Finally. Dinnertime.
Three kids straight out of the pool, hungry from a full day of school and swim practice. Mom and Dad ready to sit after teaching, working, and chasing. The first time all together today.
Conversation is passed around the table as easily as the barbecue sandwiches, peppers, and chocolate milk with bendy straws—12-year-old Marshall’s midterms, 10-year-old Whitman’s most recent divisional cut in swimming, 8-year-old Maesa’s running club.
This version of the family began its work in December 2010 when Bobby and Naomi Horton returned home from Ethiopia with Maesa, then two-and-a-half.
And it’s been work—for all of them.
family friend Wendy Schmitzer-Torbert remembers the first time Naomi talked with her about adoption.
“She knew my brother was adopted, and I had college friends who had adopted children from Ethiopia. We had a very open, honest conversation.”
She wrote in a letter of reference for the family, “You can always tell, without a doubt, how much Bobby and Naomi love their children. You can see it in the way they interact with them, whether in an intimate setting or in public. You can see it in how much they want for them—they want their emotional needs met, they want their academic needs met, and they want to help them achieve the goals the kids set for themselves.
“They want to be better parents not for themselves, but for their kids.”
Naomi had been interested in the idea of adopting from Africa even as a young girl—recalling seeing starving Ethiopian children on TV: “I was always drawn to that and the idea that there were children who needed homes.”
Bobby, a professor of psychology at Wabash, wasn’t opposed to adoption. He wasn’t pushing for it, either. But they both knew they wanted a daughter, and the 50-50 odds without scientific intervention were not good enough for them.
“I don’t like uncertainty.” Naomi smiles.
Bobby remembers lying in bed one night in 2009 and saying, “Let’s just adopt. We could sit here and talk about this forever: Are we ready, and when might we be ready? Let’s do it.”
The hurdles came early, even with their own family. Bobby’s mother worked for the Department of Child and Protective Services and had seen families disrupted by adoption. “She was trying to protect us, thinking I had a very idealistic view,” Naomi says. “And looking back on it, I did. She was trying to say, ‘It’s not always that easy.’”
Another relative refused to acknowledge the Horton’s daughter because she was black.
Their oldest son, Marshall, who was four at the time, admitted he was “scared of brown people.”
“Here we are in Crawfordsville, Indiana, about to bring a black child into our family, but our own kids aren’t even aware and prepared,” Naomi says. “Wow. That’s a problem. We need to have this conversation.”
And they did.
On August 23, 2010, the Hortons received the call they had been waiting for: “It’s a girl!”
In a journal she wrote for Maesa, Naomi penned: “We got a picture of you! What an amazing feeling to see you. I looked at your beautiful face and cried—tears for you and all that you have survived. And tears of happiness—our family is now complete.”
For Bobby, the photo meant: This is really happening. Is she going to like us? Are we going to like her? Exactly how do we do this?
“She screamed the first time she saw us.”
Bobby describes meeting his daughter at the orphanage in Awasa, Ethiopia. The photo from that day shows him kneeling and smiling, trying to be as non-threatening as possible.
“You can only imagine what it’s like for a two-and-a-half-year-old who has some awareness but is not so sophisticated as to understand what’s going on. What does it mean, these are my parents? This is Mom? This is Dad?”
“The only reason she let me touch her that first visit was because we bought her a new skirt,” Naomi says. “She was very much a girly girl even then. She let me help her put on the new clothes. That’s it.”
On November 10, 2010, Bobby and Naomi stood in a courtroom in Ethiopia while Maesa’s mother relinquished parental rights.
“It was clear she loved Maesa very much,” Bobby says. “She was just a kid herself living with her parents, who basically said, ‘There’s not enough food.’ She wanted a better life for her daughter.”
In her journal Naomi describes Maesa’s birth mother in great detail for the day Maesa will read it: “She was the youngest mother in our group. I picked her out—she looks just like you, she is beautiful. Her hair was plaited in dozens of tiny shimmering braids, and she pulled the braids back together in a very fashionable way…”
Rather than follow local custom, the Hortons changed Maesa’s name to include her mother’s instead of her father’s name. Naomi writes, “She was very honored that you will carry her name.”
A week later, on Bobby’s birthday, the adoption was finalized. The couple returned home to wait for Maesa’s visa. “I gave final exams and then went back,” Bobby says. “I actually graded exams from there.”
During the wait, the six children being adopted were moved from the orphanage to a transition home in the middle of the night. The cars shared the rudimentary road with semis as well as camels, cows, and people. Naomi explains, “It’s a six-hour drive and Ethiopia has the highest traffic fatality rate in the world.
“They thought they were doing the right thing. Two nannies, six kids including several infants, no car seats. They thought, We’ll take them in the middle of the night. They’ll sleep through it.
“Maesa woke up in the transition home. Nobody could speak her language. Nobody could even tell her why she was there.”
Days later in walk Bobby and Naomi, not speaking Maesa’s language, and disrupting her newest normal.
December 8, 2010, a sleep-deprived Naomi journals to her daughter from the plane heading back to Africa: “I couldn’t sleep last night. I think I’m just too excited and also sad for you… one more transition, but it’s a big one.
“No one expects you to be brave anymore. This is scary and strange and impossible to understand. Of two things I’m certain: You will never be alone or hungry again, and someone who loves you is taking you home.”
But Maesa would need plenty of courage and resilience in the months and years to come as she struggled with attachment issues caused by continuous upending in her first three years of life. Her parents would need equal measures of patience and persistence.
The flight from Africa to the States merely set the stage for the first months in the Horton home.
