← New Books Network
New Books Network
Stefanie Mercado Altman, Claire Altman, and Stan Altman, "Twice Blessed: A Story of Unconditional Love" (Fordham UP, 2025)
00:52:56
Loading summary
Transcript59 lines
- [00:04]
WhatsApp Advertiser
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone.
- [00:27]
Mint Mobile Advertiser 1
Learn more@WhatsApp.com Mint is still $15 a month for premium wireless and if you haven't made the switch yet, here are 15 reasons why you should. 1. It's $15 a month.
- [00:39]
Claire Altman
2.
- [00:39]
Mint Mobile Advertiser 1
Seriously, it's $15 a month. 3. No big contracts.
- [00:44]
Claire Altman
4.
- [00:44]
Mint Mobile Advertiser 1
I use it. 5. My mom uses it. Are you playing me off? That's what's happening, right? Okay, give it a try. @mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan.
- [00:54]
Stephanie Mercado Altman
$15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only, then full taxes and fees extra.
- [00:58]
Blinds.com Advertiser
See mint mobile.com@blinds.com it's not just about window treatments. It's about you. Your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows. Because@blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you. Visit blinds.com now for up to 40% off site wide plus a professional measure at no cost. Rules and restrictions apply.
- [01:30]
Stan Altman
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:34]
Rebecca Buchanan
Hi. This is Rebecca Buchanan, host of New Books in Biography, and I am here today with Stephanie Mercado Altman, Claire Altman and Stan Altman to talk about the book they wrote together, Twice Blessed A Story of Unconditional Love. Thanks for being here with me, Stephanie and Claire and Stan, thank you.
- [01:55]
Claire Altman
Thank you for having us.
- [01:57]
Rebecca Buchanan
Could you start by talking about why you wanted to write this, write your story down, why you wanted to put this memoir together?
- [02:06]
Claire Altman
Claire I've been in the book. One will find out and that we came to know Stephanie and her mother when they became the first residents at residence at a a residence that I created through my nonprofit called the Highbridge Woody Crest center for families and individuals living with HIV and AIDS. This was in the early 90s and New York City was kind of an epicenter, sadly, of the AIDS epidemic. Stephanie and her mother were the first two residents that came. I was the founder and chairman of the board, so I greeted them. And it was, like, very exciting to see the first people. And Stephanie's mom was very excited that she had found a place since her birth. Three months earlier. They had been living in an abandoned building, and somebody referred her to us. And so there we have it. And so it's a long story about how we ended up adopting Stephanie 11 years later. But I kept Copia's notes through all this time and got to know her at the center. And then closer to about. Well, when Stephanie was five or four, going on five, Stephanie's mother was. Her health was failing, and she asked that we become Stephanie's guardian in New York State. You can have a standby guardian who agrees to do that, and then if the mother or father dies or gets disabled, they can. You can step in as the guardian and then move on to adoption. So that's how we got to know them. And then we spent the next six years as Stephanie's guardian. And I was taking notes all this time and thought, you know, this is. We want to share our journey with people. And finally, in 2020 or early 21, I started writing it more seriously. And Stephanie was at our apartment one day. We all live in the city of New York, and asked me what I was doing. And I told her, and she said, can I see some of that? So I gave her a couple pages. And then she said, can I have a pen? So she starts editing. And she said, I think I want to join in this effort. And I said, great. And Stan heard us from the other room and said, well, if you guys are in it, I'm in it. So from that day, and then Stephanie is, I will say, possibly the most organized of us. She sat us down at our dining table and said, okay, we need an outline. So we outlined the book. And then she said, okay, I will write these sections. And she marked off what she would do. And sure enough, over the next month and year and a half, she produced her piece monthly on time, and, you know, kept us really kind of focused. And we decided along the way that our journey was. Everybody's journey is unique, but ours had a certain unique qualities. And we wanted to share our story, hopefully with adoptive parents, adoptees, birth parents, to show them that adoption is a wonderful way to form a family, but it can have its challenges like anything else. But if it's grounded in unconditional love for the child and you just keep focused on that and not wavering, then things will work out. And we wanted it to be in our three voices, which we can talk about.
- [05:42]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, you sort of brought it up and started it, but that was one of the questions I had for you, because you have all three of your voices throughout this, and we kind of get different perspectives and experiences. So can you talk a little bit about that and that choice and how that sort of how you melded your voices together, too?
