‘He never left my heart’: Bluffton’s adoption miracle takes the world by storm
The Bluffton Christmas miracle of 2018 has been a gift that keeps on giving.
The gift for Steve Stansfield of Bluffton was, as strange as it sounds, a mother and father, two sisters and a brother he never knew.
The gift for Bill and CarolAnn Foran of suburban Philadelphia was to hug their firstborn son, who was given up for adoption at 2 1/2 months because they were only 16, unmarried, and not very popular in their large, Catholic homes.
The gift for Jerry and Kathy Stansfield of Sun City Hilton Head was to see the baby they adopted and raised discover, 38 years later, that he also has a complete, biological family.
The gift to them all was a 2017 change in Pennsylvania state law that enabled adoptees who are at least 18 and have graduated from high school to apply for their birth records.
But an even greater gift is the unconditional love and unselfishness of the couple who raised Steve Stansfield, and always told him he had a mother who loved him. And helped him find her right before Christmas a year ago.
In the year that has passed since that magical reunion of a full family of strangers, another gift has been unwrapped.
The last piece of the puzzle fits perfectly. They all still like each other. They long to live closer to each other.
In the worldwide reaction to Steve Stansfield’s feel-good story, he has often been told it isn’t always that way.
Mummers parade
Steve Stansfield became something of a Dr. Phil after his story exploded.
“A producer from Australia called and talked 45 minutes,” he said recently after a day’s work at Salty Dog on Hilton Head Island.
The video of his reunion with his biological parents taken by his wife, Erin Hanson, was published in the New York Post, NowThis News, Metro in London, and others.
In the wake of the publicity, people from all over the globe reached out to Stansfield.
“It was overwhelming,” he said. “I was trying to absorb what was going on, and everybody had a story they wanted to tell me. How was I told? How should they handle it? How did it make me feel?”
He said 99 percent of the Facebook comments and other input was positive.
But a number of the conversations started with, “I’m glad for you, but ...”
The “but” usually ended with something like: “I found my family and I wish I never did.”
The oddity is apparently that Stansfield’s biological parents got married, are still married, and have three, now four, grown children who act, talk and think alike.
“That nature vs. nurture thing — we put that to rest,” Stansfield said.
At the kitchen table, he and his wife have this conversation:
She: “It’s a family of rascals.”
He: “We’re well-intentioned rascals.”
She: “That’s what they say.”
She said he tells stories like his biological father. He has mannerisms like his biological father.
Stansfield, his wife and two children and adoptive parents flew to Philadelphia last April. He met his grandmother and a room full of cousins he didn’t know he had. They rented a hall for a reception, and a costumed Stansfield marched with Mummers of Philadelphia New Year’s Day Parade fame in a special appearance arranged by his biological father.
He faced a new twist no one prepares you for: What do you call two sets of Mom and Dad? He calls them all Mom and Dad, but sometimes a situation could dictate that he refer to his biological parents by their first names.
Stansfield flew back up to Philadelphia a week before Thanksgiving, when his biological mother staged her first-ever Thanksgiving dinner for her complete family.
Catholic Social Services
CarolAnn Foran, Stansfield’s biological mother, still has trouble believing her good fortune. Sometimes her mind plays tricks and she’s afraid it will all go away.
She never questioned marrying Bill. They were soulmates, she said, even when they were stupid kids.
When she got pregnant, she was told she couldn’t keep the baby. Her mother was already raising seven kids. Her father said that was enough.
CarolAnn left her baby with Catholic Social Services, along with Sherlock the dog, a stuffed animal he still has. And she left a letter. She explained in the letter that she was too young to keep the baby but loved him and would always welcome him if he came to call.
The letter went home with Steve and the Stansfields, but it was redacted so that his parents could not be traced.
“When he never came to look for us, I thought that he hated us or didn’t want to know us,” CarolAnn said. “Or that he died.”
She and Bill never told their children about the baby she called Billy in her heart. She rarely brought it up to Bill because it was too hard to talk about. Her best friends didn’t know. As adults, her daughters started to piece it together, in part because their mother always cried around March 14, the day Billy was born.
She said they did not search for their son because they didn’t know if he’d been told. They didn’t want to blow up a perfect situation for him. And they had told him their door was always open.
“Bill and I, we didn’t feel like we had the right to look for him,” she said, “because we gave him up.”
She begins to cry as she adds, “The love never went away ... family is everything to us.”
She’s grateful to Jerry and Kathy Stansfield for being so unselfish.
“Sad to say, in this day and age, so much is me-me-me,” CarolAnn said. “They raised him beautifully but wanted him to have us, without knowing we were out there longing for him. Who does that?”
She only wishes it could have happened sooner. And that they lived closer together.
A year has passed now, and she hopes her story can give hope to others that they can be successfully reunited with family.
“I could not be happier than to have him back in my life,” CarolAnn said.
“He never left my heart.”
