“What does Hank say, Deanna?” Amy Hutton asks her 15-month-old daughter.
“Woof,” Deanna replies as she clasps her hands together and squeals with excitement, her blonde hair falling around her oval face.
She runs to Hank, the 153-pound, black Great Dane, and throws her tiny arms around his neck. He licks her cheek as she squeals.
Deanna then runs to her adoptive mother, De Dollar, hugging her leg and peeking out at Amy. Amy smiles as she watches the little child’s movements.
Amy doesn’t get to watch her daughter grow like most mothers. Three months into her pregnancy, Amy then 18 years old and still in high school, decided she would give her baby up for adoption.
“They couldn’t have kids, and it just felt right,” the junior in communication said about meeting the Dollars. “I thought, ‘This is the way it should be.'”
A Beautiful Girl
Amy flips through pictures while sitting at a quiet booth in the Bruegger’s on Avent Ferry Road. She smiles as she passes by pictures of her and Deanna, who is now two and a half.
Amy looks up.
“There,” she says, “look at her.”
She laughs looking at a picture of Deanna sticking her tongue out to lick a Barbie-pink lollipop.
Deanna has Amy’s hair and her boyfriend’s brown colored eyes, and Amy thinks there is not a more beautiful little girl in the whole world.
Not Ready
Two weeks after Amy was crowned homecoming queen during her senior year of high school, she found out she was pregnant.
“I was too stunned to have any real emotion,” she said. “Nobody thinks that anything like that will ever happen to them.”
Amy came from a family of devout Catholics, and her boyfriend Robbie Leonard, a senior in sports management, was at college playing football.
“The pregnancy was something we weren’t ready for,” she said. “I wanted my baby to have parents like I did.”
Real Choices
Amy stops at another photo — this time Deanna is sitting in her lap looking at drawings on a big wooden table.
“It’s hard sometimes to see a young mom with her kids,” Amy said.
Amy has used her experience with open adoption — where the mother still is in contact with the adoptive parents and gets updates on her child — to help out with Real Choices, a pro-life group on campus. It’s in this group that Amy finds the lesson she learned from giving Deanna up is worthy to someone else. This year, Amy is the president of Real Choices.
“It took me at least a year and a half,” she said about getting involved in the group. “But it was a way for me to help people who are in my situation.”
Amy preaches to anyone that adoption is a “wonderful option.”
“I would definitely describe myself as pro-life, and I’m proud to tell people that,” she said. “I believe that abortion hurts women and that women deserve better than abortion. … if mothers were given practical alternatives to abortion and a strong support system, it would be incredibly beneficial to both mother and child.”
People who meet Amy say they can feel that she means what she says.
“You can really tell she cares,” Angel Johnson, a counselor at the Counseling Center, said.
After all, she has gone through the adoption process herself. Amy said she knows the decision is tough.
“She has taken what some might view as an unfortunate, overwhelming life experience and is instead sharing another positive choice that many haven’t considered – adoption,” De said.
A Tough Decision
Amy said she was not sure what to do when she first found out she was pregnant.
“It was the beginning of my senior year in high school, and I was looking for a scholarship for swimming,” she said. “It was going to be my big year; then we found out. It was probably the biggest shock of my life. It was a pretty heavy thing to deal with.”
She said she always practiced safe sex.
“Yeah, I’m THAT girl.” Amy said laughing. “That 0.1 percent — that’s why it was pretty much the biggest shock.”
Amy and her boyfriend “automatically agreed” to have the baby. At first they wanted to raise the child together, but after talking to priests, Amy said she realized that she needed to think more of the baby’s future. So she decided adoption was the best route.
“It was a difficult decision. It was constant struggle every day,” she said.
Amy continued on with school until December of her senior year, when she became homebound and was tutored by her teachers.
“I was kind of removed from the scrutiny of peers, stuff that I really didn’t need to deal with,” she said.
At seven months pregnant, she walked across the stage to receive her high school diploma to a standing ovation. Everyone applauded her.
Coping
At first, Amy said she had a hard time coping with giving up her child, but De, 43, was “wonderful during the pregnancy” and birth. She said she struggled with the decision until the day she signed the adoption papers in the hospital.
“I felt humbled and honored that Amy would choose us and trust us to be the parents of Deanna,” Don, 42, said.
Deanna Dollar was born on July 11, 2005 and weighed 8 pounds, 1 ounce.
“They told us when we met them that they didn’t just want to take the baby and be done with it,” she said. “They said they wanted us to be as much a part of her life as they were. That was just the biggest thing. De is like a mom to me.”
And according to Amy’s mom, Maureen Hutton, Don and De make the perfect parents.
“I couldn’t ask for better people to raise my first grandchild,” Maureen said.
Amy and the Dollars agreed on having an open adoption, where Amy would visit Deanna and become a part of the Dollar family. She saw Deanna frequently in her first year, and often, but less frequently, after that.
“There always those moments when I think about her being my child, but it’s so comforting to see all the things that Don and De can give to her that I couldn’t,” she said. “And any time I felt that I had a breaking point, I’d go to Robbie. He’s so strong.”
Now
About a year ago, De, Don and Deanna moved from Raleigh to South Carolina.
Amy, of course, was sad to see her daughter move a state away.
“I don’t get to see her as much, but they are always coming here,” she said of the Dollars. “I kind of need a little bit of distance.”
And Amy and Robbie split less than a year ago.
“It seems like it would be weird, but it’s not,” Amy said of spending time with both Deanna and Robbie. “Robbie and I are great friends. It just worked out nicely. Mrs. Leonard is kind of like my mom.”
Amy finished looking through the pictures and put them back into her bag. Her focus now is finishing up her degree and promoting adoption through Real Choices, and from time to time, she gets to spend a few hours with her daughter.
“Now, I just watch them and think, ‘It will be my time some day.'”