If you haven’t heard of Frank Somerville before, we’re about to introduce you to one of the most amazing people out there. Frank is a news anchor, Krav Maga enthusiast, father, and story-teller. Every day on his Facebook page he shares incredible stories from a unique perspective, and in doing so he helps people better relate to the news and world events. A true inspiration, we were lucky enough to sit down with Frank to shift the spotlight onto him and talk to him about one of the things he’s most passionate about: adoption.
“When I grew up, I grew up in Berkeley and my parents were caught up in the whole free speech thing. It was a tough time. My dad and my mom were wrapped up in the protests and their work and I was kind of on my own, and I just remember thinking I want to be more involved, I want to push them. With my parents if I said I didn’t want to do something they said, ‘well, alright,’ but every kid says they don’t want to do something. Whenever it gets hard they say they don’t want to do it and that’s when the parent has to say, no you’re going to stick at it.”
“I don’t want my children to grow up with regrets where they say ‘I wonder what would happen if I stuck with that.'”
So, your daughters are 10 and 15, what is it like being in a house of girls?
“I love it. I always just assumed I would have a boy, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I love having two girls. My only complaint is that I wish I could get them to wear a baseball cap backwards, and neither one of them wants to do that. I could when they were four BUT as soon as they were older they wanted to turn it around.”
“I remember when my first daughter was born and we didn’t know, and she popped out and the nurse goes ‘It’s a girl’. I just remember thinking ‘What? I don’t know anything about girls’ But, I just love it.”
How do you think fatherhood has evolved? Dads are so much more engaged and evolved than ever before, how do you think the role of fathers will change over time?
“I just really hope that fathers will get involved, because it’s fun. It’s only there for a short amount of time and if you miss it, you miss it. It’s very easy to get so wrapped up in your work or what you’re doing and forget about that, and then you look back and think ‘I wasn’t there, I missed that’.”
We’d like to hear a little bit about your adoption story. How did you first come to the decision to adopt?
“I was in my late-40s and my wife was in her mid-40s and she was having trouble getting pregnant. We could have done IVF, and our thought was there’s no guarantee. We had never thought about adoption before, and then we thought about it. That’s what started getting the process rolling for us.”
“One thing I don’t say is I never call her my ‘adopted daughter,’ she’s my daughter who happens to be adopted. There’s a subtle difference there. It drives me crazy when someone says ‘Is that your adopted daughter?’ I always tell them no, she’s just ‘My daughter’.”
Would you mind talking us through the whole process? Once you made the decision to adopt, how did you decide where you were going to start that process?
“You can either do a private adoption or a county adoption. My wife wanted to do a private adoption because I think she felt like she would know more about the history of the child. So, we found an adoption agency and there’s a ton of paperwork that you have to fill out. It’s almost similar to buying a house. You basically put together a sheet that’s like a resume about you and what you like and why you’d be a good parent. They give those cards to people who are considering adoption and they pick out who they think would be a match. In reality, I had more questions than the adoption agency. I didn’t know anything about adoption and we were doing an open adoption, meaning our daughter knows who her birth mother is.”
“I had a lot of questions ‘What if she meets her birth family and sees them and wants to go with them?’ I’ll never forget what the adoption agency said to me, ‘You’ve got to understand that every day your daughter is with you, she’s bonding with you. Your daughter isn’t going to say, we’ll I’ve spent years with these people but I’m going to go over and be with my ‘real family’. When I heard that all of a sudden it wasn’t as threatening.”
“I think the thing that’s most important for me to tell people is be prepared for a horror story, because it probably happens to just about everyone. We had someone who called us and was trying to scam us. Initially, we were matched with a family in Texas and we helped with paying for bills like food, medical, and apartment. We would fly out to see her and we met her. She was going to give birth and we flew in for the birth, and my wife fed the little girl her first bottle. My wife just had this feeling that something wasn’t right. And she was right. Something you should know is that you can’t take the baby home until the mom leaves the hospital. So, the mom kept delaying and finally the last thing I remember was her saying ‘Can you come up to the room?’ and I asked ‘Should we bring the baby carrier?’ and she said ‘No.’ We went up and the mother said ‘I can’t do it.’ My wife was just devastated, and we went back to the hotel.”