- [06:02]
Stan Altman
Well, I think the melding part was kind of interesting. The. The way that came about is once Stephanie indicated to Claire that she wanted to be in. And then I indicated, all right, the three of us will do it. I've been in a lot of my teaching. I refer to the. The classic Rashomon, this whole notion of people being involved in a particular incident. And when you ask them what happened, you get three completely different views. Now, here it struck me that our unique journeys to how we all came together in this was such that it made sense to try to do this in our individual voices, both in terms of telling our stories. Because I can't really tell Stephanie's story. There are whole parts of this where she was living almost a completely different life in another household. I could tell a little bit more of Claire's story because we're married. So I thought that was one reason. I think the other reason for doing it in individual voices, from my perspective, is I realized that the whole process of going through adopting Stephanie, from the first time Claire suggested we become her standby guardian, and I thought that was a terrible idea. To where I am now really provided an opportunity to really go inside and take a look at what's happened. I mean, this has been, for me, in many ways, very transformative. And I don't know that I had the time ever to stop and really reflect on, you know, what are the things that actually I. On a personal level, I found myself dealing with. They go back to my childhood that had nothing to do with. So I thought the idea of doing this in individual voices made sense and would make this richer. And so that's kind of why we decided to do it the way we did.
- [07:57]
Claire Altman
And I should add that people ask us about the title of the book, and the credit for that goes to Stephanie. Do you want to explain how you came up with the title?
- [08:08]
Stephanie Mercado Altman
Yeah. I mean, the idea really behind it is, you know, just being alive is a blessing, but having a second chance at family as part of that life is a. At least in my case, my individual journey has been a second blessing. So hence the title, Twice Blessed. You know, my mom was. Brought me into this world, and she was pivotal for that. And, you know, there was Love while she was on this planet and paved the way for me to have my guardian, my parents now, my guardians back then, you know, so I. I consider her my first blessing and then the second is my parents and how we formulate it to become a family and things like that.
- [08:49]
Claire Altman
So.
- [08:50]
Stephanie Mercado Altman
Yeah, yeah.
- [08:51]
Rebecca Buchanan
So you, you all wrote and this was from a time when you were really young, Stephanie. So for you, like Claire, you talked about you'd kept like sort of copious notes and, you know, writing. So Stephanie, for you, what was it like? Did you have to sort of write about yourself when you were younger that time? Like, what did you sort of rely on or go to or use to get back to those. That time when you were so young?
- [09:17]
Stephanie Mercado Altman
Yeah, I mean, I think aside from like school projects that were like, you know, writing about personal experience or we did learn about. I specifically remember about memoirs in elementary school. You know, we would write like two or three page memoirs about favorite memories or things like that. But I do, I mean, the thing is I. I have a pretty crisp memory, visceral memory of when I was a kid. And I think one of the things that kept me sharp or whatever, you know, what. Or like, at least in my memory bank was my. My expressive outlets outside of school. So that, you know, being. I. I was always a. And I probably have endowed it for my mom. She was a visual artist. So I did comic books. And my parents know that there are stacks of like these comic books that I had as a kid. Writing was also another outlet. But, you know, it. It all turned out to be in acting. I mean, all of these were outlets to kind of help me process. And I think having those outlets helped me keep those memories intact for this book.
- [10:24]
Rebecca Buchanan
So you start the book. The book kind of starts before you even meet Stephanie. And so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about like, your lives, but also sort of New York at that time and what was going on that got you to this place. Right. It's. It feels like there were many, many things that got you to working with people who had hiv, people who had AIDS at a time when a very different time than it is now. Right. I think people often think that HIV is a curable, you know, or a manageable disease when it was not the case 30 years ago, 40 years ago. So can you talk a little bit about that and how you kind of sort of situated us to get to the point, to get to Stephanie in your story?
- [11:14]
Claire Altman
So.
- [11:15]
Stan Altman
Well, I guess the first part you'd have to get to how to Claire and I get together, which itself is its own story, because we both were part of a spiritual group in New York, but we had very little to do with each other. Part of our professional worlds overlapped in terms of things we did with city government. But I think we were in the Same group for five years, maybe. I said 26 words to Claire over, and then out of nowhere, my son from a first marriage wanted to start coming to New York. And so I decided to throw a dinner party for him to meet some people his own age. And one of the people that I invited at that point was Claire, because she knew everybody else that I was inviting. And I kind of laugh when I think of it, but everyone was supposed to show up at 8:30 or at 8:00'. Clock. And I had cooked. And so Claire showed up at 8:00'.
- [12:14]
Claire Altman
Clock.
