Family Forum / Parenting / Adoption / May 2008

A most unusual graduate

By TONY LEYS

May 18, 2008

Dear Desemes,

By the time you're old enough to read this, your life probably will be
transformed.

By then, you and your mom should be living in your own house or
apartment, instead of in homeless shelters or charity homes. Your mom
likely will be a lawyer, helping other people solve their problems.

She surely will have a bachelor's degree from Drake University. She's
graduating today after receiving sterling grades as a sociology major.

Your mom, Becca Coronado, will look like any other black-gowned
graduate, except at 28, she's a few years older than most.

Few of her fellow students know her well, because she was too busy to
socialize with them. They didn't know that on many nights, when they
were home in their dorms, apartments or sororities, one of the top
performers in their classes was at a shelter or the YWCA, coaxing her
infant son to sleep before returning to her homework.

She didn't tell other students about her life as an orphan, her stints
in foster homes and jail, or her past alcohol abuse and failed
marriage. She didn't talk much about her wrenching decision to keep
you by her side while pursuing her dreams.

You won't remember any of this, because you're only 18 months old now.
She plans to tell you someday about how the two of you made it
through. "I'm just going to let him know that that was our journey,"
she says.

Here is her story: Becca Coronado's Iowa journey started with a 1981
letter to a 51-year-old widow named Elizabeth Foose, who lived near
the town of Radcliffe.

The letter came from the director of an orphanage in the South
American country of Colombia.

"Dear Mrs. Foose: We are delighted to tell you that we have found a
girl for you," the letter said. "Her name is Andrea Guzman and she was
born on April 24, 1980. She is a beautiful girl."

The birth mother had signed a paper saying that she was single, and
that she was too poor to raise the toddler. The paper said she was
surrendering her daughter, "to be put up for adoption by national or
foreign parents, who may provide for a better moral, spiritual,
physical, material and economic protection for the child."

Foose had been horrified by the poverty she'd seen in earlier trips to
Colombia. That's why she'd adopted three Colombian children with her
husband, C.N. Foose, who was a veterinary professor at Iowa State
University. Even after he died in 1978, she decided she could make
room in her family for one more child.

So she returned to Colombia, adopted Andrea Guzman and brought her
back to Radcliffe. Foose renamed the round-faced toddler Rebecca.

Coronado and her siblings remember several fairly normal childhood
years in Radcliffe and then in the town of Hubbard.

But their lives fell apart in 1989, when Coronado was 8. Elizabeth
Foose died of cancer at 58, and the four children became orphans
again.

They spent four years with a couple in Webster City, but that didn't
go well, and the children were split up and sent to different places.
Coronado spent time in several foster homes and in special schools for
teenagers who misbehave.

Her sister, Susan Foose, says all the siblings had problems, but
Coronado seemed particularly angry. Foose, who is two years older, has
always suspected it's because Coronado lived long enough with her
birth mother to feel abandoned when left at the orphanage.

Coronado dropped out of high school and had no plans to pursue a
degree. "I always thought college was overrated," she recalls now with
a grin.

She also took up heavy drinking, and hung out with people who drank.
She moved repeatedly, without much purpose. She was arrested several
times, including for traffic violations and drunken fights.

Everyone in the family knew she had plenty of intelligence. But they
say she lacked direction. "We were always waiting for her to grow up,"
her sister says. "She always seemed to be 9 years old."

Then Coronado married a man she'd known for three weeks. "I was 23,"
she says, laughing. "You'd think somebody who's 23 would have a little
more sense."

Although they haven't divorced, the two are now separated.

Coronado says she was attracted to her husband because he was funny
and sincere, and he enjoyed the same things she did.

But she says she decided eventually that she wanted to change her
life, and he did not. "I wanted to settle down and be an adult," she
says.

She took a test to earn a high-school equivalency diploma. At 25, she
entered Marshalltown Community College, where she thrived. Classes
gave her structure and purpose, she says. "That was my release - being
at school," she says. "School really helped me find stable ground and
get my head above water. School has helped me find out who I am."

She says she had her last drink four years ago. She quit after
realizing that she inevitably turned mean when she was drunk. "I'd
said things that were really rude and really nasty to my friends. I
was lucky they were still my friends," she says. "I decided that if I
was truly sorry, I would have to change the behavior that was causing
it."

Coronado went to community college for two years, paying her way with
scholarships and loans. She decided she wanted to be a lawyer, and she
met several people who had attended Drake's law school. She figured
she'd finish up her bachelor's degree at Drake, then apply for the law
school.

SLIDE SHOW: Hear from Becca Coronado.

She admits she was naive about what it would take to make it through
Drake.

"I had no idea about it being a private school. I had no idea about
the tuition. No idea," she says now. "That's the kind of thing you
usually learn from your parents, and I didn't have that."