“When we arrived at customs, Maesa screamed the whole time,” Naomi recalls. “She had not been treated well by men in her life to that point, so she wanted nothing to do with Bobby—literally terrified of him. He couldn’t do anything for her. He couldn’t do anything to help me.”
Once home, Naomi was with Maesa 24/7, while Bobby took care of Marshall, Whit, and everything else he could. After three months, the couple knew the routine was unsustainable.
The first outing for Naomi consisted of a drive just circling the neighborhood. Bobby describes those first moments at home alone with Maesa: “She stood and watched me. Like, ‘What are you going to do?’ She was just terrified.
“Moments before Naomi came back, she let me pick her up. She didn’t stop crying, but she actually let me pick her up. These were baby steps into trusting and loving each other.”
they inched along, clinging to those baby steps and learning how to help Maesa cope with her new world.
“If she didn’t have food in her hand, she was unmanageable,” Naomi recalls. “The fear of not having food was so intense. We gave her a bag of popcorn to carry around everywhere.”
More heartbreaking was the time Naomi took Maesa to the bank, only to turn around and see that she had poured water and popcorn on the floor.
“To her, the bank looked like the U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia,” Naomi explains. “She thought that I was leaving her, and she didn’t have any other way to explain it to me.”
Six years later, Maesa and her family have made progress putting those fears behind her.
“Part of it is that she’s getting older, so we can have conversations about things. She’s starting to trust us,” Naomi says. “We’ve come so far, but we can’t take that pain away, as much as we want to. We just can’t undo the first three years of her of life.”
As her mother, Naomi grieves that.
Bobby calls her role “the really hard work.”
“She’s been Maesa’s primary caregiver—she’s gotten many of the expressions of love as well as the anger. Her consistency and love—the message that ‘we are and always will be a stable, loving force in your life’—has been invaluable to Maesa’s development.”
And there are these glimpses of light.
“Many of the most rewarding moments are the small things,” says Bobby. “Like learning how to put her hair in a wrap. Or Maesa telling me who her friends are, or being willing to accept comfort when she’s hurt.
“It’s the getting to the good, getting to what a family and a dad and a daughter are.”
Bobby remembers his time with Maesa near his mother’s home on Tybee Island, Georgia, one of the family’s favorite vacation spots.
We were playing; it was just us. We sat in the waves and laughed. I thought, This is what fathers and daughters do.
“She’s a very good student. I go to her class to do spelling. I think she likes that her dad comes in, that her friends know who I am. That’s heartwarming. And I can feel myself pulling for her when she’s swimming competitively, the way it feels for me when the boys are swimming.
“The little moments of feeling prideful and happy for Maesa, her feeling pride and coming to me, those are the most satisfying moments. Our relationship is not as strong as it will be some day. That’s true for my boys, too. I hope all of our relationships will continue to grow. But they’re good now. And together we have this shared history to build on.
“Of course, the kids don’t focus on that. We do. They’re just living.”
Talk to Marshall and Whit about the past six years and they’re more likely to bring up Whit’s favorite family Christmas in Atlanta or Marshall’s first roller coaster ride at Disneyland. But Naomi and Bobby have watched their sons learn and grow right alongside Maesa.
“Marshall is more caring, more loving with Maesa, more protective of her than I’ve seen him with anybody else,” Naomi says. “They’re more empathetic. They’re obviously better in terms of racial perception. If they hear somebody behaving in a prejudicial way toward someone, not just someone of a different race, they’re going to stand up and say, ‘No, that is not okay.’”
“Working through this together has taught them an important lesson: We’re always going to be together—this is our family,” Bobby says. “As mad as we may be at each other in a given moment, we’re in this together. Sadness and frustration are part of life. You learn how to work through them with people you love.”
"We began as friends 11 years ago, but we're family now," Schmitzer-Torbert says of the Hortons. “Our kids are like cousins, they’ve known each other so long.
“There have been challenges for them. I know there have been tears.
“Adoptive parents have to be eternally optimistic. You take a child into your home and hope you can give her everything he or she needs. Whether there are personality clashes, or medical problems, or you’re working through attachment issues, you never give up. This is your child.
“Bobby and Naomi want to make things better for their kids. It’s all part of the work.”
As the last of the chocolate milk is slurped from the bottom of the glasses and the final bites of barbecue are divvied among the growing tweens, conversation shifts to homework and the looming photographer waiting to take a family portrait. The kids spring from the table and Naomi scoots them into the kitchen with their dishes.
Bedtime is getting close, math still isn’t done, and the boys would rather wrestle than be photographed. But nestled on a sofa in the living room, after it’s all said and done, the snapshot rings true to who they are: a family together, at home with each other, getting to the good.
Of Love and Loss
Parents in Ethiopia who relinquish their children are usually facing such poverty that they do not have the resources to provide the most basic needs—food, water, clothing, and shelter.
“It’s impossible to understand what starvation is like,” explains Naomi. “You would do so many things that you would never think.”
Like loving a child so much that you give her up for the chance she will survive and thrive with someone else in some other place.
“Adoption actually equals loss. When people think of adoption they think it’s a wonderful thing—you’re adopting this kid, you’re bringing her into your life. But whether that means the birth mother died or can’t take care of the child, somebody is losing if you are gaining.”
Naomi deeply feels that loss for Maesa’s birth mom. “She looked like a kid who should be adopted rather than someone old enough to have a kid. She had a nervous giggle on her face like a kid who doesn’t know what to do.”
“We were just supposed to walk into this room to meet her, but my natural inclination was to hug her. I just stood there and hugged her for a really long time. You don’t need language to have that conversation.”