“Three weeks later we were matched with our daughter. We were very nervous and all we wanted was for the birth mother to leave the hospital so we could take our daughter home. I’ll never forget when the mother was discharged and we went up and got our daughter, we didn’t just walk to the exit. We walked really fast to the exit, because I just wanted to get out of the hospital because that would just mean she’s ours. This was in San Diego and we were going to fly back, but we couldn’t get a flight so we decided to drive. My older daughter was with us and she had come down with us and the four of us drove back to the Bay Area. In the car was when we named her, I had different ideas from my wife. My five year old actually came up with the name. So, we named her in the car. On the way home we also stopped at a restaurant.. I remember walking in and the guy at the counter said ‘How Many?’ and I said ‘three, oh wait, four’.”
“It’s okay to have questions, but adoption is just the greatest thing ever. For families considering adoption, be prepared for something like that to happen, but if you stick with it and stick with the process there will be a happy ending. If you’re having trouble sticking it out, remember that there’s a kid out there who needs you. If you just keep moving forward at some point you’ll find that child. The thing that’s so cool about adoption is that I now know in my little way that I’ve made a difference.”
“With our daughter, because she’s black, I just go into her room sometimes I think ‘how cool is it that she doesn’t look anything like me and yet I’m her dad and she’s my daughter’. When we were going through the adoption process we said we would like to be matched with any race or gender. When we first had a chance to adopt my daughter we were scared because she wasn’t the same race. I remember thinking at first ‘What’s it like to adopt a black child?’ and then about a month after we adopted her I realized what a silly question that was. ‘It’s like having a pink kid, a purple kid, a white kid. A kid is a kid. She happens to look different from me, but she’s just a kid.’ I love that I have an interracial family, and I wouldn’t trade it.”
What advice do you have for parents considering to adopt?
“To stop thinking about it and just do it. If you’re considering it then you know down inside that you want to do it. We tend to talk ourselves out of things that we want to do. If you’re considering it, that’s a pretty good sign that you want to do it, you’re just a little bit nervous. It’s okay to be nervous. I was nervous. I had ever single question in the book. Every single question I had was answered and it was answered in a great way. Just be prepared for it to take some time and be prepared for there to be bumps along the road. You’re kind of going into the unknown, but once you do it you’ll realize it wasn’t as unknown as you thought it was. It’s just like having a biological kid, the kid is your kid.”
“Listen to yourself, if you’re thinking about it there’s a reason that you’re thinking about it.”
Were there any surprises in having an interracial family?
“We live in Oakland, and it’s important that our daughter be around people that look like her. We haven’t really had a negative experience at all. I think there were some people who may have looked at us a little wearily at first. But then they realized that’s just our daughter.”
When do you talk about adoption? How do you talk about adoption with your daughter?
“Our thought was that we would let our daughter bring it up, and she did when she was 5 and a kid came up to her and said ‘Are you adopted?’. Our daughter came up to us and said ‘Mom, Dad, am I adopted?’ Our response was, ‘Yea, absolutely. We picked you, you’re our number one draft pick. You tell that girl ‘Yes I am, I am adopted’. Adoption is a positive, it’s not a bad word. We treat adoption as a beautiful and wonderful thing.”
Your Facebook page is filled with incredible stories and pieces of inspiration. What about telling people’s stories really resonates with you?
“I just enjoy telling people’s stories. I believe good things happen to good people, and when I’m touched by a story I like to tell people about it. Facebook has been a great avenue for me to talk about things that I’m interested in, or that I care about, or that I think someone else might be interested in. What I think is that people appreciate real, they appreciate authentic, and I don’t think you can fake caring. You either care or you don’t. I like to think that that comes across.”
“It’s not like I’m doing rocket science here, I’m just telling stories in an honest way. I just happen to like real stories about real people ”
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For more information about Frank Somerville, visit his Facebook page.
If you’re interested in adopting or already an adoptive parent, Kinsights has an online community where you can get answers to your questions about adoption and find support.
