By Kimberly Jackson
For decades KTUL has helped foster children find homes, through our program ‘Waiting Child.’ Recently we heard from a former featured child who requested a copy of her story, from 36 years ago. We searched through 40 years of tapes to find the right one. It turns out, she was just a baby at the time, who had been left at the hospital after she was born. The social workers called her “Dolly.”
She had Neurofibromatosis, and doctors gave her no hope. She would spend many years with her legs in casts, and several surgeries.
“He said she said she could be profoundly would be profoundly retarded. He said she would never walk. She would never talk and Kristi did everything he said she wouldn’t do,” said Jerry Edwards, the mother who adopted the baby called Dolly. Jerry and her husband Jesse gave the baby girl a name and a family.
“It was a deal just looking at Kristi, I fell in love with her, the first time I saw her. She was the cutest little bundle of. She had this little white dress on. She was the cutest little thing I’d ever seen before,” said Jesse Edwards. Kristi Edwards DeSonia is now a mom, herself, and a wife. And she says her parents gave her the best life she would have ever imagined.
“I was placed with the people I was supposed to be with. God has placed me where I am now with the people I was supposed to be with so I could be where I am today,” she said. “Because I don’t think I would be where I am if I was still in the system or with someone else. I don’t feel like They would not have taken care of me like my parents took care of me.”
Kristi says she has no hard feelings and has even met some of her biological siblings. Her biological father has passed away. And she says she could meet her biological mother, whenever the time was right.
In November the Edwards, who have been married 50 years, caught COVID 19. Kristi had to help take care of them. The roles in this family have reversed. The couple, who had three children of their own, and adopted a total of 10 children, will have to lean on them in the coming years. Kristi says it is her honor to do that.
Kristi says she is thankful and that one day she might consider becoming a foster mother herself.
