Story by Ramishah Maruf
CLEMMONS, N.C. — The family sitting at the large wooden table took years to come together, after death, legal battles and page after page of agonizing paperwork.
It’s dinner time, and Sarah Buckhiester and Miranda McLemore are going down the line, complimenting each of their five children. They know how important it is to go through these affirmations with their kids of different needs and backgrounds and reminding them that they are confident, worthy, loved.
“Ryder, I like how you smile when we look at you.”
Ryder, the eldest, is a Boy Scout who also just got his red belt in Tae Kwon Do.
“Greyson, I like your haircut, and you have beautiful eyes.”
Greyson said he learned about poems in school today.
“Henry, I like your curls and your beautiful eyes.”
Henry has a smart mouth that goes beyond his 3 years of age.
“Bailey, I like your pretty smile.”
Bailey is the only daughter, with a “Frozen” obsession that they think would’ve passed by now.
“Jordan, I like when you style your hair.”
Jordan is a gentle soul and the most obedient child, who takes everything literally.
Ryder, 10, was adopted by Buckhiester before she married McLemore. Greyson, 6, is from McLemore’s first marriage. And Jordan, 7, Bailey, 5, and Henry, 3, are their foster children.
The family of seven discusses what families normally do, go on scouting trips, read books every night, watch movies. Finally, after all these years, Buckhiester and McLemore thought they were safe, and their family was complete.
But when Amy Coney Barrett joined the Supreme Court and side-stepped questions about the court’s gradual progression in LGBT rights during her confirmation hearing, same sex couples across the state and country scrambled. They weren’t just asking hypotheticals anymore, but getting married or rushing to adopt their own children. Though the country has made strides for LGBT families, they feel the future is uncertain.
In early November, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case involving foster care and LGBT families. Catholic Social Services sued the city of Philadelphia after the city found out that the Catholic organization did not place children with same-sex families and stopped its funding.
Buckhiester and McLemore saw the concerns flooding social media, and asked their lawyer about second parent adoptions for their first two children, just to be safe.
“It’s very hurtful and hard to think about adopting your own child,” said Cathy Sakimura, deputy director and family law director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights.
Homophobia was on the back burner after all these years.
Buckhiester and McLemore’s wedding was in a Victorian home in Concord. Their nieces, nephews and sons were in the bridal party, their loved ones in attendance. The cloudy day matched the grays and lavenders of their wedding.
“The last thing I want is for our marriage to just be like, nope, it’s no longer legal,” Buckhiester said.
Their children all come from different backgrounds and have different needs. Buckhiester says they are happy and they are safe, and that’s what matters.
But for the first time, there is a looming anxiety that their family could be torn apart.
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Sakimura said she has been receiving many calls from families like Buckhiester and McLemore’s.
“There’s no kind of imminent way to take away the constitutional right to marry,” Sakimura said. “But other things that erode the kind of legal protections and rights that families have is more likely and something to be concerned about.”
Her first step of advice is to make sure relationships with children are legally protected, either through adoption or a court judgment. Especially given the pandemic, she said it’s good for families to think and plan for tragic events.
McLemore knows what it’s like. She and her first wife got married the first Monday morning after gay marriage was legalized, at a church that gave bouquets to every couple. McLemore’s wife gave birth to Greyson before their marriage was legalized, so McLemore’s name was not on the birth certificate.
McLemore’s first wife died five years ago. Family members made comments about taking Greyson in, even though McLemore was Greyson’s mother in every sense but on paper. While grieving her wife’s death, she had to ask the birth father to sign over his rights and begin the adoption process.
With the new Supreme Court nomination, she does not want the same thing to happen to her family today.
“I’ve been there every step of the way through the whole pregnancy, the birth, but he was not legally my child,” McLemore said. “So that’s why everything going on today scares me even more.”
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Buckhiester has always kept the doors of her home open for children. Same-sex couples are 18.4 percent more likely to adopt a child.
Ryder’s mother was one of Buckhiester’s best friends from middle school, who had him and another child back-to-back by the time she was 18. Buckhiester is his godmother, and became a young, single mother herself when she took a 9-month-old Ryder in.
“When you agree to be a godparent, you’re agreeing to more than just coming to birthday parties,” Buckhiester said. “You’re agreeing to stepping in when that parent is no longer able to take care of that child.”
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Buckhiester and McLemore met Henry first, before his golden curls grew in. He was a baldie, blue eyes bigger than the size of his face staring back at them when they saw him in the visitation room for the first time.
Henry’s birth mother was not able to get sober, his birth father died a few months after he was born. Henry was placed in foster care at 3 days old— his foster mother picked him up from the hospital.
But Buckhiester and McLemore knew, the moment they turned into the bare visitation room and saw Henry sleeping peacefully on the couch. Over the course of the year, they visited Henry at his foster home and met his foster siblings, Jordan and Bailey.
Whenever they visited Henry, they brought along small gifts for the others too. They included Jordan and Bailey in their games with Henry. Soon, they realized they were the only ones visiting Jordan and Bailey.
Jordan and Bailey’s parental rights had already been terminated, providing a relatively easier process. So they thought, why not?
The social worker asked Jordan if he would like to go home with Buckhiester and McLemore one day.
“He didn’t even hesitate,” McLemore said. “He never looked back.”
After months of headache-inducing paperwork, the couple was approved to bring Jordan and Bailey into their home in March 2020. But because of the coronavirus pandemic, movement in the system froze, and they were reduced to video calls until May.
Jordan immediately ran up to his room — he already knew where it was after a few virtual house tours.
“It’s like he already knew,” Buckhiester said.
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Last year’s Christmas felt incomplete. Three of Buckhiester and McLemore’s children were video-calling from Georgia, their plans to celebrate together in a hotel fallen apart.
But the three foster children will be experiencing many firsts this holiday season, as a full family for the first time. They’re going to have the biggest Thanksgiving meal of their lives. On the night before Christmas, their nightly bedtime story will be a Bible story about Jesus’s birth. They’ll get to open one gift on Christmas eve, but Buckhiester thinks the children will get more than one out of her.
The family doesn’t know what will come in the new year.
They’ve been watching and they’ve been waiting. The adoption petitions are in the process of being filed.
Buckhiester and McLemore still talk about the future of their family — how they can protect themselves, how they can explain it to their kids. Luckily, their lawyer told them that second-parent adoptions aren’t going away anytime soon.
“It’s not just us anymore, had it just been us, it wouldn’t bother us as much,” McLemore said. “But when you have kids, kids don’t understand.”