- [12:15]
Stan Altman
Everybody else showed up exactly at 8:30. But that half hour was an opportunity to talk to Claire. And I think over the course of the next three months, I proposed marriage on one month later. We got engaged one month after that, and we were married one month after that. I mean, it was kind of one of these kind of miracle things that just happened. And as a result, we found ourselves doing a lot of things that had us working together. And so the idea, because of Claire's work in affordable housing, she was approached to do a study of people with AIDS and their housing needs. But she wasn't running research at the time, but I was. And so they then approached me about doing it. And one of the things that I discovered during that study was the popular understanding was that it was purely terminal. If you had aids, there was no survival rate. But it turned out that data from the city's health department showed there was a survival rate small, and that what was needed was supported housing, because people couldn't go upstairs. They needed help. And so the idea of a supported housing residence was there, but the public was not support of any idea of having aids. Housing in your community became a big. A big issue because people believe that if you were exposed to somebody with aids, you'd get it. And eventually, Claire. I raised some money during that project. I said to Claire, if you ever do an AIDS resident, I'll give you the $10,000 we raised. Which she did. And so she ultimately opened up Highbridge, Whittycrest.
- [14:00]
Claire Altman
I was heading a nonprofit at the time, and we saw that there could be a survival rate, and we wanted to be part of the believers. You know, in the early 50s, people thought cancer was a terminal disease. And fortunately, with scientific advances, it's no longer a terminal disease. And we believed, not that we were medical people, I'm a lawyer by training. But we believe that that could happen. And also we believe that if people had a healthy place to live, good food, a supportive environment, that would improve their health. And there's not a lot of research back then that said that, but we believe that would be the case. So we used Stan's $10,000 to leverage a $16 million bond issue to buy a building in the South Bronx, renovate it, open it. We got support from the state health commissioner who was. Who said his staff was kind of opposed to what we were doing. He said, look, nobody else is housing these people. They're going to do it. Leave them alone. And so it was like having an angel at the head of the health department. And we got it licensed as a nursing home. And Stephanie and her mom were the first two people who moved in. And Stephanie has some early memories of even then. I don't know if you want to share that a little bit, Steph.
- [15:17]
Stephanie Mercado Altman
I mean, some of them, I don't know where to begin because they were all like little, you know, dims of the past. But I mean, one that just kind of came organically in the last couple weeks because there's an archive, at least a video archive of it is when the Body Chef did a video about Woody Crest and the importance of just, you know, housing, but also social services and wraparound services for people at that time. And how this was in particular, this model of. Of residence was put was kind of revolutionary for the early 90s, in the height of the AIDS crisis, all that. To say that I. I made more of a debut in that video than I ever thought I would.
- [16:01]
Claire Altman
You were too.
- [16:03]
Stephanie Mercado Altman
Yeah. And that was earlier two year old perspective I was so gung ho about. I mean, I hate attention now or drawing any sort of type of. To myself, but just being put in the limelight and just, you know, it was fun to be a part of attitude. You know, you think you're. You're a movie star at that now. I like to watch movies. I don't like to watch myself in the screen per se, but yeah, well.
- [16:30]
Rebecca Buchanan
And you were moving into like a new space and having your own bedroom and having all of that. So whether you knew it or not, like you get to see. I'm sure you were so excited.
- [16:39]
Claire Altman
Yeah.
- [16:39]
Stephanie Mercado Altman
Their possibilities are endless. So part of a camera. Yeah.
- [16:44]
Rebecca Buchanan
And I would probably say that even like this sort of wraparound services and what you were doing can be innovative in 2025. Right. Like, it's still. We have not. What you were doing, I think, was really amazing for that time period, but I think it's something that we have often lost sight of even now. Right. And to be doing and continuing to do so. Like, as you read through this, it seems like Claire had the. Claire and Stephanie had a. Got or had a relationship. Right. Like, met each other. Claire, you spent much more time with Stephanie and kind of had to convince Stan to take on this role or be part of this guardianship. So could you talk a little bit about just how the guardianship came to be, and then maybe we can talk about what a guardian is, especially during this time, because this. That sort of adds to some of what you had to go through to. For that long, what, six or ten long years or whatever it was before you could adopt Stephanie.
