'For the First Time in 18 Years, I Will Have a Name and Two Parents on My Birth Certificate'
In pop culture, foster families tend to get a bad rap. You know how the tired narrative goes.
Kids from troubled homes bounce around from foster family to foster family. The poor treatment they experience at the hands of their surrogate parents almost equals that they received from their biological mothers and father.
However, that idea is so far removed from reality that it isn’t even funny. Across the nation, foster parents strive to give their charges the care and love they deserve.
One such fostering couple is the Douglases. According to a Facebook post by Casey Douglas, she and her husband had always wanted to adopt a teen boy.
That runs counter to most situations where potential adopters seem to prefer babies. When they got the opportunity to foster a teenage male, it didn’t exactly come as part of a predetermined plan.
Douglas said that a caseworker “got a call 15 minutes before walking into our home … that an emergency placement was needed for a 16 year old male. That was all the information that had made it out of her mouth before I said yes.
“My husband looked at me like I was a psycho and asked if we should pray about it. I told him that I didn’t need to pray about something that God clearly placed in our laps, but that he was welcome to.”
That boy was Randall, a young man who was born with virtually no identifying information on his birth certificate.
He had no father listed, nor any identifying information such as weight or time. He didn’t even have a name.
In a YouTube video, Douglas said that she knew he belonged in her family as soon as she saw him. Not everyone else was so sure, though.
A volunteer submitted a false report that required the Douglases to go to court. But they won, and Randall stayed with them.
Even though he would turn 18 in a few months, the couple wanted to make his place as their son official. So they asked if he would be open to being adopted.
He was more than willing. He was hungry for it.
Casey wrote, “Because we fought a hard battle of him belonging with us, and when he knew he wanted to stay, he broke down in tears and said, ‘Mom, can I stay even after I’m 18? And will you promise to tuck me in even if it’s awkward?’”
They did, and they made it official on Jan. 10. That was the day that Randall Wilson Douglas gained a proper name and became a permanent part of the family.
Randall posted the video of his adoption day on YouTube with the caption, “For the first time in 18 years, I will have a name and two parents on my birth certificate.”
“Yesterday,” Casey said, “he took our name and for the first time has a mom and a dad of his very own. … God’s plan was so big, and this isn’t even a shred of the full story.”
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