Drake's tuition is $23,000 per year, and even with scholarships and
federal grants, she has racked up about $50,000 worth of loans.

She still was living part time with her husband when she started at
Drake, and she found out in March 2006 that she was pregnant. She did
not feel ready to be a mother. "I always said that I would have an
abortion," she says. "But now I know I was talking about something I
knew in my heart I could never do."

She thought for months about giving the baby up for adoption, but in
the end, she decided she couldn't do that either.

Drake has no housing for single moms, and government-subsidized
apartments have long waiting lists. Coronado couldn't afford a full-
rent apartment, but she pushed ahead with her plan, hoping she'd find
a way to make it work. Then her marriage collapsed, and she found
herself at a series of shelters with a baby in tow.

Some folks might point to Coronado's story as an example of a poor
person who pulled herself up by her own bootstraps.

She doesn't believe it.

Countless people, many of them strangers, have helped her at every
turn. They've given her shelter, food and friendship. They've helped
pay for her tuition and for child care. They've counseled her when
she's discouraged and applauded her when she's succeeded.

She swears she'll never forget.

She tends to talk about herself matter-of-factly, becoming animated
only when she talks about the folks who have helped her. The teachers
who let her bring a baby to class. The shelter administrators who
squeezed her in. The friend who volunteered to pick her son up from a
child care center on afternoons when her classes ran late.

She is especially grateful to Nancy Berns, a Drake sociology professor
who is her academic adviser. "She's the whole reason I've been able to
do this," Coronado says. "She's awesome. Just awesome."

Berns, in turn, talks about being in awe of Coronado. The professor
encouraged her and helped identify agencies that could provide housing
and child care. But she notes that Coronado did all the work. "I just
tried to help her focus on 'what do you need to do today or this
month,' as well as keeping her long-range goals in mind," the
professor says. "I never had any doubt that she could do the work, but
she had her back against the wall several times."

Berns says that with her grades and abilities, Coronado has a good
chance of getting into law school. The professor studies criminal-
justice issues, and she says Coronado is a good example of how someone
who has been in trouble with the law early in life can become a
productive citizen.

Society gives up on far too many people, she says. "We sort of
stereotype people and categorize them," she says. "We think we
understand them, and we really don't."

Coronado stereotyped people, too.

She remembers last May, when she ran out of time at New Horizons, a
west-side Des Moines shelter for women and children. Her only option
appeared to be the YWCA, which runs a well-worn, dorm-style building
downtown. She admits now that she considered herself better than the
women who stay there.

"The Y is like the last resort," she says. "I told God, 'I'm not going
to the Y.' But that's exactly where he sent me."

For $225 per month, she got a fifth-floor room with two beds, a
dresser and a little desk. Residents share a bathroom, a kitchen and a
living room.

"It's not the Ritz, but it gave Desemes and me somewhere to live for
nine months," she says. The Y also has a subsidized child care
program, where Desemes still stays while Coronado's at class.

Coronado says she learned a humbling thing at the Y. She has at least
as much in common with the young mothers who stay there as she does
with many of the more privileged young people in her classes at Drake.

April Harper-Gill, who runs the YWCA, says Coronado was a good
influence on the other residents, some of whom are just about out of
hope. She laughs when asked if she thinks a law school is really going
to let Coronado in. "I don't think people can say no to Becca," Harper-
Gill says. "People might try to say no, but I don't think she would
let them."

Dear Desemes,

Your mom says your name was your father's idea. Its origins are a bit
murky, and most people who know you shorten it to "Des." But your mom
likes your given name because it reminds her of Dismas, the name some
Christians use for a minor character in the Bible.

The character was a thief crucified alongside Jesus. In the Bible
passage, the man talks to Jesus as they suffer on their crosses. The
thief says he deserves to die that horrible way because he did bad
things. But Jesus says even thieves can go to heaven, if they change
their ways.

The point is that no one is beyond redemption, which your mother
believes is true.

The people who own the place where you're now living believe it, too.

In January, the two of you moved to the city's east side, where a
charity called Hope Ministries runs a transitional-housing program for
up to 15 single mothers and their children. You and your mom share a
room in a ranch-style house near the State Fairgrounds, and the
charity says you can stay there up to two years. The women are
required to do things like go to parenting classes, and they are not
allowed to drink, use drugs or have boyfriends.

Your mom will take a couple of online courses this summer to finish
her bachelor's degree. She plans to get a job so she can pay for a
preparation class for the law-school entrance exam. She hopes to start
law school either next spring or in the fall of 2009.

She does not foresee herself as a big-time corporate lawyer. Instead,
she hopes to practice some kind of social-justice law. Maybe she'll
help young women who find themselves in a jam.

"I am an advocate for people who are considered less desirable," she
says. "I am an advocate for giving people a chance."

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008805180335