Awesome story of adoption, love and life

For River Ridge couple, each new child is 'a natural extension of our love'

Published: Sunday, November 27, 2011, 8:00 AM

By Bruce Nolan, The Times-Picayune NOLA.com For days before Thanksgiving, the aroma of Royanne Avegno’s freshly baked bread filled her home in River Ridge as the loaves cooled atop the hand-built kitchen cabinets fashioned years ago by Ashton, her engineer-husband. The bread and other homemade dishes were for the 30 relatives who gathered there on Thursday, a smaller group than normal.

View full sizeChris Granger, The Times-PicayuneOver the course of their 40-year marriage, Bubby and Royanne Avegno have adopted seven children. Photographed with them on Thanksgiving were Jennifer, left, Jeremy, back, Meg, and Benjy.

This year it was Royanne’s mother, sisters and brother, as well as the families of four of the Avegnos’ five surviving children —­­­­ all but one delivered into the hands of a couple who, in the course of a 40-year marriage, adopted seven children.


In time, Ashton and Royanne Avegno would bury three of their kids, each severely damaged by physical infirmities or psychological injuries inflicted before finding some period of peace in the Avegno household.
Yet they consider themselves blessed. ­­
“This is our holiday,” said Ashton, known as “Bubby” to friends.
At 61, the Avegnos have launched their children, all now in their 30s.
They enjoy the fruits of retirement: decent health; a little travel; Ashton’s new interest in wine tasting; Royanne’s volunteer work at a local hospice and with a student book club at Dominican High School, where she taught Spanish and Catholic social justice doctrine for years. She still serves on its board of directors. Occasionally there is baby-sitting duty with grandchildren.
Their home, like others, is decorated with a certain amount of religious imagery — the Blessed Mother holds a place of prominence — and with pictures of their children, who present an international exhibit of family life.
Of the adopted seven, young Ashton, or “Benjy” to the family, was their single traditional adoption. He came into the family after Royanne gave birth to a stillborn second child, Laurie, and learned that Jennifer, their first-born, would be their only biological child.
Greg, malnourished and psychologically scarred by privation, came from Korea. Meg and Jeremy, mixed-race children who were both hard to place, came when the Avegnos said yes to adoption agencies’ pleas.
They were in court completing Jeremy’s adoption when, out of the blue, a Jefferson Parish judge asked whether they would consider taking Matthew, a profoundly brain-damaged newborn. The Avegnos discussed it over lunch, and they said yes a few hours later.

View full sizeChris Granger, The Times-PicayuneRoyanne and Bubby Avegno, bottom left, and top back right, feed family and friends on Thanksgiving at their home in River Ridge.

 

The following year, among the pictures of hundreds of children in an adoption registry, one of Katie, a Chinese orphan, touched them deeply. She soon arrived from Hong Kong, at age 11. And two years later, an inconspicuous notice at an adoption conference in Chicago alerted them to Gabrielle, another homeless newborn like Matthew, bearing catastrophic genetic abnormalities.
That extraordinary period of hospitality lasted about 10 years, from the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s. It gave the Avegnos a certain public profile as word spread of their open-heartedness. Adoption agencies learned to go to them with hard cases.
“For a while it was like we had a sign in front of the house: Suckers live here,” Ashton said with a chuckle.
In public outings, the Avegnos seemed to shepherd a small cross-section of global humanity, with children of every color and various degrees of health or injury.
It was remarkable to everyone else, but felt completely natural to them.
Indeed, said Ashton, “The most important thing for us was to be viewed as normal.”
Although she held a master’s in Spanish, Royanne stayed home to care for her children, especially as those with special needs came into the family. When the kids were a bit older, she went to work as a teacher, and she became known among her students for her ability to identify, chapter and verse, any quotation of Scripture.
Ashton, meanwhile, built a local engineering firm. Equipped with some carpentry skills, he eased the financial burden a bit doing most household modifications himself.

View full sizeChris Granger, The Times-PicayuneA family photo of Bubby and Royanne Avegno and all their children in the 1980s sits on a table at their home in River Ridge.

 

At first, Royanne remembered, their approach to adoption was typical. “Our motivation was purely selfish. There was nothing altruistic about it in the least. We wanted another baby.”
But the arrival of Greg, their third child and second adoption, was a revelation.
After the first eight months of life in Korea, he arrived malnourished and, even in infancy, psychologically scarred by hardship. He would later hoard food, Royanne said.
“He was the one who made us realize that adoption could mean the difference between life and death for a child. And that changed our whole perspective.”
Yet the Avegnos say their adoption decisions were never solely, or even mainly, about child rescue.
Rather, they were much more organic, usually rising out of a sense that the moment was right to accept another child, and most important, that their family had more to give.
“We weren’t there to rescue or save those kids. We were there to add to our family. To love, and allow our family’s love to spread a little further,” said Ashton.
In fact, the Avegnos said the judge’s unexpected request to take Matthew, the disabled newborn, yielded the only formal, deliberative discussion of their special needs adoptions.
At lunch that day, Ashton said, he and Royanne took a sheet of paper and listed the pros and cons.
The “reasons against” column was the longer; the “reasons for” were shorter. But it was topped, Royanne said, by the scriptural injunction in Matthew 25: “Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.”
“It’s how, without really thinking about it, we want to live our lives,” said Ashton. “I think we’re living the Gospel call, or trying to, but that’s not why we’re doing it. It was just natural for us. It was the natural extension of our love.”
As it happened, Matthew would defy expectations and live 14 years, unable to walk, talk or sit, but aware of his surroundings. He died in 1996.
“He had the most lovable personality; he could melt anybody,” said Royanne, who occasionally took him to Dominican so her students could meet him.
Gabrielle died in 1987, having lived through two and a half years of constant, intensive home care. Katie died of natural causes at 23, a few months after Matthew. She was undergoing psychiatric care, struggling with emotional scars from her early years of institutionalization in Hong Kong.
“They’ve gone through profound grief. They’ve buried three children, the most staggering thing a parent can do,” said Daniel Hines, a family friend who served as Gabrielle’s godfather. “But they’ve been sustained through their faith.”
“What we got out of it was more than we could ever expect to get out of it: the love the kids gave us and continue to give us,” said Ashton. “And now we have grandchildren.”
There are six: three each from Jennifer, an emergency room physician in New Orleans and Ashton, a construction manager who lives in Ponchatoula. Meg, a property manger, and Jeremy, a trucker and deejay, live in New Orleans. Greg manages a car wash in California.
Hines said the couple’s faith in action challenges him, but not in a way that’s off-putting. Although they sound intimidating, among those who know them well, the Avegnos make comfortable friends, he said.
“We’re each in a different position,” Hines said. “We each have gifts and opportunities to use them. These were the gifts God gave Ashton and Royanne, that’s all. And they’ve tried to develop them.
“With them, every child is allowed to be fully themselves, whatever they can be. As a society we can be hardened. We can become immune to suffering, callousness.
“They don’t.”

Bruce Nolan can be reached at bnolan@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3344.

>>>Saw this over at Opinionated Catholic

>>>Also, kudos to this frequent column of faith and the outstanding author, Bruce Nolan