Adoptive parents thankful for five siblings

By Gracie Bonds Staples

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

John Bradley has learned that life is about moments. And this one, he said staring into a bank of television cameras, felt like the Super Bowl.

He was flanked by his wife, Tamera, and five children, including Daniel who sat smiling on his lap.

It was official. They were family, the Bradley bunch as he and Tamera put it — the kind of team that love builds.

Five days before Thanksgiving, the 48-year-old U.S. Army veteran finally had the five children he said wanted when he married his bride 15 years ago.

Every time he started to speak about the gifts he’d been given, the tears came.

Moments earlier, actress Victoria Rowell, who spent 18 years of her life in foster care, told a standing room only crowd that fostering children and adopting them had little to do with money or the real estate one owned. It had everything to do with the “real estate of heart and soul; with operating not by fear but by faith.”

The Bradleys’ faith and hearts were overflowing.

They had long dismissed those who questioned their sanity and by faith forged on to claim their family. Now they sat awestruck amid the swirl of media there to record theirs and 15 other adoptions.

And so what typically is a private proceeding turned into a public celebration Saturday, a way to recognize National Adoption Day and raise awareness about the thousands of children living in foster care.

John Bradley had a lot to be thankful for. They all did; but especially John and seven-year-old Daniel.

Foster parents first

In 2005, Tamera and John completed the requisite training to become foster parents. A year later, they got the called they’d been waiting for.

Families First had two boys who needed a home.

John Bradley was at Rainbow Elementary School getting ready to cast his vote in the July 18, 2006 election when he got a call from Tamera. There was another boy and girl who social workers said were going to be placed separate from their two brothers.

“Can we take all four of them,” she asked John.

John Bradley hesitated but agreed.

“Yes, all of them,” he told her.

At 8 o’clock that summer night, Ryan, Devin, Brandon and Mercedes, the lone girl in the group, arrived at the Bradley’s Decatur home.

“We were jumping up and down,” Tamera Bradley remembered.

The missing piece

John Bradley had always wanted five children but the couple was never able to conceive. When they married, Tamera had a grown son and daughter living on their own.

Now the four empty bedrooms on the second floor were full again.

The first few months were the toughest. Devin screamed almost the entire first night. Ryan, the oldest, would barely make eye contact. Each of them talked incessantly about another brother.

As they let their guards down and their personalities emerged, the Bradleys discovered that Ryan, now 13, and Devin, 11, were the athletic ones. Each likes playing basketball but Ryan enjoys running track, too. Brandon, 12, is quite the artist. He placed first recently in a state art competition. And Mercedes, who will soon turn 12, likes to bake.

Meanwhile, a fifth sibling, then 3-year-old Daniel lay in a hospital bed clinging to life.

All five siblings had been badly beaten. Daniel bore the brunt of his mother’s boyfriend’s wrath. There were so many tubes connected to him, he looked more like an octopus than a little boy.

He wasn’t expected to make it. Social workers suggested they prepare his sister and brothers for the worst.

The Bradleys began to pray.

A week later, the tubes keeping little Daniel alive were all gone. The next week, Daniel could walk with assistance. And a week after that he was running in the hospital playroom.

John Bradley was there visiting Daniel when one of the nurses asked if he’d come to get him.

“Get who,” Bradley wanted to know.

He’d barely gotten an answer before he was ushered into a room for training in how to take care of Daniel.

Thirty minutes later, he was on his way to get a car seat so he could take the little boy home.

“I was scared to death but I took him,” Bradley recalled.

A promise to serve

Like Rowell, who spent 18 years in foster care, John Bradley knew what it was like to grow up in foster care.

It was Agatha Armstead who’d taken Rowell in and nurtured her, the actress told a standing room only crowd gathered at the Romae T. Powell Juvenile Justice Center near downtown. For Bradley it was Alice J. Vreen.

Although he was reunited with his birth mother at age 15, he never forgot the woman who took him in and later adopted him.

“We had a great relationship,” he remembered.

When Vreen became ill in 1982 it seemed right to return the favor. He went to Washington, D.C., packed her up and brought her to Georgia to live with him.

In 2003, Vreen died suddenly and John Bradley’s world unraveled. He went into a deep depression. By the time he came to himself, he’d lost his home and his wife.

“I prayed with my pastor, Dexter Roland, and God restored my life and my marriage,” he said.

For that, Bradley said, he promised God he’d serve him for the rest of his life.

“That’s when I told Tamera I wanted to foster,” he would say later.

But what about adoption?

“A made up mind”

As the weeks and months and years flew by, John Bradley was learning that “life is about moments.”

That bad moment, when little Daniel was beaten within an inch of his life, was over. He and Tamera were adding the good moments, standing in the gap the way Vreen had for him.

In no time, the Bradleys said, they were in love with their brood. So were the members at New Piney Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Decatur.

In 2007, John and Tamera learned that the parental rights of the children’s parents had been revoked. Officials at the Division of Family and Childrens Services notified the couple that the children were wards of the state. Would they adopt?

John remembered a conversation he’d had with his mother-in-law, Girtha Chambers, a foster parent for 15 years. “All it takes is a made up mind,” she told him.

His mind was made up. These weren’t foster children anymore.

“When God blessed us with these five children we fell in love with them,” said Tamera Bradley minutes before signing the court papers. “We’re so thankful he chose us to take care of his children.”

By noon Saturday, the Bradley bunch was officially the Bradley family.

When they sit down for Thanksgiving dinner, John Bradley smiled and said they’ll just be grateful for the turkey.

Three and half years after it had started, the Super Bowl was over. John Bradley’s team was still in tact.

”We won,” he said.