A Forever Home
November was National Adoption Month. Every year in Connecticut, The Department of Children and Families (DCF) and the Judicial Branch finalize hundreds of adoptions, typically 400 to 500 a year.
Connecticut’s DCF Commissioner Joette Katz said the recruitment of families has been re-designed to move away from a general message about the need for adoptive and foster families to one that focuses on a specific child who needs a home. “All around the country, states and counties struggle to achieve results through the conventional marketing recruitment methods that child welfare agencies have always used,” Katz said in a statement. “But when we focus on finding a family for one child at a time, it really brings a spotlight on the joys and rewards of adopting. The pictures and stories of the individual kids are that compelling.”
One of those adoptions provided a young girl named Indigo a forever home. Michael Brinckerhoff had met Indigo’s mother at a support group sixteen years ago and had only met Indigo twice. He received a call that a five-year-old’s mother had told DCF that she wanted her daughter to live with him.
Twenty-six hours after that call, Brinckerhoff and his partner, now fiance, Troy Saunders, went to pick up Indigo at a home in Danbury. Brinckerhoff said that he and Saunders were not thinking of having children of their own but after being with Indigo for 2 weeks, he told Saunders “She’s staying here; we’re going to figure this out.”
DCF’s initial goal, had been to reunite Indigo with her mother, but when that couldn’t happen, the couple began the adoption process. On April 4th, the adoption was official.
Brinckerhoff says that one night after putting Indigo to bed, she asked him to turn the light back on. “She looked at me and said, ‘Thank you for taking care of me, I love you.’”
Tags: Adoption, Connecticut, Danbury, LGBT, LGBT family, LGBTQ, LGBTQ family, National Adoption Month