Finding space for another

THE PARENTS: Jeannine Powers, 37, and Jeff Powers, 38, of Roxborough

THE CHILD: Joseph (Joey) James Powers, 7 months, adopted March 24, 2021

HIS FOUR-FOOTED GUARDIANS: Sophie, their newer beagle, “thinks Joey is her baby,” Jeannine says, and Doc, also a beagle, acts as Joey’s “chief security officer.”

It wasn’t really a date — just brunch at Weezie’s Kitchen in Richmond, Va., a place Jeff visited so often that the owner named an omelet after him. The Jeff Express folded eggs with feta, pepper jack, mushrooms, and onions. The not-a-date went well.

They’d met a few months prior, in early 2008, while both were waiting tables at a Richmond country club. But a relationship was out of the question, Jeannine insisted; she was planning a move to Philadelphia to start graduate school in art history.

Once they were long distance, the spark ignited. “He lured me in,” Jeannine said with a laugh. “He wrote me letters, physical letters on paper.” The two logged frequent-driver miles on I-95, traveling between Richmond and Philly, for a long year and a half.

And sometime during that period, when they were walking home from a bar hangout with friends and Jeff was talking about the next steps in his life, Jeannine impulsively said, “Where you go, I’m going to go.

“It was out of my mouth before I thought about it. Then I thought: OK, I mean that.”

Jeff moved to Philly in 2010. The next milestone was getting a dog — Dr. Peter Venkman (they call him Doc), a rescue beagle. Then there was the night in October 2013 when the opera-singing server at Victor Cafe began crooning lyrics about love and marriage; when Jeannine turned from the performer, she saw Jeff on one knee.

They married in 2014, in Newark, Del. — a short ceremony made even shorter when the officiant began to declare the vows: “Jeannine, do you —” he started, and she blurted, “I do!”

“Everyone laughed, but in a good way,” Jeff recalls. Jeannine remembers that moment, too, and other moments when she grabbed Jeff’s hand in the midst of the day’s whirlwind to regain her calm.

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They’d talked about children — a clear yes — and about the possibility of adoption. “I always thought that if one has the space in their heart and their home, … if it’s something that speaks to you and there is someone who is looking for a home, then those two pieces fit together,” Jeannine says. “I felt like I had space.”

Jeff was amenable to adoption; when he pictured fatherhood, he imagined being the “funny, goofy parent” who could ease stress with laughter.

They tried … and tried … for about a year; they wryly call the summer of 2015 the “summer of testing, the summer of bloodwork, of being poked and prodded.” The tests were inconclusive; they declined to try IVF.

“It’s wonderful that those options exist, but it wasn’t the right path for us,” Jeannine says. Instead, they began to work with A Baby Step Adoption, providing fingerprints and financial records and a profile book for birth parents to peruse.

“It was a lot of pressure,” Jeannine remembers. If they photographed the living room, might a birth mother think it was too messy? Should they include the piano in the picture? The bookshelves? “You don’t know what’s going to inspire a birth family to feel connected to you.”

A few months after they entered A Baby Step’s network, Jeannine became pregnant; she didn’t know until she began to miscarry, two weeks before Mother’s Day 2018. “I needed time to grieve that, physically and emotionally,” Jeannine says, so the two hit pause on adoption for about nine months. They also adopted a second dog, another beagle, named Sophie.

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In April 2020, they were matched: a birth mother pregnant with a boy and due in August. “With each passing week, it was starting to feel a little more real,” Jeff says. Friends handed down baby clothes; on a Sunday in June, Jeff washed and folded a load of the tiny garments. The next day, they got a call from the caseworker: The birth mother had changed her mind.

“It was a gut punch,” Jeff says. “It’s complicated,” Jeannine adds, “to have that sadness and also compassion for someone who wants to parent when you are also on that journey.” They grieved, and talked, and kept waiting.

The call came last September: a birth mother, pregnant with a boy, due in November. Jeannine and Jeff’s network of friends and family sprang into action: offering clothes and books, creating a Google document of advice and lists of must-have baby items.

On Election Day, they got another call: The birth mother is being induced. Get on a plane to Arizona. Jeff, a professor of molecular biology, was on his way to administer exams, but Jeannine hastily packed and was at the airport by 3 a.m.

Then, she says, the day unfolded like a movie: She stepped off a hospital elevator, was handed a sticker with her name on it, rounded a corner, and saw him — a tiny, wrinkled bundle swaddled in a blanket patterned with elephants.

“Oh, my God, it’s you,” she remembers thinking. “There you are. It’s me.”

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Jeff’s medical students rallied on his behalf, asking administrators to hold their final class sessions remotely; he flew out two days after the birth and was able to meet Joey before midnight.

“He was asleep,” Jeff recalls. “Jeannine put my hand on him. It didn’t seem real.”

While they waited for interstate adoption paperwork to clear, friends and family trooped to their house, setting up a swing and bassinet, stocking the refrigerator, hanging welcome signs and balloons. Even the mail carrier knew they were bringing a baby home.

And then they were three, in the midst of a November chill, learning the new rhythms of parenthood. Jeannine recalls nights when snow drifted outside the nursery window and she rocked Joey in a chair. “It felt special to be in that little bubble with him.”

Jeff likens parenthood to watching someone experience your favorite movie for the first time; witnessing their delight deepens your own. “It’s like that with kids, for everything,” he says.