Tara Smalstig never imagined adopting a daughter. Then her “baseball family” inspired “this feeling in my heart.”
Tara Smalstig recalls the first time her daughter Athena told her, “I love you.”
Athena was two years old when she became part of the Smalstig family—they fostered her for a year, adopting her on her third birthday.
“In the mornings Scott would tell her, ‘Athena, I love you. I’m going to miss you today,’ and I’d say, ‘Well, tell Daddy you love him, too.’ She’d say it because we asked her to say it.
“But soon after the adoption they had a dedication of the children at church. It was really close to Mother’s Day. As the children were going up front I said, ‘I love you, Athena.’ She turned around, looked at me, and said, ‘I love you, Mommy.’
“It makes me tear up now thinking about it.”
Scott smalstig ’88 smiles as he listens to the story.
“When we got married, I said to Tara, ‘Let’s have a big family.’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t mind adopting.’ At that point Tara stopped me and said, ‘I think you married the wrong girl.’”
Tara laughs: “I was like, ‘I am not adopting. Not adopting.’”
That changed during the summer of 2012. Scott coaches baseball along with two friends, and the couples and their families have become close. “Our baseball family,” Tara calls them. Both other couples have adopted children.
“They were also foster parents to this little boy, and we all got to see how they were helping him,” Tara says. “They were giving him a start in life that his mother could not.
“I got this feeling in my heart, and it kind of went to my gut. I just kept having these conversations with God, and the answers kept coming back: ‘No, you do have the time, and you do have the resources, and you do have the ability.’
“Finally I just had such a stomachache from it. I could tell that it wasn’t going to stop unless I actually talked to Scott about it. I said, ‘You know, my heart is kind of opening to fostering.’
“And even though Scott was super excited, he kind of looked at me and goes, ‘I am almost 50, and you’re wanting to go back and do what?!’”
Scott laughs: “Like she married the wrong man!”
But he was all in.
“We knew that this needed to be a family decision, because it would require sacrifices on the part of our other kids,” Tara says. So they took the idea to Madison, then 12, and Gehrig, 11. “We started to talk about fostering, and they said, ‘We don’t want to foster. We want to adopt. We want a little brother or sister.’ I was sitting there almost trying to talk them out of it, wanting them to understand how things would really be.”
They experienced that reality soon enough.
“When Athena first came to us, she kind of latched on to me,” Tara says. “If I wasn't in the room, she would freak out. It was scary to Madison. She came downstairs just crying, saying, ‘Mom, I don't know what to do.’ I told her, ‘Honey, you've just got to be patient and you will figure it out.’”
And she did.
“Madison is intensely patient with her,” Tara says. “She teaches her things I can’t teach her. One day Madison looked at me and said, ‘Mom, do you think that Athena is part of my purpose?’ And I told her, ‘Absolutely, because you are so patient with her and you are so kind in how you teach her.’”
“athena wasn’t affectionate in the least when we got her,” Scott says. “I can’t imagine some of the things she went through in the first eight or nine months of her life. But in the last year she has become the world’s greatest snuggler, and I think she learned that behavior most from Gehrig. He’s always been an affectionate kid. When he was in daycare the other parents would come pick up their kids at the end of the day, and their kids’ heads would be wet because Gehrig had been kissing on them all day.
“His first reaction with Athena is always a hug, a kiss, or a touch.”
Scott’s own first encounters with his youngest daughter were more challenging.
“He’s the guy you want to coach your kids,” Tara says. “Kids flock to him because he’s so patient with them. But Athena didn’t like men, and she didn’t want a thing to do with him.”
Athena was so attached to Tara that no one else could help with her care.
“I was a little stressed out because I wasn’t getting any breaks,” Tara says. “I told Scott, ‘Listen, you’re going to have to figure this out with her.’ I had to go downstairs and get some exercise or I was going to lose my mind. So I’m down in the basement of the house and I hear her screaming two floors up. All of a sudden it gets quiet. And then I hear her laughing.”
“I got on the floor and actually resorted to mimicking her behavior just to mirror and show her how ridiculous she was acting,” says Scott. “It worked. Something clicked.”
“Now she’s the biggest Daddy’s girl there is,” says Tara.
scott and tara say their older children “have been a huge part” of Athena’s early accomplishments in school.
“She was so far behind,” Tara says. “Now she’s actually at the top of her kindergarten class.”
The couple also credits the Wee Wisdom Daycare Center, which they describe as partners in working with Athena from the beginning.
Picking up his daughter from daycare and school has become a highlight of Scott’s day.
“I walk in and her head pops up from wherever she is in that facility. The minute she sees me she just screams, ‘Daddy!’ Comes running to me as fast as she can. That has happened every day for the last year and a half. That joy is just affirmation that we’re doing a couple things right. You can change a little corner of the world in a hurry.”
These days, Athena’s “I love you’s” come in many forms.
“Ever since she turned five, she’s become a cuddler,” Tara says. “Within the last two months, she wants it from everyone before she goes to bed. Tonight, Madison and Gehrig weren’t home yet. She says, ‘Mommy, tell Madison and Gehrig I love them very much.’”
Slumber Party
For a while, part of Athena’s bedtime ritual was an extreme version of a familiar and difficult one for most parents: crying herself to sleep.
“This went on for months. It just crushed me. She was inconsolable,” says Scott. “Tara is the structure of our household, even for me, and sometimes she gets a bad rap for being the tough one. But she is the structure for everything we have.”
Still, there were times when Tara was gone…
“One night I got home, and I called out for Gehrig, called out for Scott, heard nothing,” Tara recalls. “I’m wondering, where’s Scott? Where’s ‘G’? I finally peeked in Athena’s room, and there were both boys, asleep on the floor next to her bed.”