- [17:48]
Claire Altman
Right? Yeah. When we started Highbridge Woodycrest, we figured that many of the parents would die and there needed to be a plan. It just seemed logical for who would take care of them after that. We weren't set up to be an orphanage in a classic sense of the word, and we didn't want the children to live their life there. So we tried to convince all the mothers and we had a couple of fathers to create a standby guardianship agreement, which is. I had never heard of it. I didn't learn about it in law school, but I learned about it then that there was a way to do that. And that, as I said, the mother or the father signs it, the would be standby guardian signs it. And then after the parent dies or becomes disabled, the guardian goes to court and gets it approved by the court, and you're the guardian. You go through this typical, you know, fingerprinting, and the guardian, if you will, not the parent. And we got most of the mothers at Hydridge Woodycrest to find either a relative or a friend who would agree to be a guardian. Stephanie's mom didn't want to do that, but she also said nobody in her biological family would be up to that task. So originally I tried to help her find somebody else. And then it just became apparent clear that that wasn't getting anywhere. And then it was the end of the summer, Labor Day of 1995, 5. And she asked me to come to a meeting at her apartment. Sounded very official because by that time she and her partner had moved to a residence that we apartments independent residents that we supported. And Stephanie was there. They kept her home from school, dressed her up, and Everybody was very formal. I thought, what is this about? And Rosa said, I'd like you to become you and Stan to become Stephanie's guardians. And so there were some blips along the road. We said we would do it. And it took a few months because a prior person stepped back in the picture. But then that February, when it was Rose's birthday, she got a letter from the other people saying they weren't going to do it. And I said, don't worry, we'll do it. And the next day she signed the papers for us to become the standby guardians. And it was only about a month or so later that Rosa died. And then we went to court. And I guess you could say the kind of rest is history. Stephanie was living in an apartment with her mother and her mother's partner. But frankly, her mother didn't want the partner to become the guardian. And so that was the way it was. And we didn't want to upset this apple cart, if you would. Although we could have said we have sole custody, which the courts would have had to agree with. But we decided it was better for Stephanie to share custody so we didn't disrupt her situation. And that went on for a few years. But then a number of experiences transpired that ended up with us having to go to family court. The partner got arrested and things happened, and we didn't feel it was a safe environment for Stephanie. So the family court trial was a trial, but we weren't going to give up because we didn't want Stephanie to be thrown in the midst of chaos and a situation that wasn't healthy for her. We could see, you know, her first. We took her to the playground the very first day that we sort of stepped in to help take care, you know, take her out on Saturdays and so forth. And she couldn't do the monkey bars. She said, I can't do it. And that was often the refrain that she cited was, I can't do this, I can't do that. And we said, yes, you can. And that became our. Our dialogue that, yes, you can do this, you can do whatever you want. And I think as Stephanie to segue, she. After that she began to. Everything she was interested in, she said, can I do that? She said, can I take swimming lessons? Can I take musical theater lessons? Can I take horseback riding lessons? She was, can I play soccer? And we said, yeah, as much as you want to do things, we'll help you. And I. It's interesting, I think, that when you have experiences, then you do begin to Remember them. I hadn't thought about what Stephanie said earlier until just now, but it probably helps sear things into your memory.
- [22:41]
Rebecca Buchanan
So, Stephanie, I know you have to leave soon, so I wanted to ask you, because one of the things you all talk about this book, partly writing it, because you want people to know and think about adoption and what that's like. And I know for a number of young people, especially young people who are being, for whatever reason, removed from their home, do a lot of that back and forth and back and forth. And so can you talk a little bit about that from your perspective as a young person and even maybe now what that was like and what being with Claire and Stan might have given you, that you weren't getting another. Yeah, that. Just that experience. Because I know a lot of people don't think about it or we don't hear about it a lot from a child's perspective. Right. We often hear about it from the adults who are involved.
- [23:31]
Claire Altman
So.
- [23:31]
Stephanie Mercado Altman
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I. I can. Here's my career about, like, kind of going off is. It's almost like you're. You're trying to find the steps to two different beats, you know, And I. And I'm. I'm also to add on to the creative. I was. I am still an avid salsa dancer, so it was like, you know, being in. In the midst of two homes felt like you were misstepping a lot of the time. And it. Majority of the time, honestly, it did feel like that. And the thing is, I think, you know, when it comes to trying to exist, like, within two homes and have different values, different. Just different energies and vibrations as well. I think the thing that my parents gave me was this idea of just being authentically me, even at a young age, you know, just to not lose sight of, like, how love does anchor you in the moment. And I think it's the same with music. You know, you just kind of find the flow of whatever the beat is in that moment. And, yeah, I think it. You know, they're very. It really was like night and day between. Between the one household that I was in and then, you know, under their household. And I just took it for the moment, honestly, I think that's what got me through. And there's no right or wrong way to coexist between households. I think, you know, each person and their situation's unique to them and the players and their story and how that plays out. But I think for me, it was almost conforming in a way. I think I conformed in the different environments to make it easier for myself, you know, so I definitely was one Stephanie in one household versus the other, you know, and not to say, you know, that was healthy, but it helped me at least in the moment, you know. Then later I processed through, through, you know, therapy and things like that and other avenues. But yeah, I think it's. It's tricky. There's no clear answer, you know, but I think if you kind of learn the beat of each household or each moment, that'll take you through.
