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'A regular family'

For Ron, 40 and single, and Steven, 15 and troubled, adoption was a fading hope. But an intuitive caseworker helped the seeming mismatch become ...

By JUSTIN GEORGE
Published November 24, 2005

[Times photos: Melissa Lyttle]

Ron Hancock, left, and new son Steven Hancock hold the Heart Gallery photograph of Steven that Ron saw in February 2004 that jump-started the process of bringing them together. It now hangs on the wall of their living room.

	During lunch with friend Julie Ashlock, left, Steven Hancock, 16, defends his facial hair, or lack thereof as his dad, Ron Hancock, right, would say.

PLANT CITY - Ron Hancock figured it was his last chance. He was turning 40, had watched two engagements fail and had put off fatherhood long enough.

At first, he wanted a little girl. But the state is skeptical about single men who want to adopt girls. So he decided a little boy would be fine. He dressed up a spare bedroom in everything cowboy and began taking parenting classes.

Sharon Forman-Kress, 58, a veteran caseworker, looked around and asked her parenting students to describe their fantasy child.

Hancock had a clear picture. He wanted "a cute 5-year-old in bib overalls who was going to take over the world." He knew what he didn't want: "Someone else's problem."

By the time he finished, Forman-Kress knew what kind of child would be the right fit. It just wasn't the child Hancock had described.

"You don't always get what you want," she said, recalling what happened next, "but you get what you need."

Hancock grew up in Durant in eastern Hillsborough County, the fifth of six children. His father was a sheriff's deputy; his mother took care of the kids, including many neighborhood children who came over. Maybe that made him want children so badly. In high school, he volunteered in the church nursery. He would have had six kids if he could.

In Hancock, a man who worked his way up from meat cutter to title examiner, Forman-Kress saw someone not trying to fill a hole. She saw structure, empathy, determination and consistency. Someone who felt he had a lot to pass on.

"If you have those things, you can make it work with any child," she said.

Even a boy like Steven.

In 2004, the then-15-year-old was among more than 900 children who were available for adoption in a six-county area of Central Florida, including Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco.

He never knew his parents. Along with his older sister, he bounced around foster homes.

His sister was adopted years ago. Steven kept bouncing around.

One family planned to adopt him, until the father got cancer and died. At other homes, Steven said, he was beaten for missing chores. He was saved by a caseworker, then sent elsewhere.

"I thought all that was normal for a regular family," he said, "because I didn't have a regular family."

Foster parents favored their biological children, Steven said. Once, when he didn't feel like celebrating a biological child's birthday, his guardians sent him to his room, woke him at midnight and made him watch the birthday child eat cake.

After 12 foster homes in seven years, Steven arrived at the Children's Home, a group facility in Tampa. He was 9.

Each year, he gave up a little more hope. But if he were ever to be adopted, he knew what he wanted: a home with two parents, not one.

Only 3 percent of people who adopted children from foster care in 2003 were single men, according to the most recent national statistics.

Forman-Kress spent months assessing whether Hancock would make a good parent. He passed her tests. For reasons she can't explain, she found him a perfect fit for Steven, who still lived at the Children's Home, where she was assistant program manager.

"Ron is a very open person," she said. "It just looked like a match to me. I know this sounds stupid. I match a lot of good families together. I don't know what it is. It's a knack. ... I'm not going to put a family of eight in a Volkswagen."

When she told Hancock she had a teenager in mind, Forman-Kress remembers him laughing.

"No, Sharon, no," he told her.

She told him to just go look at the Heart Gallery, a collection of pictures hanging in a Tampa exhibition in February 2004. Foster care advocates and agencies created the exhibit, featuring professional photographs, and sometimes recorded messages, to entice prospective parents.

Just look at his picture, Forman-Kress said.

He turned a corner and saw the photo. Forman-Kress did indeed have a knack.

Hancock thought the boy looked like a Hancock. He was big and tall, 5 feet 11, while Hancock was 6 feet 3. Same light brown hair, too.

"Take this kid off the market," he told Forman-Kress, when he called from the gallery. She told him to think it over on the weekend.

He called at 8:30 a.m. Monday and left three messages.

The next Saturday was a picnic for prospective parents and children from the Children's Home.

Steven said they bribed him to go. "You go to so many of those things - why bother," he said.

