September 16, 2011
34 children
Jackson family says adoptions are way for them to live the Gospel
Michael and Mary-Jo Jackson are the parents of seven biological children and 27 adopted children. Their family motto is “one heart one road,” Mary-Jo explains, “I want the children to know that we are all one heart and all on the same path.”
By MARY ANN HUGHES (Message staff writer)
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall possess the land.
Blessed are they who mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice’ sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 5: 3-10
Editor’s note: This is the one of several stories published this year on people who are living examples of the Beatitudes.
Mary-Jo Jackson starts each day with the prayer: “Let me get through this day.”
She asks God to help her “to know what to say” and “what not to say.”
And then she adds, “Please let nothing traumatic happen.”
Then her day begins. And it’s always a big day because it involves the lives of the 20 children that live under her roof.
Mary-Jo and her husband, Michael, recently moved to Evansville. He’s a pharmaceutical engineer at Mead Johnson, and they are the biological parents of seven grown children. In 1994, Michael traveled to Russia to begin the adoption process for their son Brian. Since then, the couple has adopted 27 children from Russia, Kazakhstan, Serbia, China, Romania, Vietnam, Bulgaria, Korea and the United States.
When Michael returned from that first trip to Russia, “he had nightmares for weeks,” said Mary-Jo. “He said that we needed to go back” to adopt more children, “so we did.”
“The living conditions in the Russian orphanage were horrible,” Michael says. They were a stark contrast “of what we took for granted here.”
As their family has grown, Mary-Jo and Michael have dealt with cleft palates, leg amputations, heart surgeries, hearing aids and eye corrections. Despite those difficulties, they agree that their biggest challenge has been helping the children who suffer with reactive attachment disorder, which is often caused by early abandonment and neglect.
“People think the toughest thing is the children in wheelchairs,” Mary-Jo said. “Nope. That’s simple.”
It’s the issue of abandonment that is so difficult. “One child was left in a doctor’s office,” she said, “and one child was left on a street corner. They don’t ask much about their biological families, and if they do ask, we tell them that it wasn’t possible for their families to take care of them.”
Her days with the children begin early and are long, she says. Luckily, she has a lot of energy and “works fast.”
“Everybody has a schedule in the morning. It has to be very organized.” There are three and a half bathrooms, and the high schoolers take showers in the morning and the grade school children take baths in the evening.
“We have no ‘I don’t want to get up,’” she says, explaining that four buses take her children to local public schools each weekday morning. Then Michael heads out the door with the six Reitz Memorial High School students and the five Christ the King students.
“The first thing I do is laundry,” Mary-Jo says. “I spend my day — all day — doing laundry and cooking. Fortunately, I love cooking.”
She quips, “We say we could have given tips to Eisenhower on planning D-Day.”
The biggest misconceptions about the family, she says, are people’s ideas that “it might be like a TV movie. People see them at church — all attentive.” But because many of the children come from very bad situations “they have demons with them, and they don’t go away.”
She holds a master’s degree in childhood development, and admits, “I thought I was prepared.” Some of the problems her children face were not even discussed by professionals when the adoptions began back in the mid 1990s.
Most days are good, she says. That means “everybody is smiling. Everybody is able to work through their problems. We are not without our problems, but if they handle them — that’s a good day.”
Some days are difficult. Sometimes, she admits, she’s tired or the family gets off its schedule. Things get difficult when the children “go back to their old coping skills. That might mean stealing food or scratching themselves until they bleed. That’s a bad day. Luckily, those don’t happen too much.”
When they do, it’s up to Mary-Jo and Michael to “figure out why they happen.” Sometimes the children will “self-harm. They didn’t get enough stimulation in the orphanages, and they don’t look at touch as a good thing. They scratch themselves to relieve stress.”
Despite the difficulties, she believes that “Christ calls us to live his word by loving God and loving our neighbor. We accomplish that by opening up [our home] to these children. It’s not everybody’s way, but for us it really is.”
Daily prayer helps. Mary-Jo says she is constantly having a conversation with God, and prays to the saints. “I have a great devotion to the saints. Each child has been given the name of a family member and also a saint.”
Daily Mass helps too. She walks a mile on weekdays to Holy Trinity Church in downtown Evansville to celebrate the Liturgy at noon.
Her day of work and prayer continues in the afternoon, and soon the children return from their schools. Then it’s time for dinner, homework and baths.
The house is quiet in the evenings, she says, and the TV isn’t on. Soon the children are heading to their beds, and finally only Mary-Jo and Michael are awake. That’s the time for them to share about their day, and “touch base to see what we can do for the kids,” she says.
Then it’s time for evening prayers and sleeping, before it starts all over again the next morning.
Michael says, “It’s the way we live. We’ve seen the conditions, how kids live, and we felt if we could help them out, to have better lives, that’s what our calling is — to help others.”
Loads of laundry and sleepless nights
Here are some questions and answers from the Jackson family’s website onehugefamily.com.
Question: How many loads of wash do you do in a week?
Answer: Usually 28. In the winter that goes higher when you factor in sweaters and heavy clothing.
Question: How do you afford to care for so many?
Answer: We are very, very disciplined with Michael’s salary. And no, there is no money tree in the backyard or printing press in the basement!
Question: How do you travel anywhere with the entire family?
Answer: We have two vans and a sedan. We do go to church every Sunday as a family.
Question: What outside help do you get?
Answer: Zero, zip, nada, zilch. Michael earns the money, Mary-Jo is the cooking and cleaning diva, and the kids all have chores. (A note to remember: Many of our kids have physical or cognitive situations which limits the type of chores they can accomplish. And many of the children have spent too much time parenting themselves. So we are very careful with the distribution of chores. These are growing children, not cleaning machines and not assistant parents.)
Question: Do you ever get tired?
Answer: Are you kidding? We’re tired all the time! But that’s the life when you are a parent. Either you are awake at night with babies/toddlers/sick children, or 3 a.m. finds you stressed about your teenagers, or worrying about your fourth grader who is struggling with math, or about how you are going to get yet another child into orthodontia without robbing a bank. In our case we have the added mental stress of knowing many of the kids will not be able to live on their own as adults without a lot of interventions. We try to take it one day at a time, to not obsess about things out of our control (tough for Mary-Jo), to not worry about money (Michael’s stressor) and to let God do His thing without suggestions or demands from us.