Bringing home a forever daughter
“When the foster children went home, that was the most devastating thing I’d been through in my life,” Aileen says.
THE PARENTS: Aileen Zanoni, 50, and Tim Wells, 40, of Mount Holly
THE CHILD: Violet Anne Faye, 7 months, adopted July 25, 2023
HER NAME: Both always loved the name Violet (they grow the flower in their yard), and Anne is the birth mother’s middle name. Faye is for a grandmother Tim cherished as a child.
Tim didn’t check any of the boxes on Aileen’s ideal-boyfriend list.
But maybe that was a good thing.
When they met — both were working at a Burlington County school for children with disabilities, so they chatted on the curb while waiting for the children’s buses to roll up — Aileen wasn’t even looking to date. She’d moved from Philadelphia to be closer to her mother, who was dying of cancer.
Tim was just a new, kindhearted friend. “I was not expecting to meet someone,” Aileen says. “And Tim was not like any of the guys I’d dated before. He was a lot more down-to-earth, less concerned about material things. He valued family. Such a tender, gentle person.”
Their first date was the students’ winter concert at the school where they worked, followed by ice cream at Friendly’s. “She told me about what she was going through,” Tim says. “The more I was with her, the more I got so interested and attached. I fell in love with her.”
That was fall 2005. He proposed two years later, during an evening beach walk in Emerald Isle, N.C., where his family was holding a reunion. Her ring, a souvenir from a trip to the aquarium, was a dolphin with a glass stone, a stand-in to show Tim’s family that they were really engaged.
“Eventually, we got a regular engagement ring, but that’s the one that means something to me,” Aileen says.
They married the following year in Delran, in a church so sticky in the September heat that Aileen kept willing herself, “Don’t pass out.” She surprised herself by tearing up during their first dance, to John Denver’s “Annie’s Song.”
Tim wanted kids. Aileen wasn’t sure. Before Tim, she’d never envisioned herself marrying, and she didn’t yearn to be pregnant. In addition, she takes medication to treat bipolar disorder. “I didn’t want to go off [the medication] and risk my life falling apart,” she says.
They were still considering whether, and how, to start a family when Aileen was diagnosed with breast cancer. Doctors caught it early; she had a lumpectomy, radiation, and follow-up hormone treatment that made pregnancy out of the question.
“It was really clear that having a child biologically would be unhealthy for me, so [I thought], let’s do it a different way.”
In December 2017, they became foster parents to a 6-day-old girl. She was with them for 11 months, and when she left — to be reunited with birth parents who had shown they were prepared to raise her — Tim wept inconsolably.
It was a bittersweet day, Aileen says. “We were so devastated that we weren’t going to see her first thing in the morning and last thing at night. But it was the right thing to happen — a happy, safe, healthy home.”
A few weeks later, the agency called: A newborn boy, exposed to methadone in utero, ready to be picked up from the NICU. He stayed for 20 months. “It became evident that his parents were doing what they needed to do: classes, drug treatment,” Aileen says. Once again, they said goodbye to a child; the boy had just begun calling them “Mama” and “Dada.”
“When the foster children went home, that was the most devastating thing I’d been through in my life,” Aileen says. After the second child was reunited with the birth family, she and Tim realized: We can’t do this again.
She Googled “baby adoption Philadelphia” and found her way to Open Arms. “We immediately liked their ethics,” Aileen says. “We felt comfortable with how they give the birth parents a lot of time to decide if they really want to parent.”
They took an adoption loan from their credit union, got a home study, filled out stacks of paperwork. Then they waited. For 14 months. It was Jan. 3 when Aileen was driving home and the case worker’s name popped up on her phone.
“Is Tim there with you? Can you get him on the call?” She couldn’t — Tim’s a truck driver, and his work hours are hard to predict — but the couple scheduled a FaceTime call with the case worker that evening.
“She told us a little girl had been born and we were chosen by her mother. That’s when we both just started crying,” Tim says. The child was in North Jersey; she was exactly a week old. Aileen called her boss at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University: “Maternity leave starts tomorrow!”
The trip felt endless. But then they were in an unfamiliar house, sitting on a sofa while a stranger introduced them to their infant daughter. “It was surreal: Is this really happening?” Aileen remembers. “We have a baby now, who’s ours and who is going to stay with us?” Though they had already foster-parented two infants, this felt different. They hadn’t done skin-to-skin contact with the other babies. They hadn’t envisioned a future with them. “We brought her home Wednesday, and at 3 a.m. on Friday, I was feeding her, I had my shirt off, and it just hit me: OMG this is your daughter forever!”
They send periodic letters and photographs to Violet’s birth mother, and they have pictures of the birth mother as a child. They’ve met once and hope to do so again. “I want [Violet] to know where she came from and the reason why her tummy-mom chose us,” Tim says.
On the way to North Jersey to meet Violet for the first time, they stopped at Target for a car seat. They also bought two necklaces with the baby’s birthstone, blue topaz: one for Violet and one to give her birth mother.
“We’ll see how this develops,” Aileen says of their relationship. “She is Violet’s first family. She’s the reason we have a family. She’s our family, whether we have a future relationship or not.”