Julia and her family were supposed to go to Southern Utah for spring break. Instead, they’re here at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport. Eleven-year-old Julia loves this place. Today she’s wearing pink and purple: a purple hat with sparkly plastic jewels, a pink hooded sweatshirt, purple flip-flops. She’s chatty and thrilled with everything.  She runs up to volunteers to ask the sea otter’s names; she stares wide-eyed at the dark red octopus; she pets sea stars and urchins for twenty-five minutes in the touch tank.

Julia’s adoptive parents, Diane and Jack, hang back and watch her explore. They even allow Julia a few rare moments out of sight— until they see her trying to push to the front of the crowd at the sea lion window.

They call out to her sternly. Julia whirls around, her eyebrows furrowed, her lips in a pout.

“No, no, no!” She crosses her arms and stomps her feet.

“Julia.” Diane says in her warning voice.

“No! No! No!” says Julia.

“One,” says Diane, holding up her pointer finger. “Do you want to go to two? You can’t push people.”

“They’re pushing me!” says Julia. Diane takes her by the arm and pulls her close, speaking softly near Julia’s freckled face. Julia’s expression is sullen. She exclaims an occasional “No!” in response to whatever Diane is telling her.

The outburst better suits a child half Julia’s age.  Diane and Jack have had to learn patience and flexibility in the two years since they adopted Julia.

Julia is disappointed about Utah, but even a short trip to the coast an hour from home is big. Before Diane and Jack adopted her, Julia had never seen the ocean. In the weeks before spring break, taking an extended trip seemed increasingly impossible. Julia was at a critical point in counseling sessions—she had just begun to process severe trauma from her past. Leaving town and missing two therapy appointments might set Julia back, her counselor advised.

So Jack and Diane adjusted, as they have so many times since Julia came into their lives.

Diane and Jack thought long and hard about adopting an older child. At any given time in Oregon, there are about 1,000 such children waiting to be adopted. Like Julia, most of the kids are adopted out of foster care and suffer from mental and emotional disorders. Children in foster care are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder at twice the rate of U.S. war veterans.

Why would any couple choose such a challenging child for their own?

*        *        *        *

The social worker approached the two-story house in a small town outside of Eugene.  This was Julia’s house. He was investigating a neighbor’s report about the conditions of the home for Oregon’s Department of Human Services. Unfortunately, this was a major part of his job. Reports of child neglect and abuse are common in Oregon—in 2009, there were 7,240 founded cases.  

A man in his forties opened the door. First, the social worker noticed the flies. Second, the stench. Then, he saw the children—a four-year-old girl with a sprinkling of freckles across her face and her two brothers in the living room. They were playing with toys sticky with food.  Their faces and feet were smeared with dirt and food. The carpet was covered with trash, dirty diapers, moldy food, animal feces, and empty bottles.

The man let him into the house, and when the social worker spoke to the children’s mother, she explained that she was too sick to clean. The reality, she later admitted, was that she couldn’t care for the house or her children because of her methamphetamine addiction. She was seventeen at the time, and she later told state workers that she had never learned how to be a mother.  

The social worker toured the rest of the house, noting the urine and feces all over the bathroom, the kitchen sink full of dirty pots, and the mold-encrusted food inside the refrigerator. When the odors made his stomach turn, he stepped outside to call his supervisor and come up with a plan.

Next