Sunday, December 25, 2005

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Miracles do happen

By John JohnstonEnquirer staff writer

A petite woman sits on a bench, anxiously awaiting the arrival of a bus at the Greyhound terminal, downtown.

After 26 years of wishing for this Christmas, her wait is almost over.
She has green eyes and short blond hair. Her name is Joan Murrell. She is 55 and lives in Colerain Township.

She was Joan Murin when she went into labor on Christmas night, 1979.
She was 29 years old, unmarried, alone. She became pregnant, she says, when she was taken advantage of during a vulnerable time in her life.
For months she prayed about what to do with the baby. At first, she planned to keep it. Eventually, though, she felt God pointing her in a different direction. She wanted the child to be raised by two parents, not a single mother working two jobs. Placing the child for adoption, she decided, was the right thing to do.

It was not easy.

After an emergency C-section, mother and child remained in the hospital for several days. A doctor allowed her to hold and feed her baby. The infant would never remember those moments, but Joan wanted her to know she was loved.

On the day the private adoption was to be finalized, Joan nearly dissolved in tears. A nurse told her she could still change her mind. But she was wheeled outside the hospital doors, into the cold, to meet representatives of the adoptive parents.

The baby was wrapped in a blanket. She kissed her, again and again.
Then she handed her over.
Joan left the hospital with a macramé tree ornament. In the center was a small photo of her newborn daughter.
She has hung it on her Christmas tree each of the past 25 years.

Three years later, Joan met Fletcher Murrell. They have been married for 22 years.
They tried to start a family. Joan wanted two or three children. For eight years they tried. Fletcher checked out OK, but a doctor told Joan that she would need surgery to conceive. Even then, there were no guarantees.
They left it in God's hands.
Eventually, Murrell came to realize she would never have another child.
But she thought often of the one she had placed for adoption.
"I hoped and prayed that she had loving parents," she says.

Christmas and Mother's Day always were especially painful. As the years passed, Murrell thought of the milestones she was missing - her child riding a bike, celebrating birthdays, going on a first date. She wondered whether her daughter would ever try to find her.
"I hoped that I could see her one time before I died," she says.

Murrell didn't know it, but she could have bumped into her daughter in a grocery store. The girl and her adoptive parents lived only 10 minutes away until she was 11 years old.
Kristen Stiner moved from Cincinnati to Florida and then to Pennsylvania. She now lives in Meadville, Pa., and is studying to become a medical assistant. She began searching for her birth mother six years ago, when she was 19.

She had a great childhood and loving parents, she says. But she always felt "a huge void" - the result of not knowing where, and especially who, she had come from.
She posted her story on the Internet. She worked with databases that help adoptees locate birth parents. She even wrote to TV talk shows, hoping they'd have her on as a guest.
"Always a dead end," she says.

Last February, she called the Hamilton County Courthouse. Someone offered a tip: Try calling the attorney who represented the adoptive parents.
The attorney still practices law. He remembered the case. He gave Stiner the names of her birth parents.

Stiner couldn't find her birth mother, who by now had a different last name. But she found a phone number for her birth father, who'd had no contact with Joan for 25 years. He knew the name of the church Joan had attended back then. It's the same one she attends today: College Hill Presbyterian.

Murrell, a nurse's aide, had just come home last Feb. 22 when the receptionist from her church called. "I think you better sit down," the woman said. "I just had a young lady on the phone claiming to be your daughter."

Within minutes, Murrell was talking with Stiner. Both were in tears.
"She called me 'Mom.' I just never thought I would hear that word," Murrell says.
Or this one: Grandmother. Stiner, who is separated from her husband, has a daughter, Kara, age 5.

Since that day, Murrell and Stiner have talked frequently, asking and answering hundreds of questions. Murrell had worried that her daughter might be angry with her, but that has not been the case.
Stiner and her daughter came to Cincinnati for a two-week visit in July. Then they began looking forward to Christmas.

Tuesday afternoon at the bus terminal, Murrell is waiting at the wrong gate when a voice calls out. "Mom!"
Murrell turns, sees her daughter, and they embrace tightly. Then she hugs her red-haired granddaughter, who never stops smiling.

She can't wait to take them home. For 25 years, she wished and prayed and placed on her Christmas tree a macramé ornament with a photo of her newborn child.
The miracle, she says, is that her daughter is finally here to see it.

E-mail jjohnston@enquirer.com