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Adopted Teen Has Some Bonuses

By November 18, 2010July 18th, 2017General, Parent-focused, Portraits

By Cathy Free,  Deseret News

Thursday, Nov. 18, 2010

PROVO – Nancy Zelenak had nine months to think about becoming a parent and now that Aubrianna is officially here, she’s come with a few surprises.

First, Zelenak’s new daughter can whip through most of her story books in a few minutes flat and she knows how to cook a mean macaroni-and-cheese.

Then, there’s that matter of wanting to be hip and fashionable. One of Aubrianna’s first questions was to ask her mom if she could get her tongue pierced.

The answer?

“No way,” says Zelenak. “Absolutely not. Isn’t going to happen.”

Becoming a mother to a teenager at age 49 has one definite advantage: Saying “no” is a lot easier, imagines Zelenak, “than if I’d done this when I was 20.”

It was nine months to the day that Zelenak took Aubrianna in as a foster child that the pair signed official adoption papers last month.

“I came with a lot of bonuses,” says Aubrianna, now 17 and a senior at Provo High School. “She doesn’t have to get up with me in the middle of the night. And I know how to do laundry.”

Since November is National Adoption Month, the teen and her mom wanted to get together for a Free Lunch at Mimi’s Cafe (Cajun chicken for Aubrianna and jambalaya for Nancy) to share their story in the hope of inspiring others to adopt children who have spent their lives shuttling from one home to the next.

A longtime social worker who now works as a trainer for the Utah Foster Care Foundation, Zelenak always wanted to have children but wasn’t able to. After her divorce seven years ago, she thought she’d spend the rest of her days with nobody to greet her every morning except her cat.

Then, last spring, she received a phone call from a foster care caseworker. Two sisters named Aubrianna and Ariana had to be removed from their foster home because of neglect. Did Zelenak know of another family that could take them in?

“I remembered Aubrianna and her sister and I couldn’t bear the thought of them starting over again,” recalls Zelenak. She then said something that surprised her: “Bring them over. They can live with me.”

That was 10 months ago. Now Zelenak is working on adopting Ariana, 11, and another girl, 15, who she recently took in.

“For years, I’d been showing videos in my foster parent classes about grief and attachment, and it always got to me,” she says. “My goal is always to unify kids with their birth families, but sometimes, it doesn’t work out that way. In Aubrianna’s case, her birth mother had given up all parental rights. So she didn’t have a ‘home’ to go home to.”

Until age 11, when somebody finally alerted authorities about her birth mother’s neglect, Aubrianna lived in motel rooms, dozens of filthy apartments, even city parks with her four siblings. As the oldest, she was expected at age 5 to look after the others while her mom went on drug and alcohol binges.

“We’d look for food in people’s trash cans or eat cat food they’d left out on their porches,” she recalls. “At school, we wore the same clothes all the time so we were social outcasts, but that was OK with me. We didn’t dare get close to anybody or they’d find out how we lived. They’d find out our secret.”

After six years in foster care with her younger sister (her brothers were sent to other homes), Aubrianna now feels a sense of permanency for the first time.

“It feels right — it feels like a family,” she says, as her new mother hugs her in the booth.

“There’s one thing,” she adds, grinning at Zelenak. “We all know you can’t cook. I’ve had lots of experience at it. So tonight, I think we’ll be having my homemade macaroni and cheese.”

Have a story? You do the talking, I’ll buy the lunch. E-mail your name, phone number and what you’d like to talk about to freelunch@desnews.com

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