- [25:39]
Rebecca Buchanan
And like Stan and Claire, it seems like you also made some changes in your life, significant changes in order to help Stephanie, along with la, to try and keep it as non jarring. I don't know if that's the best word as pos like. So can you talk a little bit? Because you talk about this in the book a little bit, you know, or some examples of what you did in order to support Stephanie and to sort of continue to be there for her went on, you know, throughout.
- [26:10]
Claire Altman
So let me just say, Stephanie, I know you have to slip out. Do you have any couple last thing thoughts you want to share? Yeah, you're good.
- [26:19]
Stan Altman
Okay, you want to take start or you want me?
- [26:22]
Claire Altman
Either way, go ahead.
- [26:24]
Stan Altman
So I think, I think what ultimately kind of set the whole tone for this, our relationship with Stephanie through this entire period. In part when Claire and I got together, we often talked about being in it together. And when Claire raised the issue of becoming Stephanie's standby guardian, my immediate reaction was, you must be out of your mind. Because my two sons from our first marriage were older, they were out of college. I was at a place in my professional career where because Claire was working in Miami on a contract, I basically lived on the beach. I was reliving my own childhood from growing up in the Rockaways during the summer. And I thought this was the worst idea at all. It was going to destroy our life. And maybe I was a little jealous over Claire's feelings for Stephanie, but when I thought about it, I had to really ask myself, what did it mean to be in it together? If I really believed that I needed to see this from Claire's point of view. And so after several days, I realized that it was more important that I support Claire in all of this than worry about myself. And I think once we both made the commitment to become Stephanie's standby guardian, no matter what happened after that, that issue never ever came up again. I think maybe. And that's where the unconditional love part of the title in our book comes From. Because every day, no matter how crazy it was, and Claire kind of just breeze through the family court experience, which was some of the most horrible days of my entire life, sitting in a courtroom with a hearing officer who's all but decided that it doesn't matter what we say, they should probably, you know, give custody back to this other person. And you kind of feel like your life is, you know, slipping away. And. But we just decided every day. We, you know, we had one mission in life that was we were going to stick by Stephanie no matter what happened. And so I think, in a sense, that really set the tone for all of this. We didn't get too far ahead of ourselves. The way the circumstances turned out, we would have never predicted how that case would have ended. And then once it turned out that the other individual passed away and we were now the sole party in this case, the case was over. And we immediately then got called by the. Claire had filed two separate cases, one for adoption and one for sole custody. And we got a call from the adoption court saying, you want to adopt her? And the funny part of it all is, after we adopted her and we left that the court, we ran into the hearing officer who said to us, well, you know, we have a hear. This was August. We have a hearing in September. And we said, there's no hearing in September because we just adopted her.
- [29:20]
Claire Altman
But I just go back to your. So that's the. The context for all of this. But then we didn't. We really didn't know how. We didn't have any guidance about how to approach this. But the first time that we took Stephanie to a movie on a Saturday, because, as you saw in the book, we took her out on Saturdays while her mother was still living, to give the mother a break and so forth. And she had never been in the movie theater before, so she. I think it was this movie about a pig called Babe or something like that. And she immediately, as we sat down, the movie started. She got on the floor and started crawling around, and I was, like, crawling behind her to keep up with her. But she thought, you know, she didn't have a concept that you sat there for two hours and watch this. You know, she crawled around to figure out what was going on. We let her be who she was. I mean, she talked about different steps, whatever she was, you know, interested in doing. And she very quickly picked up on all kinds of things, whether it was musical theater. So we went to a lot of children's plays where they were corny kind of slapstick kind of things, and she loved it. She eventually. She wanted to play an instrument. She eventually decided to take up viola because a friend of hers who played the violin, the friend's mother said, they need viola players. There are not so many of them. So she said okay to that. She just, you know, was open to learning all kinds of different things. And then also, you know, speaking up very much for what she wanted when she. We found a wonderful school in Murray Hill, where we lived, P.S. 116, and she was thriving in kindergarten. We had moved her and the mother's partner down to an apartment in this area from the Bronx, and she. But when she got into second grade, the class was big, and there were disruptive kids and she wasn't learning as well. And meanwhile, before she went to kindergarten, we took her to be. You had to be tested then to be in the talented and gifted program, which I thought was a little strange, but any event. And she just froze. Her mother had just died. She didn't do good. She didn't do bad. So by the second grade, though, she said, you know, I think I belong in the talented and gifted program. And she said, so can you help me get in that? And so I went to the principal and I said, you know, I object to your testing. I think it's racially biased, et cetera. And the principal said, we don't test anymore. We do observation. So they brought Stephanie into the class. She started teaching the kids how to play chess, how to do math problems. And she said, you know, that is where I belong. And as a second grader. And then she got in that program, but she spoke a lot. I mean, I have to say we followed her lead. And I think that's an important lesson for all parents, really. But you need to listen to the child, unless they want to do something dangerous or completely outrageous. Most of what we did didn't cost much money. You know, we made use of YMCAs and other programs that were virtually free, and we just followed her lead. When she wanted to go horseback riding, that was another story, because I grew up in the south, where my mother made me learn horseback riding, and I got thrown and stepped on. And I had a very big fear of all that, But I realized I had to get over that. And so we always say we followed her lead and tried to let her do what would help her, because kids know what they want.
