Family finally whole

EVERETT – Ruth Brandal found that losing a child to another life could be every bit as brutal as losing a child to death.

As first-time foster parents, she and her husband, Paul, wanted more than anything to adopt Tiffany, a tiny 5-month-old whose mother had left her with a baby sitter and never returned.

The Brandals were on the verge of making Tiffany their daughter when her mother reappeared. A judge decided the woman deserved another chance at motherhood.

In 1984, after two marvelous years with Tiffany, the Brandals were out of the picture – seemingly for good.

For 17 years they mourned not only the daughter they had lost, but also their helplessness.

“All those years we’d look at little kids and think, ‘Is that her?” Ruth Brandal said. “It felt like a child had been abducted. We knew she was out there, but we didn’t know where. All we could do is pray for her.”

Their prayers would be answered. They eventually found their little girl, and 20 years after they lost her she would finally become their daughter.

In the early ’80s, Ruth and Paul Brandal, who now live on an organic buffalo and poultry farm on the outskirts of Everett, were devastated to find out that having children would be impossible without extremely costly medical intervention.

Ruth Brandal’s mother, Elynor Zimmerman of Seattle, a longtime foster parent and child welfare advocate, urged them to become certified foster parents.

They did, and not long afterward an abandoned baby girl came to live with the couple.

“She was 5 months old,” Ruth Brandal said. “All she could do was roll over.”

For two years they cared for Tiffany – more than long enough to fall in love with the little girl, her broad smile and her propensity for pleases and thank-yous.

By the time Tiffany was 2, she had spent only about 10 hours with her birth mother. Then the woman, a heroin addict, made a move to clean up her act and started spending more time with her daughter. She campaigned to get Tiffany back.

The thought of losing Tiffany to a woman who had already abandoned her once made the devout Christian couple desperate with worry.

“I considered abduction just to protect her,” said Ruth Brandal, a registered nurse. “Here I’d never lied to my parents, but I was considering something so illegal out of this incredible love. That was the passion I had.”

With two women who wanted the child, Tiffany was confused and in danger of being “cut in half – like the baby in the Bible story with King Solomon,” Ruth Brandal said. She knew she had to say goodbye.

“In the Bible, the real mother let the baby go before she’d see it hurt,” she said. “I was willing to let her go because I couldn’t stand to see her life cut in half.”

She paused.

“It wasn’t my choice for her, but it was outside my power to do anything about it. It was the absolute most difficult thing I’ve done in my life.”

Tiffany was their first and last foster child. It was years before Ruth Brandal could speak about the girl without crying.

“All the years that she was gone, I prayed for her – for God to put his arms around her when others would not,” she said.

As she mourned, Ruth Brandal made a promise to herself. When Tiffany turned 18, she would try to find her.

Bouncing around

Tiffany Copeland lived with three half-brothers and her mother until she was 9 years old. She doesn’t remember ever getting so much as a hug.

When her elementary school reported her as truant for missing school about 50 percent of the time, Copeland used her mother’s address book to find her paternal grandmother and her father.

After meeting her father for the first time, she went to live with him for a couple of years, but entered foster care again. Before the end of high school, she lived in nearly a dozen foster homes.

“Most of my childhood, all I wanted was to be with someone who wanted me there,” Copeland said.

When she was a senior at Tukwila’s Foster High School, she went back to live with her father. He rented a room to her, and to be allowed to live with him she had to work part time.

She was determined to graduate from high school, which she did before joining the Army. But after she enlisted and was out on her own, things didn’t calm down right away.

Much of her leave time was spent in White River in Pierce County, where time after time she would track down her homeless, drug-addicted mother and plead with her.

“Go to rehab. We need a mother,” Copeland would tell her. Her mother refused.

In the Army, Copeland met her future husband, Andy. The day she tried to talk to him for the first time, they both got in trouble. They became friends doing punishment push-ups.

She was stationed at Fort Lewis when Ruth and Paul Brandal used the Internet and her birth father to locate her. Copeland was startled and amazed to learn that someone had always loved her and had been looking for her.

“The first thing she said to us is, ‘The way my life went, I wished you had adopted me. Why didn’t you come get me?” Ruth Brandal said. “I said, ‘First of all, we didn’t know where you were. And we had no right.’”

The Brandals sent her 17 roses, one for each year she had been away from them. They gave her baby pictures and clothes she had worn as a toddler.

Unaccustomed to such attention, Copeland was reluctant at first and fell in and out of contact with the Brandals.

For a few years, they would speak occasionally when she would call them, or they would write her letters. They also sent Christmas presents – the first she could ever remember receiving.

When they visited her in Texas earlier this year, the Brandals decided to ask her if she wanted to officially become their daughter.

“She was kind of stunned,” Ruth Brandal said. “The next day, she gave us Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards, and said, ‘Yes, I really want to be your daughter.’”

Copeland had decided that, unlike many of the people in her past, the Brandals would love her no matter what.

“When there’s two people like Ruth and Paul that love you, what are you waiting for?” she said.

Fixing the glass

Cheeks flushed red like a new mother’s, Ruth Brandal, 49, stood in court next to her husband Paul, 51, and both became parents and grandparents in the span of five minutes.

Copeland, 22, stood next to her husband and their 1-year-old daughter Kayla. The couple, who are both out of the Army and living in Amarillo, Texas, also have a son on the way.

Adoption doesn’t have nearly the same implications when the adopted is 22 as it does when a child is 2, Judge Kenneth Cowsert told them, but it’s important all the same.

Copeland’s birth certificate will be updated to list Ruth and Paul Brandal as her parents.

Outside the courtroom, the new family hugged as relatives crowded around with congratulations.

“I’m a mom – it’s for real now,” Ruth Brandal said, her voice rising and her eyes teary. “It’s not just a wish or a dream, this is true. Pinch me!”

Ruth Brandal carried with her to court an old framed baby photo of Copeland. The frame had fallen off the wall one day after Tiffany had gone, cracking the glass. Ruth Brandal could never bring herself to fix it.

“It was a symbolic thing, the broken glass,” she said. “I’ll repair it now.”

Copeland and her adoptive parents are still getting to know one another, and she’s learning to accept the love they want to give her even as she’s learning to be a good parent herself.

Copeland also is learning a new career. She plans to follow her mother into nursing. Her husband is studying mechanical engineering at West Texas A&M University, but the couple eventually plan to move to Kentucky so he can enter a seminary.

The couple will have Copeland’s new parents to help them along the way. After bouncing around most of her life with no one but herself to rely on, trust and commitment come slowly to Copeland.

“I have two people who love me and want to call me their daughter,” Copeland said quietly. “But it will take time.”

“Life usually doesn’t have such happy endings,” her husband said.

Read more about DSHS Child Welfare reforms:

http://www1.dshs.wa.gov/geninfo/cws.html

Learn more about the Foster Parent Association of Washington state:

http://www.fpaws.org/

Read more about the foster care class-action lawsuit Jessica Braam vs. DSHS:

http://www.atg.wa.gov/braam/

Reporter Jennifer Warnick: 425-339-3429 or jwarnick@ heraldnet.com.

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