“I know Mira’s adopted, I know her story, but it’s like she’s always been here.” |
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Theresa Grimes used to have a photo of a beautiful little girl as her phone’s lock screen. The two had never met; “Linny” was thousands of miles away and had no idea a New Yorker was thinking about her. Grimes dreamed of bringing Linny home to Albany with a new last name, where she could meet eight strapping brothers and get help with her many special needs.
But Linny didn’t come home to the Empire State. She didn’t become a Grimes. Instead, after Theresa and her husband Mike, a mortgage service office manager, got through a significant chunk of the adoption process, an Italian family adopted Linny first.
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“It was like a punch in the gut,” says Grimes, a customer service agent for a major airline. She suddenly felt less like Muhammed Ali and more like Si Robertson, who once joked: “I sting like a butterfly and punch like a flea.”
That punch that knocked her out of one boxing ring, however, landed her in another: that of now being mom to Mira, a 12-year-old Ukrainian with a penchant for frilly shirts.
“I know Mira’s adopted, I know her story, but it’s like she’s always been here,” Grimes says. “You can’t imagine your life without her, nor would we want to.”
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Theresa and Mike first became interested in adoption after kinship-fostering a cousin’s biological son. At age three, he was nonverbal and not toilet-trained. After a year with the Grimes family, however, “a light switch went off.”
“I couldn’t believe the change that being in a family made,” marvels Grimes. “You could see the difference in a short time, the leaps and bounds that this little boy made.” She began surfing through special needs adoption blogs when she discovered Reece’s Rainbow.
Mike and Theresa aimed to adopt Linny, but when that fell through, they found Mira (code-named “Lucia”). Ukraine was an attractive option for them, as it accepted older parents (the couple is in their mid-50s) and larger families like theirs. And Mira had a winning smile alongside special needs (cerebral palsy, epilepsy and delays) they felt comfortable in accepting.
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The family’s first Ukraine trip (to meet Mira and accept her referral) was in November 2019. Thanks to some issues with judges and Mira’s biological family, Grimes came back again in January and February. Those problems smoothed out, she then traveled to Ukraine once more to bring home her first daughter forever in March 2020.
March 13, 2020, to be exact ― the day the world shut down. Theresa was in Ukraine less than six hours before hopping back on a return flight, afraid of being stuck in Ukraine indefinitely because of Covid-related travel restrictions.
“It was heart-wrenching,” Grimes confesses. “I didn’t even get to see Mira, but that might have been a good thing. I don’t know if I could have left if I saw her.”
Finally, at the end of June 2020, the anxious mother returned, this time to spring 10-year-old Mira from her orphanage for good.
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She was worth the wait.
“She’s amazing, just a wonderful little girl,” gushes Grimes. “There’s not a person she’s not friendly or very kind to.”
In the 21 months since Mira became an American, her new mother says, she has made substantial progress. “In Ukraine, she could barely hold a pencil, but now she’s doing very well in school and speaks full English.” Mira attends physical therapy and is a “sponge” for learning. She’s also discovering the finer points of femininity, no longer wiping her face with her shirt and slowly overcoming trauma surrounding personal hygiene.
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Mira has also found her place amongst eight big brothers ages 34 to 14. Her stubbornness might help with that, Grimes laughs. Mira simply fits in ― and her brothers love her fiercely.
“My most important job in life is to raise good, decent humans, and if I’ve done one thing right in my life, my husband and I have raised good men,” Grimes says.
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And now they get to raise a good woman, too. |
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Crystal Kupper is a freelance writer specializing in magazines and special projects. Since earning her journalism degree, she has written for clients such as Zondervan, Focus on the Family and the Salvation Army, among many others. |
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REECE'S RAINBOW | www.reecesrainbow.org |
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