Untitled Document
The first thing you see
when you enter Patty Redpath’s house is two laundry baskets brimming
with shoes — big shoes, little shoes, sneakers, boots, sandals. Aside
from Patty, everybody removes his or her footwear at the door to minimize
the amount of dirt in the house. The next thing you notice is that the little kids are
in pajamas. Outside it’s still daylight, but Patty has a rule that on
school nights they all have to be in their bedrooms by 8 or 8:30. “I
need some time where I don’t have to manage, don’t have to
supervise, but I can do what I need to do — pay bills or call
somebody that I need to talk to without all the noise in the
background,” Patty says.
Those rules might sound rigid unless you know that
Patty is a single mother with seven kids, ranging in age from 17 down to 2
years old. They’re all adopted, all born to mothers with drug and
alcohol dependency, most with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder and
some with additional special needs. Patty, 49, sustains her brood on her salary as a
school social worker. They live in a doublewide trailer home, with
bookshelves lining the narrow hallways, bunk beds crowded into four small
bedrooms, and the kind of furniture that comes in a box stamped “Some
Assembly Required.” They eat a lot of macaroni, spaghetti, and Ramen
noodles.
While a reporter snoops around, Patty fends off
arguments from a second-grader trying to stuff a dozen books into a
backpack and a teenager begging to buy a car. In a back bedroom, a fight is
brewing over a game of Connect Four. In the kitchen, one kid is playing on
an Xbox set up on a miniature table tucked beneath a countertop; in the
adjacent den, another kid is watching a movie on a portable DVD player.
Above it all, the television blares American
Idol, and a toddler, barefoot and giggling,
runs around trying to referee the action with a mouthful of gibberish and a
tippy cup full of chocolate milk. Amid the chaos comes the sound of Patty laughing. To
her, the constant stress and commotion and the infinite loads of laundry,
the homework and housework, mean that life has turned out exactly the way
she planned. “I wanted to create a family through adoption,
and I wanted a large family,” Patty says. “This is kind of my
life’s mission, my life’s work.”
What made Patty this
way? She was raised by her paternal grandmother and her late father, a
printer and bartender, whom she describes as a “very much
service-oriented and kid-oriented” kind of guy. She helped take care
of her older sister, who had significant developmental delays. Their mom
lived elsewhere, and, without elaboration, Patty mentions that her last
year of high school was spent “for various reasons” in an
informal foster-care arrangement, with “someone who volunteered to
let me live with them.”
“I always wanted to be adopted,” she
says, maybe half-joking. “You know — family
challenges.”
Adopting children, she figured, would be the best way
to repay the people who took care of her.
She moved to Chicago, first as a student at Barat
College of the Sacred Heart in Lake Forest, then at Loyola University,
where she earned a master’s degree in social work. She found a job as
a caseworker at the Allendale Association child-welfare agency, where she
helped match special-needs kids with appropriate foster families. When she
felt ready to start her own family, she went through the process of earning
her foster-care license and applying to a private adoption agency. She had
been enjoying having her first foster child for about two months when
someone from the adoption agency called to tell her that they had a baby
for her.
“It was cool. I still remember that,”
Patty says. “There is nothing better, for me, than getting that call:
‘We’ve got your baby here — come and get him!’
”
The agency asked her what she planned to name the
baby, and she said Joseph Daniel. But a snafu with his birth certificate
prevented Joey’s placement for several weeks. During the delay, even
though Patty had never seen this child, she agonized over his wellbeing;
she already felt like his mom. Finally, after a month of waiting, she
brought Joey home. Because of his birth mother’s chemical
dependency, he had severe gastroesophageal reflux and seemed hypersensitive
to almost everything. Joey was, Patty says, a “very high-maintenance
baby.”
But by the time he was 3, Patty was ready for another
child. Almost as soon as she renewed her foster-care license, she got a new
baby boy. He was officially a foster child, but his caseworker told Patty
that he would likely be hers to adopt. This time there was no paperwork
problem, and her Alex joined Joey at just 6 days of age.