- [33:23]
Stan Altman
I mean, I think the other part of this is that, as Claire said, when we. When I first met Stephanie, and I went to the house to meet Stephanie and Rosa, and her partner, Stephanie, was hiding behind a couch. And in the early days, Stephanie was so shy and so putting herself down that she couldn't do anything. That one of the things, from my point of view was to try to help her kind of find her own voice and find her own sense of self confidence that she could do things. And so much of what we were doing with Stephanie was really directed at allowing her to express herself, to feel that she could do things, rather than saying, well, you can't do theater because we're too busy. And I think the adjustments we made because both Claire and I are pretty busy professional people, was that this was more important. We'd manage the other stuff. But focusing on her needs and helping her become a full person was really one of our unspoken objectives here. No matter what came up, that was really decision point. How is this going to affect her growing up as a whole person?
- [34:36]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, I think one thing, I mean, you brought it up through this interview and it comes through in the book, is this. You're advocating, right. For Stephanie and also for your family. But sometimes that meant that you had to take a step back. Right. And at times you could feel that it was very frustrating, but you had to really walk a line there too. You couldn't just sort of, as much as you wanted to sort of pull her out of the situation she was in and bring her to your house and just keep her. So can you talk a little bit about. Because it was a long process for you, I mean, to go through, to get to the point of the adoption. So can you talk a little bit about that experience of knowing. I mean, I know a lot comes up in here, even about her wanting to apply to the arts middle school. Right. The junior high, middle school, and kind of having to helping her advocate when she couldn't, when there were times she couldn't. So can you talk a little bit about that in those times where you had to like, sort of hold back a bit in order to. Yeah, yeah.
- [35:45]
Claire Altman
I mean, it was. We did walk a fine line because we had very different views on what Stephanie needed with her mother's partner. So we, we never criticized, we never talked about the other person. When Stephanie was around, we always tried to, you know, invite her. And Stephanie's biological family, she didn't have much of one, but her great grandmother was raising kids from multiple siblings of Stephanie's mom, who had died of aids. So she was elderly at the time, raising about six kids, which was a whole lot. But we invited them to holiday events. We invited them to dinner. We tried to help keep those connections. And then with the other party, there are a lot of things that they did that, you know, were borderline dangerous for Stephanie. But people kept saying, if you try to push it now, you may lose the whole thing. So we just tried to be patient and, you know, make sure that we helped Stephanie, like you say, with they. That person. And Stephanie's uncle wanted her to go to middle school near where they lived. And the art school was a little bit across town, but not that far. And so you had to. It's interesting to apply to a middle school when you're 10. You have to present a portfolio, which it's not like in another place where you just go to the middle school. So I had kept all of her papers and everything. And so she and I put together a portfolio for her to apply, you know, to have. I mean, I think it's hard for any kid to do that by themselves, but you just. And we didn't expect, you know, anything from the partner in terms of cooperative. Stephanie's mother wanted her to be raised a Catholic, and I was too, but I was what you call a fallen away Catholic. And Stan is Jewish. But we found a very ecumenical, open parish here in the city and agreed to take Stephanie there. The other person didn't participate in that, although she was a Catholic. But we said, that doesn't matter. It's what Stephanie's mother wanted. And so it was. Stephanie acclimated when Stan was the resident Jew, teaching the parents about Hanukkah and Passover and everything. And so one Hanukkah season, he brought dreidels and Stephanie taught the kids how to spin the dreidel. And walking from the family faith program to the mass at the church that morning, some of Stephanie's friends said, are you Jewish? And she said, no, I'm half Jewish and half Puerto Rican. She found a way to kind of manage these two groups. And so it's. It was a lot of. I have to say, we bit our tongue a lot and we didn't say much. But, you know, you had to kind of be as flexible as possible and mainly try to protect Stephanie from anything that was harmful. Yeah.
