20 years as a family, but where did all the time go?

This is a special day in my life. It’s the 20th anniversary of the day that two small children arrived on my doorstep, never to leave again. It’s the day that my heart was expanded three sizes, just like the Grinch, because it suddenly had to accommodate two extra small humans who became permanently lodged there.

This experience just gobsmacked me. See, I was such a workaholic hard news reporter that I forgot to get married and have children.

But one day, I turned

43, looked up and it occurred to me that it was time for me to fulfill my long-standing plan to adopt foster siblings and keep them together.

I wanted to do this because my mother had been a foster kid herself in Texas, which was a hardscrabble place in those days, where they still farmed kids out for work. I know, you’re thinking “Anne of Green Gables,” but these weren’t gruff yet kindly farm folk who were won over by her charm.

This was during the Depression, and these people were hardened and uncaring, as my mother recalled it. They were happy to take in stray kids — as long as they did all the household chores and picked cotton as well.

My mom was a little girl when she was moved in there with her sisters, one who was older and one who was a toddler. Mom used to show me the scars on her fingers from the sharp stickers on the cotton boll that would cut her when she pulled out the center.

But at least the sisters were all together.

Then, her older sister disappeared. It turned out that she had run away. My mom was permanently scarred by this because she was crushed that her sister hadn’t even said goodbye. Their relationship never entirely recovered.

Then, as she got older, my mother discovered why her sister had run away: The man of the house tried to molest her, too. Fortunately, my mother had enough gumption not to put up with that, so she ran away as well. I remember asking her, “So because of what happened to you, you told Alice” — the youngest sister — “that you were leaving, right?”

My mom just looked at me with a determined set to her jaw. “No, I didn’t.”

“Why not?” I gasped. “When you knew how much it hurt you?”

My mom got this sly look in her eyes. “She might have told,” she replied. That explained a lot to me about why my mom was the way she was.

But her relationships with her sisters were never close again. That’s why I always wanted to adopt foster kids and make sure they were kept together.

Through a long series of bureaucratic mishaps, it took me years of waiting to finally get my kids. It took so long that everyone in the county adoption office felt sorry for me. Finally, I got a call that I’d been matched with a 5-year-old boy and a 3-year-old girl.

At that point, I could hardly get excited, because I’d had so many attempts fall through. But — this time — after a number of court hearings and attempts by various other people to claim them, the judge said they were mine.

I didn’t entirely believe it was going to happen, but my friend and I sat on the big front porch of my shingle bungalow all morning and waited. Hoping against hope that it would work out. And sure enough, their social worker’s car pulled up at 7 a.m., and two little kids got out, carrying a cardboard box and Hefty bag full of their meager possessions.

I felt like I could breathe for the first time that morning. It was true. They were officially my foster kids. We showed them to their bedrooms and let them play with the balloons with which we’d filled the house.

Then, I used their new car seats for the first time and drove them to the department store to pick out their own matching sheets and comforters — the first new ones they’d ever owned.

Cheetah Boy went with Scooby Doo. Curly Girl picked Barbie. We came home and put the new sheets on their new beds, and — suddenly — we were a family.

That was on Aug. 2, 2002. We still had to go through court hearings and plenty of drama before I could legally adopt them. But I knew I’d never let them go. For years, I used to take the kids to Carl’s Jr. on Aug. 2, because that’s where I took them when I was visiting them at their previous foster home in Lancaster. Finally, my daughter said, “Mom, we don’t care about that. You care about that.” So I stopped.

But today, I really think we should go to Carl’s Jr. (even though I don’t like Carl’s Jr.) to celebrate. Don’t you?