“The awesomeness of having a really fresh one
was really kinda nice,” Patty says, laughing. “A fresh
babe!”
Alex was just 4 months
old when Patty was contacted by a caseworker who needed someone to take
care of a toddler named Jesse for the weekend. On Monday, the caseworker
asked Patty to keep Jesse for two weeks. At the end of two weeks, the
caseworker asked Patty to keep Jesse for a month. Patty, realizing that
Jesse needed help with medical problems and learning issues, said no, she
couldn’t keep Jesse any longer — unless she could adopt him.
The caseworker agreed.
Patty decided that the three boys needed a sister and
applied to a private adoption agency. Soon enough, she brought home a baby
girl, just 3 days old, and named her Lauren. Like her new big brothers before her, Lauren had her
birth mother’s drug problems to work out of her system, but Patty had
learned to handle the process. In fact, she managed to singlehandedly pack
and move her family from Chicago to Springfield when Lauren was just 6
weeks old. “See, by then Joey was 5, and I wanted him to
start kindergarten in a place that was smaller and more familiar, a place
that was less cumbersome for getting around as far as daycare and school
and church. I specifically wanted him in Catholic school,” Patty
says. She bought a home in a trailer park off North Grand
Avenue, enrolled Joey at Little Flower School, and got a job as a school
social worker. Once settled into the new surroundings, she got back to the
business of building her family.
Illinois Department of Children and Family Services
placed a 7-month-old baby girl named Tyra with Patty. But Tyra had a twin
brother named Tyree, who was also in the foster-care system —
somewhere. Patty became determined to reunite Tyra and Tyree in her home.
At the time, though, she had another foster child — a child she knew
she wasn’t going to adopt — which gave her a full house, by
state standards. She spent two years fighting to get Tyree, eventually
hiring an attorney. He was 3 by the time he came to live with Patty. The
twins were 5 by the time their adoptions were finalized. Six years later, Patty adopted again, a newborn girl
she named Olivia who might just be the finishing touch for Patty’s
family — or maybe not. Having fostered an additional five kids among
her seven, Patty says she might resume that work again. “I’ve
thought about doing that. It kind of just depends,” she says. All of Patty’s kids were born with the kind of
problems that foreshadowed the need for extra help, extra attention, extra
love. Four were born to birth mothers with diagnosed mental illness; four
have been found to have depression. One has intermittent explosive
disorder. One child was born HIV-positive but, like many such babies,
outgrew the condition at 18 months of age. Another was found abandoned in a
crack house when he was less than a month old. Not many people want to tackle raising babies born
with problems. Patty, howeve, is in seventh heaven. “I am so lucky. Even though it’s very
challenging at times, I literally, really and truly, say thank-you prayers
daily for each and every one of them,” she says. “I just
believe there’s a reason they ended up with me. And why these seven?
I think there’s a reason for that, too.”
Despite their
backgrounds, Patty says, all of her children are normal. “I’m a special-ed social worker, so
‘normal’ for me is pretty broad,” Patty clarifies.
“They all have challenges they have to deal with on a daily
basis.”
But each of her children also has his or her own
special charm. Joey, now 17, is “very charismatic,”
Patty says, and “has a way of working himself into people’s
hearts.” Jesse, 16, is exceptionally intelligent and can learn
“highly technical stuff by rote very easily.” Alex, 14, and
Lauren, 11, are “pivotal” to the peace of the household, Patty
says. “They can talk to all the kids and hold their own with any of
them,” she says. Tyree, 8, is thoughtful, loving, a
“people-pleaser,” and his twin, Tyra, is particularly good with
the elderly. Olivia, just 2, has speech problems yet manages to be
extremely expressive. Her status as the baby of the bunch gives her the
magical ability to relieve tension among the teens. “Sometimes, with adolescents, there’s a
real yuck energy, and she just balances that kind of thing,” Patty
says. “Everything is so new and fresh to her, everybody just enjoys
her.”
Lauren claims that Olivia even counsels the older
kids after they’ve gotten a lecture from Patty. “After my
mom’s left, Olivia will come up and talk to whoever’s in
trouble,” Lauren says. “You can’t be mad at Olivia.
