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What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting?

Kamala Groomes
What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting?

A picture of a brown eyed, short brown hair baby girl with dimples sits on the desks of

Shawna and Kyle Williams in both of their offices. The baby girl in the picture is their daughter,

Penelope Rose Williams, which whom they adopted. Shawna Williams is a Spanish professor at

East Georgia State College in Statesboro, Georgia, and her husband works as an insurance agent.

Three years ago, Kyle and Shawna had the opportunity to adopt Penelope in Idaho. While on the

journey to adoption, Kyle and Shawna ran into some road blocks they never thought they would

come across.

Fluent in Spanish, Shawna has been an Associate Professor of Spanish at East Georgia

State College for the past ten years. Every student has that one teacher that stands out to them.

That teacher that makes coming to class a little bit easier. That same teacher that loves coming to

work and encouraging her students to work harder and to be successful. Shawna Williams is that

teacher, and if you asked any of her students they wouldn’t say otherwise.

“I absolutely love teaching my students! I have to say what makes my heart melt is going

a period of time not seeing them, and when I do see them, they have something positive going

for themselves,” Shawna Williams said.

While Shawna is an amazing professor to her students at East Georgia, outside of work

she wanted to be more than just that. Since the age of 17, Shawna had been told by her

Gynecologist that she was not going to be able to get pregnant. “The doctor just looked at me

and told me that I was just dealt a bad hand of cards in life,” Shawna says.

Shawna and her husband Kyle have been together for 17 years, and he was aware of her

not being able to get pregnant. Shawna had a lot of fibroids on her ovaries that made it difficult
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What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting?

for her to conceive. The couple played with the idea of adoption for a few years before they

actually went and did it. “I’d always wanted to adopt when I was growing up, I always thought it

seemed like a really cool idea,” Williams says. Shawna did not want to adopt a child that was

already in foster care or in the system already because she felt like they could have been exposed

to certain things and a certain environment that she could not handle being a first-time parent.

Having the urge to want to adopt a baby, Shawna nor Kyle did not know anyone that had

adopted before, but one Sunday all of that changed. “I found a couple of people in Statesboro

that had adopted, and I talked to them about it, and one of them got me in touch with a lawyer

who specializes solely in adoption only in this area,” Williams says.

At first, Kyle and Shawna both got cold feet about adoption. Shawna was worried about

what kind of past trauma the child could have went through while Kyle was worried about

adoption in a small town could be out of the ordinary. “Living in a small town where adoption

isn’t big, and everyone has their own kids, it was a little nerve wrecking trying to adopt. I think

the biggest thing was, I didn’t want my child growing up feeling out of place,” Kyle said.

Adoption isn’t just as easy as going to the dog pound and picking out what child you want, and

then you get to take them home. Shawna and her husband had to go through a lot in a few years

just to get approved to adopt a child. They were instructed by their lawyer to put a profile

together so they could be marketed. The profile would be things about them for birth parents to

look over when they are looking for families to adopt their child. “We had to drive to Hilton

Head just to get finger printed by the FBI like four or five times, we had to have someone come

and test our water just to make sure it was safe, and you have to pay all of this money,” Shawna

says. Shawna’s father is sick with testicular cancer and he passed out one day at her home while
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What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting?

she was there alone, and she called 911. They had to put that in her profile because she dialed

911, the agency said that looked bad on her behalf.

Shawna and her husband Kyle had to jump over many hurdles to get the adoption ball

rolling, but after a few years of get fingerprinted and plenty of home visits they were finally

given the chance to adopt a baby boy in Virginia. “I remember getting this call from the agency

telling us that it was a young lady who had been on a heroin and drank a little was giving birth,

and wanted the baby to be adopted by us,” Williams said. The adoption agency contacted them

and let them know about the baby, and that they had to fly to Virginia as soon as possible so they

could sign the paperwork for the adoption because of the adoption laws. In the state of Virginia,

a mother had to wait 24 hours before she could sign paperwork releasing her parental rights, so

the baby could be adopted. Things took a turn for the worst once Shawna and her husband flew

to Virginia. “We knew the mom had been on drugs, and we didn’t really know how bad she was

until we got there,” Kyle said. When the couple got into Virginia and made it to the hospital, the

young woman had already giving birth to the baby boy, but unfortunately, he did not make it. On

top of having to pay for their immediate flights to Virginia, they also had to pay for the mothers

stay at the hospital and an adoption fee to their adoption agency. “Gosh, I don’t remember the

exact number, but it was around $75 thousand dollars that we had to spend in fees.” Shawna said.

The couple was extremely heartbroken about what happened. This was the closest they

had come to adoption, and it was like the rug was pulled from under them. Two weeks later

Shawna got another phone call from their adoption agency saying they had a chance to adopt

another baby, but this time in Idaho. Skeptical about it because of their recent experience, they

took a leap of faith and did their research once again on the biological mother. The mother was a

22-year-old Hispanic woman that was days away from giving birth, and had only decided to give
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What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting?

her baby up for adoption two weeks prior. The young woman had never been to a doctor to

receive prenatal care and she was taking about four grams of heroin a day and drinking beer

daily. The young woman wanted a closed adoption which meant once she signed the paperwork

she was to no longer be contacted about the baby, she only requested two things from the

adoption agency. She would like for the name Penelope to be incorporated somewhere in the

baby’s name, and that she would be adopted by a couple that did not already have children which

made Shawna and her husband a perfect fit. Upon arrival to Idaho they met with the mother the

night before she gave birth and took her out to eat at the Olive Garden.

