Blanca’s Last Wish: Love All My Children

ROCKFORD, Ill. — When the moment came, Rose Malavolti crouched beside the dying woman, clutched her wrist, searched her eyes and waited for the words, mother to mother.

They were strangers, these two women. They had never shared a meal, never seen each other outside the crowded hospital room, never even spoken to each other in the same language. They had met just one day earlier, when Rose flew to Laredo, Texas, from her Illinois home.

Now it was time for the question.

Blanca Enriquez was propped up in her bed, her face weary, her bony frame weakened by the cancer that had snaked through her stomach like a lethal vine.

In her final months, she had made a request--actually, it was more of a plea. She wanted her eight children to remain together after her death. And here were Rose Malavolti and her husband, Al, who had come more than 1,000 miles, eager to adopt them.

But first, the dying mother, just 38 years old, had to know one thing. She asked the question in Spanish, her voice breaking:

“Will you love my children?”

*

In the end, when Blanca Enriquez’s time on earth could be measured on a few pages of a calendar, that plea became everything to her: She wanted her youngest eight children to grow up together, to share their lives as one family, from 19-month-old Kenya to 17-year-old Eric.

Her eldest daughter was married, but she knew the others still needed someone to tend to them, to teach them, to treasure them.

It was a mother’s wish, confided to another mother, who set out to make it happen.

Esther Firova is the kind of person who’s always shaking trees to do some good, whether it’s raising money for the Little League, the Special Olympics or someone who can’t pay a utility bill.

So when the principal at her sons’ school asked her to take some laundry detergent to a mother of nine with terminal cancer last fall, Esther, being Esther, wasn’t about to make a hello-here’s-your-soap-goodbye kind of visit.

“It was a mission that we didn’t realize was going to be a mission,” the mother of five now says with a smile. “I couldn’t let go.”

She befriended Blanca Enriquez, remembering her own despair many years ago when her mother was helpless, dying of cancer. And she gently broached the sensitive subject: the children.

Blanca’s response was measured in sobs. “There were so many tears, I don’t know where they came from,” Esther said.

Yes, the distraught mother said, someone was working to place her children, but no one could take all eight.

So Esther tried to calm her, asking, “What is it that would make you happy?”

“I don’t want them to be separated,” Blanca replied.

Esther started simply, with the most immediate task: giving the family one final holiday season together.

She arranged a special Thanksgiving dinner, then lobbied Laredo’s business community to fill a long Christmas wish list for the family.

Her appeal spread like a chain letter of mercy into Catholic schools, homes, banks, a grocery store. Folks began phoning Blanca, inquiring about the possibility of adopting some of the children. Her response was terror, laced with anger.

“She said, ‘My kids are not animals! They’re human beings. I don’t give one here and there!’ ” Esther recalls. “I’d just hold her and tell her, ‘People don’t mean harm. . . . We can’t get mad at people caring.’ ”

There was talk of placing the five youngest in a children’s home. Then along came David Teran, a San Antonio promotions salesman who read the Christmas flier while visiting Laredo’s convention bureau.

“There’s a family in our community with tremendous needs,” it declared. “Their mother is terminally ill, and there is no father present and no source of income.”

Teran handed over $20, but that seemed too easy.

So he stopped by to offer Blanca spiritual support, and they soon became fast friends. He visited often, bringing footballs and soccer balls for the children, who’d squeal, “David!” and line up to be hugged when they saw him. He drove his wife and three kids down to meet them. And he asked his mother to send her Christmas gift to his family--money to upgrade their computer--to Blanca and her children instead.

And then, in the funny way fate has, something magical took place.

Far, far away, in Illinois, a couple with four children had been trying for some time to adopt three Mexican siblings. They hired a translator to help with the documents--Teran’s mother, who lives in Indiana.

Please, the prospective mother said during one of their phone conversations, pray for the adoption.

Certainly, Margaret Teran said. But in return, she asked the woman to pray for Blanca’s children, who soon would be motherless and had to stay together.

