Triple their joy
Manchester couple get three daughters in the hope of one
Manchester couple seeking a daughter end up adopting three.
After trying for years, through surgeries and a lost pregnancy, Matthew and Marie Wesson found they couldn’t conceive a child and laid their hopes on adopting just one little girl. Now they have three.
On Thursday, Seraphina, 3, Amelia, 4, and Penelope, 6, became adopted daughters of the Manchester couple, welcomed with balloons, pink paper chains and cheers from family and friends after a court session beamed live into the Wessons’ living room.
The couple had been foster parents to the biological sisters since 2019 after the girls were removed from their biological parents due to physical neglect, state Department of Children and Families social worker Janeen DeFeo said.
DeFeo, who attended the adoption approval and celebration, remembered calling Marie Wesson in 2019 with news that the couple were a
match for a pre-adoptive home.
“I said, ‘We have a new match — and don’t laugh,’ ” DeFeo said.
At that point, she said, the girls were not likely to be reunited with their biological parents, but DCF wanted to make sure they stayed together.
Marie Wesson recalled DeFeo saying, “‘I don’t think you’re going to say yes.’ She was so trepidatious. She almost didn’t call us.” In their communications with DCF, Matthew Wesson said, “We had been pretty specific — a baby girl.”
“We wanted to adopt one baby girl,” Marie Wesson, 51, told family and friends at
the celebration Thursday, “because I thought that was all we could handle.”
But the Wessons said they quickly made up their minds after DeFeo’s call. When Marie called him at work with the news, Matthew Wesson, 47, a
maintenance technician at 3M in Meriden, said he sat down on a box and cried. He said he already felt connected to the girls, although he had not even seen them.
The couple also has an adopted son, Dale Wesson, 22, who has suddenly become an official big brother.
“I’m just so happy to have them in my life,” he said.
About 30 people crowded into the Wessons’ home for the adoption approval, presided over by Judge Auden C. Grogins of the Waterbury juvenile court. Those gathered before a laptop computer livestreaming the court session included leaders and members of the Full Gospel Interdenominational Church, where the Wessons are longtime members and Marie works part time.
Through tears of joy, senior pastor, the Rev. Eleanor Kalinsky, said she has seen the fear of uncertainty, of being moved from one foster home to another, vanish from the girls’ eyes.
Watching her daughters, who wore matching yellow and blue dresses and flowers in their hair, Marie Wesson, who also runs her own floral business, said, “We are abundantly blessed. God’s been so gracious.”