But Hancock and Steven hit it off at at the Florida Aquarium. It seemed like fate, Hancock said. Steven kept winding up in Hancock's group of adults, who were rotated among the children.

They made small talk, mostly. What do you like? Steven said he had two family requirements: "You have to have a dog and no other children."

Hancock had six dogs.

He called Forman-Kress from the parking lot.

"Sharon, this is my son," he said.

Forman-Kress convened case workers and therapists to tell Hancock the good, bad and ugly about Steven, whose parents' rights were terminated when he was 2.

Hancock talked it over at lunch with his sister-in-law. Tammy Hancock, 47, made sure he knew what he was getting into.

"He's always been independent and able to go when he wants," she said. "The only thing he had to worry about was feeding the dog."

Hancock charged ahead.

When Forman-Kress visited Steven at a therapy session, she asked: "What if I told you I have a family for you?"

Steven had been let down before. But he was excited.

"I wasn't getting any younger, and the more I wait, the less likely I was going to get a family," Steven said.

Added Forman-Kress: "If it wasn't for Ron, I have a very bad feeling Steven would have lingered in the system. His age, his anger issues. I didn't see him getting a family that quick, and some kids become unadoptable at a certain age."

At the first supervised visit, Hancock brought twice as much chicken nuggets and Mountain Dew as Steven asked for, plus a double quarter-pounder.

Both were nervous, Forman-Kress said. But visits continued to Outback, movies, a flea market and the mall. In May 2004, Steven was allowed to sleep over.

First, Steven removed the bedtime stories and stuffed animals from his new room.

"I was going to have a 5-year-old baby boy," Hancock said.

Steven "Buccaneered" everything, buying anything related to the football team, from curtains to sheets. Soon, Buccaneers T-shirts disappeared from Hancock's closet.

Hancock bought Steven 10 pairs of shorts and four pairs of shoes in size 13 instead of the 15s he lazily slipped in and out of.

"I bought him the first clothes that fit him," Hancock said.

Every day, at first, Steven ran into his room to take inventory. That was what he had done in the Children's Home, where several hundred dollars' worth of his Play Station games disappeared.

At the Children's Home, Steven sometimes played staff members off each other. Here, there was just Hancock. "Well, at the Children's Home, they let me . . ." didn't work.

During the four months before Steven left the Children's Home, he acted out at school. He was testing Hancock.

Hancock told him: "There's nothing short of killing me that'll make me turn my back on you."

On Oct. 1, 2004, the same judge who took away the rights of Steven's birth parents made Hancock Steven's father.

The adoption papers didn't magically ease transitions. Hancock told Steven to stop cussing and spitting and to say "yes ma'am." If he broke his bike, a new one wouldn't just appear.

Steven identified with former Buccaneer Warren Sapp, a maverick. Hancock identified with Mike Alstott, a quintessential team player.

"I don't think anyone should believe it's rosy," Tammy Hancock said, "because Steven is a teenager, a typical teenager, and they've had their difficulty bonding and knowing each other."

But it's working. Labeled "special needs" when he was adopted, Steven had been on four medications, none of which he now needs. He is a Plant City High School honor roll junior, enrolled in the nursing program. He wants to be a firefighter or paramedic.

"I figured people have helped me all my life or tried to," he said. "I figured I should give back."

On Oct. 30, Hancock and Steven flew to Washington as one of four families from across the nation who helped open the National Heart Gallery in Union Station.

Last Father's Day, Steven, now 16, told Hancock, now 42, he would no longer call him Ron - but Dad. He reverts to Ron only when upset.

In their Plant City home, about 25 Hancock family pictures hang near the kitchen. Steven and Ron will be joining some of them today for Thanksgiving dinner. The display also includes Steven and represents his future filled by a large family. Hancock put Steven's past, the few pictures from his foster home days, in a safe deposit box.

"That's pappa and granny right there," Steven pointed.

"That's Matt. Jessie," he said.

He was stumped. Hancock jumped in: "Missy."

The journey together has only started, but Hancock thought about how far he'd come.

"He's added a lot more to my life than I have to his," Hancock said.

"If I would have kept my original thought, I would have missed a good friend."

Justin George can be reached at 813 226-3368 or jgeorge@sptimes.com

[Last modified November 24, 2005, 00:35:36]