“She said she had never been inside an Olive Garden before. Kyle and I just looked at

each other in awe, like who has never been to Olive Garden? It was crazy because after we sat

down and ate with her a few hours later she went into labor, so I’m convinced that the Olive

Garden did it for her,” Shawna said.

While Shawna and her husband were excited for the arrival of their new baby, they were

also worried about how the baby would turn out after knowing all the drugs the mother was on

while she was pregnant. After 15 hours of labor, Penelope Rose Williams was born at five

pounds. Once the baby was born, they had to wait 24 hours in order for the mother to sign the

adoption paperwork. While Shawna and Kyle were waiting for doctors to give an update on the

baby to make sure she was okay, the young woman told nurses she need to go outside for a

smoke break but wound up trying to run away from the hospital. A security officer saw her and

brought her back to her room and kept her under restraints until it was time for her to sign the

paperwork. The baby had been on so much drugs while the woman was pregnant that they had to

put her on methadone, a drug used to help drug patients with withdrawing. The very next day,
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the mother signed her rights over to Shawna and her husband and asked them to not contact her

about the baby anymore.

Doctors did not realize to the extent what kind of damage the drugs would have done to

Penelope just yet. They ran tests to try to determine, but they didn’t find much except that she

was indeed going through withdrawal. Babies that go through withdrawal have symptoms such

as: high pitch crying for long periods of time, shaking and they clench up a lot. Penelope

displayed a lot of those symptoms and because of that she had to stay in the neonatal intensive

care unit, or NICU, for 6 weeks after she was born, which means Shawna and her husband stayed

too.

“It was the longest and most intense 6 weeks I think I ever had to wait. We found things

to do around Idaho while were there, but mostly we stayed at the hospital with Penelope. The

only time we had to leave was during the nurses shift change, but once that was over, we would

turn around and come right back and sit with Penelope. I mean, that was our child now, I

couldn’t just leave her there,” Kyle said.

Once the 6 weeks were up, the couple was faced with the biggest challenge they would

have to conquer, which was traveling cross country on an airplane with a screaming newborn

while also being new parents. “oh my gosh! I was terrified! She just kept crying, and I mean high

pitch crying for hours, and I know people wanted to say something, but no one did. I was just so

nervous,” Shawna said. Arriving back to Statesboro, they had more help than they thought they

would. Family and friends opened them with welcoming arms and helped out where they could.

Amber Hartley, a family friend and coworker of Kyle’s, babysits for Shawna and she adores

Penelope.
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What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting?

“When I first started babysitting Penelope, she just cried all day long. I thought I was

going to have a panic attack. They told me she what she went through, and I just had to have

patience, but she would just cry all the time,” Hartley said.

As time went on, Penelope’s withdrawal symptoms started to fade away as if nothing

ever happened. The crying slowed down and turned into smiling and consistent laughing, and the

shaking went away. Shawna was able to find her new normal with being not only a wife, but a

new mom as well. Fast forward to three years later, and Penelope is still doing amazing.

Showing no signs of brain damage from all the drugs her birth mother was on during pregnancy,

and just as happy as can be. Shawna felt like things could not have been any better with life, and

then she got sick one day.

“I was throwing everything up. It was hard for me to keep anything down and my face

started breaking out like I was a teenager again; I was like what the hell is going on?” Shawna

said. Clueless to what was going on, while out grocery shopping one day at Walmart she decided

to get a pregnancy test just for the fun of it. When she got home, she peed on the pregnancy stick

and the test came back positive. Shook, she called her cousin-in-law and made an appointment to

be seen at the obstetrician the very next morning.

“I didn’t even tell Kyle, because I took a picture of the stick and showed it to my sister,

and she said that I could have a cyst, and that cysts cause false positives on pregnancy tests, so I

knew I wasn’t pregnant,” Williams said. At the doctor the next morning, without anyone

knowing, Shawna went and did an ultrasound to see what was going on. “I remember telling the

nurse to not get her hopes up because I already know I have a cyst, and she looked and me and

said well ma’am, your cyst has a heartbeat!” Williams said.

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What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting?

In total disbelief, she called Kyle to come and meet her at the doctor’s office, she sat in

the ultrasound room for an hour looking at the ultrasound and listening to the heartbeat of a baby

she was told that she would never be able to have. “I had already known from the night before

that Shawna was pregnant just by how she was throwing up consistently. She said she thought

she had a cyst, but I knew better,” Kyle said. Shawna had a healthy pregnancy, and she tried to

keep it a secret for as long as she could. Since she was 17 years old, doctors had been telling her

she would never be able to get pregnant, and she was unsure about how the baby would come

out.

“I was so nervous that the baby wouldn’t make it to full term, because for the longest I

wasn’t even supposed to have a baby, and now I’m pregnant. I thought the baby would come out

with like three arms or something,” Shawna said. The baby was not born with three arms, but she

was born a healthy baby. Amelia Grace Williams was born at 6 pounds on September 19, 2019.

What was just a couple from a small town that was told for the longest that they could not get

pregnant, is now a family of four. Showing no signs of withdrawal or brain damage, Penelope is

a healthy kid running around daycare and is in love with being a big sister to Amelia Grace.

“It’s a raw feeling, and still unreal to me. I think of it as just being God. He has the final

say so in life, what a mighty God we serve,” Shawna said.