She’s got that face.”
As the designated spokesperson for the kids, Lauren
chooses her words carefully, but only for accuracy, not politeness. She
describes the twins as “boisterous.” She calls Joey lazy but
stubborn. She describes Jesse as hot-tempered, but she’s plainly in
awe of his diligent job search, estimating that he applied at 20 different
businesses before Harbor Freight finally hired him. The cool thing about adoption, apparently, is the
freedom it gives a popular preteen to disown her siblings on a whim.
“I’m not related to any of them,” she quips —
making an exception for the delightful Olivia. “Oh, that’s my
sister,” Lauren says. She has no complaints about the crowded conditions of
her home — “I’m used to it” — or the economic
rigors of living on a tight budget. “We know that we can’t
always be asking for everything, and we all kind of remind each
other,” she says. She doesn’t even seem to mind her weekly
chore: cleaning the tub, toilet, and floor in the bathroom she and Tyra
share with Patty and Olivia. “It’s better than the other bathroom,
because they’ve got the cat litterbox in there — and
boys,” she says.
As for her mother, Lauren calls her “a great
one.”
“Sometimes, like, at night, I thank God that I
got this great of a family,” Lauren says. And other times? “Other times, I close my door and blast
music.”
Life is about to improve
for the Redpaths. On June 19, the family will break ground on a new home,
being built by Habitat for Humanity of Sangamon County. With five bedrooms,
it will be the largest residence this Habitat chapter has ever built.
Before construction gets under way, Patty and Habitat must come up with at
$40,000 in donations. Fortunately, Patty has discovered she and her
children have more friends than they ever imagined.
Last month, Tim and Tina Hogan, who are members of
her parish, turned the tragic death of their 24-year-old son, T.J., into a
fundraiser for Patty, asking that mourners contribute to Habitat Home No.
75 in lieu of flowers. Patty says she’s not sure whether she ever met
T.J., but she now feels he must be her guardian angel in heaven.
Even more surprising is a fundraiser planned by the
SandTrap Tavern and the Black Pistons Motorcycle Club. Called “Biker
Insanity,” it’s a poker run, silent auction, bake sale and
50/50 raffle scheduled for May 24, Memorial Day weekend.
Patty — an associate of the Dominican Sisters
and a member of the religious laity — doesn’t normally hang out
at taverns with bikers. “I don’t drink; I don’t smoke; I
don’t do any of that stuff! I’m not really a Redpath,”
she jokes, acknowledging her extended family’s hard-partying
reputation, “and I’m not a biker! Oh my God!”
In fact, Patty normally insists on driving because
she makes such an unpleasant passenger, constantly asking “Oh, we
don’t have to go that fast, do we?”
But SandTrap operator Min Costa has organized this
fundraiser because she and Patty are soul sisters — Costa also
adopted a high-risk baby girl, now an eighth-grader on the high honor roll.
“They tried to discourage me in every way, but between God and love
that’s how that child blossomed and developed. You’re not going
to tell me any different,” Costa says. “When I heard Patty’s story, I said,
‘Gotta do it’ — because she didn’t get just
one,” Costa says, “she got seven kids! How miraculous is
that?”
To hear Patty tell it, her family wasn’t so
much a miracle as it was a product of her own bullheaded
naïveté. “I think when I began I was a lot younger,
certainly inexperienced . . . and I think I had some of that
all-they-need-is-love kind of thing,” she says. “Well, it
isn’t all that they need. They need a lot more than that. Somebody
once told me: Loving them through something is more crucial than just loving
them.”
Her training as a social worker for special-needs
kids has helped, she’s sure, though she’s found parenting to be
a different game. She believes that her preprogrammed personality simply
led her to this life. “How I’m wired makes a difference,”
she says. “You know, if I didn’t have my faith, if I
didn’t have my sense of humor, I wouldn’t have been able to do
this at all.”
Contact Dusty Rhodes at drhodes@illinoistimes.com
This article appears in Apr 17-23, 2008.
