SUE: You set us up for this. You told us to do this, so you should protect our kids and us from these kinds of things happening. How dare you set us up for this?

There was no answer. She wrote to a friend:

I try to pray but I feel like I am praying into a black hole. Reading the Bible does nothing more for me than reading the newspaper. . . . I still “believe,” but I feel nothing, no connection to God, no reality of the Holy Spirit in my life. . . . This must be what Hell is like.

Very slowly, she returned to life. She thought about what had happened and how it was only one of the terrible things that had happened in the world, and she thought about the question of how a good and all-powerful God could allow such things. She thought that the world was an unfolding story whose ending was unknown to her, and that without knowing the ending she could never hope to understand why things happened the way they did. She had faith that ultimately God would make sure that things turned out for the good, but how He would do that was a mystery, so she had to accept the world as it was. It was not for her to judge.

2005

“Of course you feel great. These things are loaded with antidepressants.”

Dear Abel,

These are the pictures we wanted to send you. I hope you will be allowed to keep them. . . . It really is sad and a shame that you are in jail, it breaks my heart every day. But since you are there, you have to decide how you will use your time. Will you use it being angry and bitter and defensive? Or will you use your time trying to make a positive difference? You have a wonderful opportunity to spend big amounts of time in prayer—praying for each of us—how wonderful that would be to know that someone is praying for me and Dad and each of the kids every day! . . . What a gift God has given you if you choose to use it that way. Amazing Grace! You have a great opportunity that in some ways I wish I had. The choice is yours—how WILL you spend your time?

Love Mom

2006

Dear Abel,

I hope you’re doing OK. Just a short note to wish you Happy Birthday. I’m sure you’ve had better but I hope it’s the best it can be. Mom and I will be thinking of you. How are things going. I’m sorry I’ve not written more often. I think the last time was when Mamie died. That was a hard, sad time. . . . It’s been hard on Mom. She keeps everything in. A lot like you. . . .

I had my top teeth pulled and now have dentures. They look good but are painful till I get used to them.

I miss you and hope at some point soon to come see you.

Love

Dad

2009

Dear Abel,

I don’t know where to begin, so I will start with what is on my heart—I love you. Really, truly, sincerely with all my heart. And I miss you so very, very much it is a huge ache in my heart. So why then haven’t I been faithful about writing? Why haven’t I found a way to get out there to visit you? I have no answers and no excuses. I truly cannot even explain it to myself. . . . I feel as though I have failed you as a mother in the last few years but I truly hope and pray that you will give me more chances to make up for that over all the years of both of our lives that are still ahead of us. . . . Certainly I have forgiven you for any and all of the things that are in the past. I hope you will do the same for me. . . . I do love you so very, very much and I look forward to renewing our relationship.

Much love and many prayers—MOM

As the pregnancies came one after the other, and especially after Abel went to prison, Hector began to drink. It was his escape from everything that was unbearable. No matter what he drank, he was always up at five to tend to Adam and Dylan and Wayne when they were still alive. He never let things slide, though sometimes he would go to bed hammered and realize the next morning that it was a good thing nothing had happened in the night. Eventually, Sue told him that if he didn’t stop drinking she would leave him. Hector promised her he would stop drinking completely, and he did. But that didn’t take away the sadness that had got him drinking in the first place.

HECTOR: I had a tremendous amount of energy when I was young, and always saw things, you know, cup half full. But I started feeling tired. Dealing with the same shit over and over and over as each generation of kids went through—ahh, not this again. Kid got kicked out of school, or this one got arrested. Maybe ten years ago when things were getting really hard, I started to get a little cynical and wondering, Is it worth it? Why do I keep getting up every day and doing the same thing? You get the same results. What’s that thing about insanity?

It wasn’t just the awful stuff that hadn’t worked out the way they’d hoped: Only a few of the kids still went to church. None of the kids had adopted kids of their own.

CHELSEA: I’ve never wanted a huge family. I’ve witnessed firsthand everything that’s gone into adopting, and I’m not sure I’m ready to deal with that. My parents have a calling that I don’t feel like I inherited.

In the hard times, when Sue and Hector felt that they’d failed, it was difficult for them to remember why they’d chosen to do what they did.

JOSE: When my parents were young, they were cool: she was the beauty queen, he was the sports star. I remember how they hung out with friends, they went out for picnics, the stuff you see in a movie from the sixties—they all brought their kids, they had dinners at their friends’ houses. But with so many kids, to maintain relationships becomes harder, and not everybody wants to be associated with them because things happen, and there are black people in their family, not everyone feels like their family is so cool anymore, and that changes your circle of friends and how you behave.

SUE: If someone came over for dinner they would always leave saying something like, This was actually really nice. The way they would word it was, We didn’t expect it to be nice.

JOSE: My parents lost their mojo. They paid that price for having such a family. I think my dad feels it the most. My mom travels for her job and has a network, but my dad is at home, and my dad went from being a really, really cool guy—even now, if you go to Barre, everyone knows who he is—and then as life went on they became kind of outcasts. I think my dad wishes he had more friends.

ISAAC: He had us, we were his friends as far as going out to play pool or go bowling or ice skating. But he didn’t have a group of guys, like normal people go out with their friends through life. He never had that.

In the hard times, it was easy for Sue and Hector to forget how unlikely it was that anyone else would have adopted their children, and how much worse off they would have been if they’d not had a family and a home. In the hard times, it was easy for them to forget how many good things had happened in their children’s lives. Misery is a stronger emotion than happiness, and catastrophes punctured their minds and reshaped their sense of their lives in a way that ordinary contentment did not. But there had been many good things.

After Lilly got pregnant, she went to work on the line at the Cabot Creamery factory, and it turned out she loved her job—twenty years later, she was still there and had been promoted to line leader. She’d been with the same man for many years. Sometimes when she’d had a drink or two she would cry and tell her parents how much she loved them and how grateful she was and how she would never have this life without them.

Tricia had had two more children, was living with a man who had also been adopted, and was a home health aide to elderly people; she loved her work, too. JD was a plumber and was engaged to his girlfriend. He knew that if Sue and Hector hadn’t adopted him he would have spent his life in prison for murdering the man who killed his father.

Renée and David worked in the kitchens of local schools and were living on their own. SueAnn dropped out of college to have her second baby, but she was happily married and liked her work at the Hair Cuttery; Flory had also been married for years. Isaac was married and had joined the military. Joelle had a job supervising special-needs children in schools. Chelsea and Jose were the biggest successes in worldly terms: Chelsea was a director of the Web site at a large media company in Philadelphia, and Jose was a programmer at a bank in Zurich. Even Abel had found his feet after his release from prison—he was working as a chef at a Japanese restaurant.

When Sue and Hector had been married for twenty-five years, the children pooled their money and arranged for them to spend a week camping by the same lake in Vermont where they had spent their honeymoon. When they got back, there was a surprise party waiting for them—the whole family was there. SueAnn had made centerpieces and name cards, and Renée read a poem she had written for the day. Chelsea had made a family video. Alysia danced, and people cried to see her.

And every year there were birthday parties and weddings and graduations; there were grandchildren and great-grandchildren, most of them still living in the same neighborhood within a few blocks of each other and their parents, in and out of each other’s homes all the time, minding each other’s children. And every Easter and Fourth of July and Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s the children and the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren gathered with Sue and Hector in the big house they still lived in, although they couldn’t afford it, and ate a meal together. And though some were missing—three dead, two in prison—still, most were there, year after year, and, for everything that had happened, they were a family. ♦

*An earlier version of this article implied that Chelsea got pregnant while she was still in college.