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Hope & Healing

Adoption Brings a Dozen Bundles of Joy

By SHANNON PHILPOTT
Messenger Correspondent

The telephone rings, and the front door slams as a teenager enters from school. An 8-year-old runs through the kitchen with a superhero costume, complete with a cape. Mom opens her planner to discuss this week’s upcoming schedule. A cell phone rings, and dad asks one of the 12 children to remove a bookbag from the table. It may sound like chaos, but Ken and Mary Besse says it’s more like “organized chaos.”

Though recent movies like “Cheaper By the Dozen” and “Yours, Mine, and Ours” portray fictional families acting out everyday chaos with 12 or more children, the action within this Millstadt family’s household is very real.

Children run from one end of their renovated farmhouse to the other. With six bedrooms and only two bathrooms, the daily schedule has to be organized.

“Ken and I had always talked about having a large family,” Mary Besse said. “It was what we were meant to do — our calling.”

Disagreements about who gets to use one of the four cell phones and who gets to drive one of the five vehicles are typical. However, conversations about birth parents are typical, too. Each one of the Besse children, ranging in age from 8 to 31, was adopted through Catholic Social Services, a diocesan agency.

When Ken and Mary Besse learned that a natural pregnancy was out of the question, they decided that it didn’t matter how they got their large family and they chose to adopt.

When the couple, both teachers at Belleville West High School (Ken, 64, is retired, and Mary, 59, will retire at the end of this school year), began the adoption process in 1973, they were told the wait would be pretty long. “We decided to refinish the kitchen in September 1975, and we got Brad the second week of November,” Ken Besse said. “We thought it would be much longer, so we always joke that we got Brad on the installment plan because we had spent most of our money on the kitchen.”

Brad, now 31, ran the household until Leah, now 28, arrived. Then Anna, now 24, came along, followed by Rachel, now 18. All four were adopted as infants through CSS.

The couple was thrilled to continue building the foundation of a large family, a tradition established within earlier generations of Besses.

However, after the first four children arrived, Ken and Mary Besse began to discuss the possibility of foster children. “After we adopted the first four, they (CSS) started calling us,” Mary Besse said with a smile.

Already established siblings, Brad, Leah, Anna and Rachel met Nick, Tabby and Kate for the first time in 1990. Tabby, now 19, Kate, now 18, and Nick, now 16, were siblings in need of a stable home environment.

The first night a new child enters the Besse home, and every night from then on, the entire family sits together for a meal. “I always try to make a special dinner the first night they are home,” Mary Besse said. “It’s usually something I hope they like, such as macaroni and hot dogs.”

Sharing a chair in the family kitchen, giggling, Tabby and Kate chime in that they remember digging into the meal with their fingers. A home cooked meal was something they had rarely experienced before joining the Besse family.

Mary Besse said she remembers how each child adjusted differently to the stability they provided. When Robby, now 19, joined the Besse clan, he was amazed that all of the children in the home had the same last name and that they ate meals together as a family, Mary Besse said. “Once they have the stability of being home, it becomes home,” Mary Besse said.

The family continued to grow as each foster child was available for adoption, and as more foster children needed homes through CSS. Jeffrey, now 13, joined the family as a foster child, followed by natural siblings Chris, now 12,
Please see ‘Adoption,’ p. 9