- [38:57]
Stan Altman
The only thing I would add on that final note is. No. Is that when we got to certain points where we thought what was. If we kind of went along with keeping the peace, it wouldn't be the hard advantage. We would put our foot down. I mean, I made it pretty clear that she wanted to go to that middle school she was going to that Middle school. It was one of the few times I reminded everybody that we're the guardians here. Not that I think they understood what that meant, but I think we weren't prepared to. To kind of go along with everything. In fact, notice at times we went along with everything to try to protect Stephanie, but in some of those decisions, we just put our foot down that she's doing this. Period, end of story. There's nothing to discuss here.
- [39:46]
Rebecca Buchanan
So in the book, sometimes we'll get to a book about adoption or something like this, and it ends with like, we adopted. But you kind of continue and talk about life after adoption. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that too. About that, your family and really creating a family and being with and watching Stephanie grow up after you adopted her and after you sort of got the official paperwork right, where the birth certificate was changed and. Yeah, can you talk a little bit about that?
- [40:22]
Stan Altman
You know, it's kind of interesting in terms of. I mean, like one of the things in terms of integrated in family. When we would go down to the beach, for example, in Florida, we'd take Stephanie down some weekends and then our older sons would come down. Well, they would kind of adopt her. I mean, I remember our youngest son and his then fiance took Stephanie to see X Men. It was Stephanie's first exposure to Hugh Jackman, which she then became a huge Hugh Jackman fan. When Stephanie got into riding, it became clear she had this bad reaction to horse dander and we thought that was the end of this. It turned out my cousin was a horse fed in Colorado and we ran an event and I explained to him that it was sad that she was not going to be able to ride. And he said, I wouldn't do it this way. I started giving her an antihistamine before she rode and let her build up antibodies. And so from that moment on, he became her vet. You know, anything with her horse, call Uncle J. And so I think she kind of integrated herself and the family adopted her as just part of the normal. And I think in that sense we were very fortunate about how all this kind of seamlessly happened.
- [41:44]
Claire Altman
I think also that we decided some people said you should end the book at the appointment where you're a doctor. But I think the story, you know, everybody. People say, and one of our pre publication reviewers says, you know, there's always a tragedy with adoption. And at first I kind of recoiled about that. But in point of fact, usually it comes through some kind of tragedy, misfortune. It was that in Stephanie's case, and that causes trauma. And not to say other kids don't have trauma from other reasons, but certainly losing a parent is traumatic. And so we kept, you know, we made it possible. I mean, Stephanie was up for talking to a therapist. She was in therapy for a very long time. Different ones to meet different needs along the way. I think it's, you know, self confidence problems that Stan talked about. It takes a long time for young people to regain self confidence when they've lost it. And no question, Stephanie, I don't think ever blamed her mother for. Well, at some point she did ask our spiritual teacher, you know, why did my mother die? And our spiritual teacher was very insightful. He said, you were meant to be born to your birth mother and then you were meant to be raised by Claire and Stan. And it's like rocks in the river. You know, the water flows around the rocks. And so that became a kind of metaphor. When we would run into a big problem. I would say to Stephanie, you know, it's like rocks in the river. And she got it. So it's. You have. You really need to be there. I don't think kids, you know, stop needing their parents when they're 18 or whatever. She took to college very easily, but there are still things. I mean, I remember a class in race and identity that, you know, kind of threw her for a loop. And she used to. I would watch my. I remember it was a Monday afternoon class and it ended at 4:00. And I knew I was going to get a call from her at 4 o' clock saying, this was really hard for me, this happened, that happened, whatever. And you want to be there to listen, you know, as long as a young person needs you. And then also we kept the memory of her mother alive. You probably noticed the COVID of the book and the history of that picture, which is a pastel done by her mother that sort of suddenly appeared about a year ago. And we celebrate her mother's birthday every year and we keep, you know, things alive, which I think helps. I think if somebody is completely disconnected from their birth parents. It's a. It's a severe wound. You have to, to the extent you can keep some kind of connection even when the person has passed away. So it was those kind of things, I think.
