Adoptive parents receive teen mom’s baby
WALNUT CREEK, Calif. (AP) – At 16 days old, Kathryn Taylor Temple already has a pile of press clippings telling how her adoptive parents had their hopes for a child dashed, then lifted again. The clippings first tell the story how the couple was scammed by a woman who claimed to be pregnant, then they recount how an expectant mother 300 miles away was so moved by their disappointment and perseverance that she picked them to raise the daughter she was carrying.
Alette Coble-Temple, 32, a psychologist who works with troubled teenage girls, suffers from cerebral palsy.
During the year she and her husband spent trying to become parents, the couple often heard from adoption agencies and expectant mothers that they didn’t want to work with them because of Alette’s disability and given her husband Bob’s age, which is 52, and status as a cancer survivor.
“Initially I felt like I was in an episode of “Law & Order,’ and then when we got this call, it felt like a “Hallmark Hall of Fame’ movie,” Alette Temple said Tuesday as she fed Kathryn a bottle with the help of her husband and the baby’s full-time nanny. “We want the disabled community to benefit from this and we want the adoption community to benefit.”
Kathryn’s adoption became final last Friday, capping the Temples’ seven-week odyssey from anger and despair to elation and gratitude. On March 19, Walnut Creek police arrested Maya-Anne Mays, a woman who had spent months promising the couple she would let them adopt the baby she said she was due to deliver on March 22.
They had paid Mays $14,000 in living and medical expenses, taken her into their lives, and prepared the baby’s nursery, but their worst suspicions were confirmed when it turned out she wasn’t pregnant. Mays remains jailed on three counts of felony theft.
“When we were dealing with Maya, we were already worried about her because we knew she was a different kind of person,” Robert Temple recalled. “But the crazier she acted, the more I wanted to protect the baby.”
An eight-months pregnant woman in Eureka heard a television news report about the couple and, as she would later relay it to the Temples, was so impressed by their grace and determination not to let Mays’ scam sour them on adoption that she decided right then knew she had found the future parents of her child.
“She was impressed that despite all our pain, the story ended with Bob saying, ‘We will have the baby some day,”‘ Alette Coble-Temple recalled.
After giving birth on April 18, the woman, who is in her mid-30s, told a delivery room nurse that she wanted her daughter to go the Temples, but she couldn’t remember their names.
She eventually got in touch with an adoption facilitator who tracked with the couple down with the help of police and news articles about the Mays case.
Flush with fresh hope, the Temples, the woman they planned to hire as a nanny and Alette’s parents dashed up to Eureka on Thursday, April 22 to meet the birth mother.
It turned out she had a close friend with cerebal palsy, and Alette’s wheelchair and slurred speech weren’t an issue for her.
The following Sunday, they had a candle-filled “entrustment ceremony” at which the birth mother formally relinquished her claim on Kathryn, an act the legal papers caught up with five days later.
Before the Temples headed back to the Bay Area, the birth mother gave them a sculpture of three dolphins, a custom-made baby bracelet, and half of her own mother’s wedding ring set.
By wearing the other ring, she would always stay connected to their daughter, she said.
“I have the utmost respect for this women. She has had her own challenges in life, but she would not accept a penny from us,” Alette Temple said. “She must have said 10 times over the three days I met her, ‘I want (her) to know I did not sell her. I did this out of love for my child,’ and she did.”
Like her one-of-a-kind adoption story, the baby’s name echoes with tender life lessons.
She was called Kathryn for her maternal great-grandmother and an aunt who died of cancer, Katie for short because her birth mother first spotted the Temples on television station KTVU.
Taylor is her middle name because that was the name her birth mother originally chose for her.
“This was our labor,” Alette Temple said. “We had lots of labor pains.”