Changing the script
By Jessica Farrish Register-Herald Reporter | Posted: Sunday, November 23, 2014 3:00 am
Kristen Adkins
Kristen Adkins currently owns and operates an education consultation service, Education Revelation, that assists parents of public, private and home-school students to develop strategies to help their children meet educational goals and challenges.
If producers of a soap opera, a la “Desperate Housewives,” would ever scout Oak Hill for talent, Kristen Adkins is the type of woman who, at first glance, may get typecast. Blonde (and occasionally red-headed) and beautiful, she married her high school sweetheart before she’d finished college. Then, she settled into her hometown and is now a stay-at-home mom.
Only, the 40-year-old Adkins could be counted on to change the script. She’s done it in her own life several times, proving that life really can be as exciting as a soap opera, that a woman really can have it all and that it’s not smart to stereotype a blonde.
Adkins has been a respiratory therapist and midlevel manager at Plateau Medical Center in Oak Hill, a public school teacher, a private school teacher, a church planter and a businesswoman. She also home-schools her four children and maintains two blogs,www.homeschoolingconsultation.blogspot.com and weavingahomeschooljourney.blogspot.com.
She currently owns and operates an education consultation service, Education Revelation (www.educationrevelationconsulting.com), that assists parents of public, private and home-school students to develop strategies to help their children meet educational goals and challenges.
Adkins, a mother of four, has two biological daughters, Myah, 15, and Eden, 11. Her family grew in 2008, when she and her husband, Sam adopted two children, now ages 11 and 9.
Since her experience of adopting, she said, she encourages every family who’s able to consider adopting at least one child through the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources.
“If every stable family would adopt just one child, it would cut down on the problems (in society),” said Adkins. “People may think, ‘I can’t do this,’ but you can.”
Those who know her — she lives, attends church and works among people who have known her since she was a child — use words like “leader,” “strong,” “compassionate,” “dedicated” and “creative” to describe her.
Adkins, the daughter of Rudy and Joy Painter of Oak Hill, grew up on Joy Street in Oak Hill — a street Rudy Painter had named in honor of his wife, a New River Bank teller and another beautiful blonde, according to popular opinion.
In 1983, a dramatic moment in her young life spun the first twist in Adkins’ life.
“I had a nose bleed that wouldn’t stop, so my mom and dad took me to the ER in Oak Hill,” she recalled.
The nurses’ crisp, white uniforms and the bright lights and organized frenzy of the ER captivated Adkins during that late-night ER visit and made an impression that would influence her education and career choices several years later. Her grandmother, Roxie Painter, had also worked at PMC in the 1970s, and Adkins said she wanted to “be like her.”
For the next decade, Adkins’ life progressed like a well-scripted documentary of small-town America. She entered Oak Hill High School in 1988, and she and Sam, a friendly red-haired classmate with a big smile, began dating their sophomore year. They both graduated in 1992, and Adkins earned an associate’s degree from The College of West Virginia in 1994. She joined the staff of Plateau Medical Center in Oak Hill at age 19.
“I was too young for the 401(k) plan,” she recalled of her young age.
Adkins and Sam married in 1996, two years before she got her bachelor’s degree in respiratory therapy and a minor in management. She then continued her career as a respiratory therapist at PMC for the next several years and was named to a midlevel management position. She and Sam welcomed Myah in 1999, and Eden came four years later — around the time she and Sam built a house in Thousand Oaks and helped found Grace Baptist Church in Fayetteville.
Then she decided to change things up a little. “I was starting to feel like I wanted to spend more time with my children, so I went back to school,” she said, explaining her decision to leave the health care field and pursue a teaching degree from Western Governor’s University, based in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The twist in her life “script” led to a career with the public school system and then a teaching position at a private school in her hometown. But that wasn’t the big change.
Her life as a middle-class American mom of two kids was uneventfully moving forward like the lives of thousands of others, and God made an edit.
They had two daughters, and Sam, especially, had always wanted a son. So the couple — who already had two cherished girls and didn’t feel it was wise to play “Russian roulette” on getting an XY combination from a third pregnancy — decided to step out of the box and adopt a little boy.
They began by fostering children through the Fayette County Department of Health and Human Resources and in 2008, they “got” their little boy, along with a surprise – their third daughter, the little boy’s biological sister.
The “rewrite” of her family life was a curve Adkins had never imagined. But she said the experience of adopting the two children — who she said are as precious to her as if she’d given birth to them — was life-changing and she encourages other parents to consider adoption.
For those “watching” Adkins’ life story unfold, she tells them that adopting isn’t as different from having a biological child as some may think.
“You’re ‘expecting,’ but in a different way,” said Adkins. “You’ve taken your parenting classes (through DHHR), you’re prepared and you’ve even gotten a room ready at your house.”
Adoptive parents who are waiting on their children do the same things “pregnant” couples do, she explained. They look at toys and clothes, wonder if they’ll get a boy or a girl and wait for the “first meeting.”
“You’re expecting this phone call, with a child or a baby on the other end,” she said. “We wanted a boy, and every time we would go shopping, I’d look at the boys’ things and say, ‘If I had my little boy, I’d buy that.’”
Adkins didn’t expect to get her little boy and a little girl, but says she and Sam knew quickly it was what they wanted.
“The call came while I was on my planning period at work,” she recalled. “(A social worker and personal friend) was on the other end, asking if I wanted a little boy with a sister.
“I had to call Sam first! We decided within 20 minutes to accept them both.”
As the social worker walked the two latest additions to the Adkins family up the driveway to their new home, she said her daughter looked up with a big smile and asked, “Are you my new mommy?”
Adkins said she felt an instant bond and the children now are legally ‘Adkins’ and as much a part of her family as Myah and Eden.
“When (Fayette County Circuit Judge Paul Blake) was doing our adoption hearing, he said, ‘After today, this moment, these children are as if you had given birth to them,’” she recalled. “There will be no distinction between these children and the ones you had naturally.
“So these are your children forever.”
Adkins said the act of adoption has given her greater insight into her Christian faith, which teaches that God adopted people into his family by the death and resurrection of his son, Jesus Christ.
“God loved us so much that He adopted us into His family,” she said. “God loves us so much that He wants us to be His children.”
Adkins’ life story of a blonde (or redhead) hasn’t stopped twisting, though. She began home-schooling her four children and now offers educational consultation services, providing insight and solutions to students’ educational challenges and needs in order to ensure student academic success (www.homeschoolingconsultation.com).
http://www.register-herald.com/news/life/changing-the-script/article_aa1dd989-b6ac-52a0-8cb7-55aecb62a62e.html
November 24, 2014
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