- [44:54]
Stan Altman
Yeah. And I do think the story really didn't end with her adoption. I think had we ended it there, what would have gotten lost in some ways is some of the really dramatic effects this whole process had on us individually. I know in My case, I had a very traumatic childhood to the point where my survival was burying all my feelings so that you couldn't hurt me anymore, because I had no feelings to hurt. And I often say that at some point, being involved with Stephanie, raising Stephanie, being, quote, her father, she never let me close my heart to her, no matter how many times I might try. It wasn't possible. And that changed my sense of, you know, having, in a way, the guts to just be open again. And I have to smile and laugh because when we announced that we were going to buy her a horse because she had just had a terrible experience after many years of riding, of being put in a situation where she practiced for a horse show, and then they put her on a completely different horse, and it was so unsettling, unsettling. And really set her back and feeling that she was no good, that the only way we felt that we're going to get over this is to get our own horse. Well, when we announced that, from that moment on, she called us mom and dad. And I think when she said that, I think the two of us just broke down in tears because we never asked her to call us anything other than who we were. And for her suddenly to feel that she now trusted us in a way, to refer to us that way was like, you know, almost undescribable.
- [46:42]
Claire Altman
And I guess one last little horse story is she. We knew her mother didn't want her, and nor did we, of course, have anything to do with drugs and the life that her mother had had. And so, I mean, we didn't preach about that all the time. But when Steph even got to middle school, she didn't, you know, she didn't liked the fact that her friends were partying and drinking and starting to see boys. And so she had just started her high school, and we would go upstate. We had bought a house to go with her horse so that she could ride on the weekends. And I was picking her up from school, and she threw her backpack in the back, and she said, I have a question for you. And I said, okay. What is it? She said, what do you think about white lies? And I said, well, I guess it depends on what the situation is. I said, did you tell your friends a white lie? And she said, yeah. I said, what was it? She said, well, I don't want to go to parties with him on the weekend. I don't want to go drinking and seeing boys. So I told him I have a boyfriend upstate. And he said, oh. I said, so how did you describe him? She said, well, I said he was tall, dark, athletic. I said, you mean African American? She said, no, no, no. I said, you mean your horse? And she said, yes. So I said, okay, that one works for me. So his name was Dixie Jazz, so she couldn't call him that. She made up another name for him for her friends and they never hassled her again. She said, and I'm sorry, I got a horse show, I got to see my boyfriend, blah blah blah. And so, you know, she figured out ways to cope to stay on the straight and narrow that she wanted to and but we were glad that she felt open enough to us to share with us, you know, what was going on.
- [48:32]
Rebecca Buchanan
So I'm going to we've been talking about this for a while and I think this is a good place to kind of ask you the final question, which is self promotion. So can you just when the book's coming out, how people can get it? If you have any events or anything else going on with the book or anything you want to sort of promote with your book?
- [48:53]
Stan Altman
Well, it turns out the official publishing date for the book from Fordham University Press is October 7th. However, Fordham University Press has now if you pre order the book they now have a 25% discount and free shipping and they are shipping the book. We've been surprised the that they have probably at this point shipped over 200 books before the official date. If you go to just the Fordham University Press and look up our book, there is a 25% discount code called just blessed 25 and then we are.
- [49:40]
Claire Altman
Our website is twiceblessed.org you'll see all our events and any other promotional things will be at the Brooklyn Book Festival this Sunday, September 21st. We have a book tour talk at the culture bookstore on 112th and Broadway on October 22nd from 6 to 8. And on our events page on our website other events are posted and will be and we plan to continue them for as long as there's an appetite. We are working closely with a very old and well respected foster care adoption agency, Spence Chapin. November is Adoption Month nationally and so we'll be doing an event for them and with them at their headquarters on November 18th. So I think the best place Rebecca is looking at our event page on our website and we are reachable. Our contact information is there. We hope to be putting together a newsletter shortly. We haven't had a chance to get to that but we urge you know, again parents, adoptive parents, adoptees and anybody working in the child services area as well as healthcare professionals, because healthcare professionals run into situations a lot where there's a parent who's sick, there could be an adoption. But to encourage people that with some courage and just focusing on love for the child, you can get through these things.
- [51:16]
Rebecca Buchanan
Well, thank you again to Clarence Dan Altman and Stephanie Mercado Altman for talking to me about Twice Blessed, a story of unconditional love. I really appreciate it.
- [51:27]
Stan Altman
Thank you. Rebecca.
- [51:28]
Claire Altman
Thank you.