“We’ll take them,” the woman replied.

That was Rose Malavolti speaking.

“I said, ‘You haven’t even spoken to your husband!’ ” Teran recalls.

“She said, ‘From the time my husband and I got married, God has been preparing us just for this.’ ”

*

In January, the Malavoltis, accompanied by their two youngest children, arrived in Laredo to meet Blanca’s three sons and six daughters--including 19-year-old Erica, a new mother herself, who had temporarily left her husband behind in Wisconsin to help out.

The Malavoltis were touched by what they witnessed that first day: Edgar, 7, impish with his gap-toothed smile, scurrying to pick up smaller siblings who had tumbled down the stairs; Juan Pablo, 5, unwrapping a lollipop and then handing it to a sister who had been enviously eyeing it; and Jacqueline, 3, tenderly patting little Kenya’s back as she cried.

Only the older two--17-year-old Eric and 14-year-old Wendy--were told that day why Rose and Al were there.

The Malavoltis carried a photo album to Blanca’s hospital room, where they paged through it, showing her Christmas and vacation snapshots of their three sons and daughter.

Her mind clouded by morphine, she nodded in and out, but told Teran, who was translating, “They seem like nice people.”

Blanca Enriquez--whom they learned was an illegal immigrant--had no money or job, but she had a legacy: her children. And with so little, she had done so much to instill in them love for one another.

“They were normal, healthy, happy kids. I knew what would happen in that situation if they had to split up,” Al said. “I knew how much more we had to offer them than that.”

But blood ties stirred some powerful emotions the next day.

Two of the children’s fathers were known, and neither had provided support, had any regular contact with them or expressed interest in taking them. But some of Blanca’s brothers and sisters wanted the children to remain in Texas, although no one could afford to care for the entire brood.

Anna Laura Cavazos Ramirez, an attorney who provided legal help, sat in Blanca’s hospital room for four hours as the dying woman argued--in person and by phone--with Eric, who couldn’t decide about the move, and with her siblings and in-laws.

“She kept saying, ‘These are my children. This is my decision. You are not going to provide for them the life I’d like them to have,’ ” Cavazos Ramirez remembers. “She was crying through the whole thing. I had to step out. It was just the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Finally, with Blanca unwavering, her family acquiesced.

Then Cavazos Ramirez presented Blanca with papers to relinquish custody of her children and carefully explained the documents, word by word. The exhausted mother listened, closing her eyes occasionally, but as each line was read, she acknowledged that, yes, she understood.

By then, 17 people--family, friends, hospital workers and the Malavoltis--had packed the room. All were in tears, including the notary public.

With pen in hand, Blanca paused to ask a question.

A nervous Teran translated for the Malavoltis, eager to capture every nuance of a moment that signaled the end of one family and the beginning of another.

“Vas a querer a mis hijos?” Blanca asked. Teran repeated in English: “Will you love my children?”

“They’re all I’ve ever had in my life,” she said. “They’re all that matter to me.”

“I bent down and held her hand,” Rose recalls. “I said, ‘All children are precious in God’s eyes, and we will do our best to love them. Children are precious to us as well.’ ”

Then, sobbing, saying goodbye to her children with every stroke of the pen, Blanca scrawled her signature.

She died a month later, on Feb. 12.

One month after that, Cavazos Ramirez went to court, seeking permission for the Malavoltis to take the children to Illinois, pending formal adoption. A judge visited with Eric and Wendy, asked the attorney questions, then gave his approval.

On the children’s last day in Texas, Wendy asked to visit her mother’s grave. There, she grabbed a clump of dirt with a pebble in it and stuffed it in her pocket.

“The little ones really didn’t understand,” Esther says. “The older ones, they looked relieved. It was like, ‘OK, Mom. We’re doing what you said you want us to do.’ They didn’t cry. There was a smile behind the sadness. It was like, ‘This is for you.’ ”

*

In this far northern Illinois city, a quaint Dutch Colonial sign at the end of a cul-de-sac announces the frame house Al Malavolti built with his own hands.

It’s an inviting place: A white swing sways on the front porch, a stuffed bear reading a magazine rocks on a hallway chair, and a trampoline sits out back.

The Malavoltis have the old-shoe comfort of a couple who soon will celebrate their 24th anniversary: They quote each other, they know each other’s foibles, they tickle each other’s funny bones.

At 46, Al, an engineer, is soft-spoken and wiry with an unflappable demeanor, an easy smile that widens beneath aviator eyeglasses and a flannel-shirt, outdoorsy look that befits a man with a forestry degree and a carpenter’s skills.

At 43, Rose, with her pixie haircut and tiny pearl earrings, is sentimental but self-deprecating, a born storyteller who does some public speaking about faith, and animatedly quotes everyone, from Albert Schweitzer to Mother Teresa, to her children, tossing out adages that seem destined to be needlepointed.

“When you’re green, you grow. When you’re ripe, you rot,” says Rose, who makes it clear which category is for her.

Rose, who now teaches religion at Boylan Catholic High School in Rockford, insists she knew she’d adopt ever since her fourth-grade teacher told the class poignant stories about her days in an orphanage.

As a principal, teacher and counselor, she has seen too many children in trouble.

“So often,” she says, “you go home and you think, ‘That is the neatest kid. I wish I could take her home and give her a shot at life.’ ”

They have done just that as foster parents. And they’ve spent $14,000 and five years on the tangled and ongoing process of trying to adopt the three Mexican siblings.

Then came Blanca’s children.

Friends and family counseled against taking them. Rose and Al have two sons in college, after all, and tuition isn’t cheap. And folks told the fortysomething couple it was their time to be selfish.

“Some people say, ‘I’m done raising my children--it’s my turn,’ ” Rose says. “For what?”

This is a couple, after all, who once welcomed 100 kids to a party at their four-bedroom home.

“There are people who think we’re crazy, and they jokingly say it, but halfheartedly mean it,” Al says. “People can’t see how we do it.”

It just takes a lot of patience.

And organization.

In the Malavolti house, those age 13 and older shower in the morning; the younger ones bathe at night. Bedtimes are staggered. After dinner, some children do dishes and some prepare lunches for the next day.

The couple’s youngest biological son, 8-year-old Gabriel, already a generous child, has learned to share even more: his toys, his room with two other boys and, perhaps hardest of all, his parents.

Sixteen-year-old Rachel gets up early in the morning and sometimes helps dress the little ones.

The freshly minted family sits in two full church pews, consumes up to 12 gallons of milk and washes 36 loads of laundry a week, and travels in a 15-seater 1981 Ford van bought from a church at an almost-giveaway price.

They have received many donations, too, including a hot-water heater from Al’s boss at Sundstrand Corp., a washer and dryer from a neighbor, two freezers, even a side of beef. One adoptive mother with 10 kids sent a $165 check along with some advice: “The one thing I learned with children is pray, pray, pray.”

She also offered a household hint: “Buy paper plates and cups. It will keep you sane.”

Money, though, remains a big concern, so they plan to seek financial adoption assistance from Texas once the legal process is complete, which should happen within less than six months.

In the meantime, the new members of this ready-made family continue to adjust. In Texas, Wendy would awake at 5 a.m., check the weather reports and make sure her brothers and sisters were dressed properly. Here, Rose gently told her, she could stop being a mother--and start being a 14-year-old.

Some of them also face legal and cultural barriers: Eric and Wendy are considered illegal immigrants and won’t be eligible to become citizens until the adoption is final, and Jacqueline, 3, is only now learning English.

But Rose and Al love them, and the children--all eight of them--are together.

Every Sunday night, this new family has a prayer service where they talk about what they are grateful for. And always, every Sunday, without fail, they say a prayer for Blanca, who loved her children enough to entrust them to two bighearted strangers.

Funds can be donated to the Malavolti family, care of Members Alliance Credit Union, 2550 South Alpine Road, Rockford, Ill. 61108-7890.