El Segundo’s Marie Fellhauer’s long journey to motherhood

 

Those who know Marie Fellhauer know her to be many things.

She’s an El Segundo native who grew up to become an LAPD cop and then a councilwoman in her hometown. She’s tough and sweet and articulate and deeply devoted to her community.

But those who really know Fellhauer also know that what she’s wanted to be longer than anything else is a mother. And it was this dream that proved to be the most ellusive thing of all in her life.

Marie met her future husband, Justin Fellhauer, in 2001, through an old fashioned matchmaking service. She wasn’t messing around; she knew she was looking for the future father of her child. She remembers going to the upscale office on Wilshire Boulevard to give the agency her preferences for a mate.

“I remember telling them, ‘I don’t want a cop,’” she recalled. “They laughed at me. ‘Cops don’t spend this kind of money,’ they said.”

She laughed, too. “Well,” she told them. “I am on a payment plan.”

Justin was a quick match. Like her, he was an avid snowboarder and athlete who loved to travel and believed strongly in community. He worked in sales. And he dreamt of being a father.

He was from Colorado and lived in Long Beach — three miles, she joked, outside the 20 mile range she listed on her profile. That was remedied when he visited El Segundo. He was already in love with Marie, and quickly fell for the little city, as well.

“I must have lived in California a year and a half at that point and didn’t know El Segundo existed,” he recalled. “The first time I came here I thought, ‘Wow, this really is a community.’”

They were married the next year. They stayed in El Segundo.

“I was born and raised here,” she said. “I wasn’t leaving.”

They tried for two years, without luck, to have a baby, even though there appeared to be no medical problems. In 2004, Marie began taking fertility treatments, a process that would continue for nearly a decade, entailing heartbreak after heartbreak. She went through five in vitro fertilization cycles, at $20,000 per, but each cycle kept falling just short of success.

“At one point we started calculating how many shots she took, and it was over 3,000 during all those cycles,” Justin said. “She had a few pregnancies, but they were short-lived.”

Finally, the couple began investigating the “open” adoption process — in which the biological mother is able to stay in touch — and warmed to the idea. They discovered that emphirical data shows that open adoption negates some of the difficulties of the traditional adoption process — the emotional disturbances, a tendency to produce runaways — and provides a loving, secure environment for children who otherwise might face the challenges that come with unwanted pregnancies. In 2014, they formally began an adoption process for the first time, after finding a woman that January who was a match. They followed her through her pregnancy, and that March she went into labor after a placental abruption. The baby did not survive the birth.

Marie was devastated. “Maybe we are just not meant to have kids,” she remembers thinking. “Maybe we’ll just travel the world and have lots of money, but no family.”

“That heartbreak made us feel like that,” she said. “But I always knew, from the bottom of my heart, that I was meant to be a mom. Since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a mom.”

Earlier this year, the couple found another potential match, a young woman pregnant with twins. Though they didn’t enter a formal agreement, they talked at length with the woman and were on the verge of adoption when she gave birth, just after Easter, and changed her mind.

“That’s when we got a puppy,” Marie said. “I was like, ‘I just want pups.’ I was exhausted.”

A girlfriend of Marie’s gave the couple a new idea. She’d had a friend find an adoption match on Facebook. “Why aren’t you posting your profile on Facebook?” she asked Marie.

Justin and Marie, through their adoption agency, iHeartAdoption.org, already had put together a four page pamphlet about themselves and why they wanted to be parents. The pamphlet showed photos from the couple’s active lifestyle and shared things about many facets of their lives — their careers, family, where they live, their interests and hobbies —  and their commitment to build a relationship with the birthmother. At the very top of the very first page was a simple statement: “To love others makes us happy.”

After checking with the adoption agency, they posted the pamphlet on Marie’s Facebook page.

“Justin and I have been trying to adopt a child for the last couple of years and I thought I’d ask all of my Facebook friends to share this post and help us be seen by as many people as possible,” Marie wrote. “Our agency works with birthmothers from anywhere in the US and we are looking for an open adoption where the birthmother and other blood relatives can maintain contact with the adopted child.”

This was  Wednesday, July 8. Friends immediately spread the word — the post was shared 444 times. And on Saturday, the phone call came through, via the 1-800 number included on the Facebook post. The Fellhauers were in San Diego at an Independent Cities Association conference Marie was attending as a councilwoman. When Justin excused himself to take the call, Marie figured it was a business call.

It was the parents of a pregnant young woman whose cousin had seen the post and shared it with her. She’d looked at the pamphlet and felt some connection, and so asked her parents to vet the couple. She lived in Sacramento, where the parents happened to be visiting — from San Diego. Justin arranged to meet them the next day. That Sunday afternoon, the Fellhauers met them in a park by a beach. They talked for two-and-a-half hours.

“I already love you,” the pregnant girl’s mother told Marie as they parted. All four were in tears.

A call was arranged with the couple’s daughter that week. The Fellhauers spoke with her for an hour and it went well; a visit to Sacramento was agreed upon. They flew up the very next weekend and met and talked with her for four hours. Not long after, she called.

“Yes,” she said. “I want to match.”

They met again and developed an entire “birth plan” at the hospital and how things would be handled later on. Marie had lost both her parents, so the idea of the young woman’s parents staying deeply involved was exciting to her. Justin’s mom, Cheryl Bailey, had already moved to California, and lived ten houses away, hopeful and ready to help out.

A match was formally made. And then on the night of September 14, they got the call — the woman was going into labor. The Fellhauers drove over the Grapevine at 2:30 a.m. and arrived in Sacramento in the wee hours. The birthmother wanted Marie in the hospital room with her and her own mother. Twenty-four hours later, with her mother holding her hand, she gave birth to a baby boy. She already knew his name. She looked up at Marie. “Marie, meet your son, Klaus,” she said.

“I was bawling my eyes out,” Marie recalled.

And so, on 7:54 a.m. on September 16, after 13 years of heartbreak matched only by the willed hopefulness that followed each dashed hope, Marie Fellhauer became a mother.

Marie, as had been planned, cut the umbibical cord. The midwife then handed the baby to her for his first “skin to skin” contact with his mother.

Recounting that moment six weeks later in the family’s home in El Segundo, with Klaus ensconced in a nearby crib, Marie looked towards her husband. “I love you, and I love the day we got married,” she said. “But that was the best moment of my life. Instant love.”

Just after Marie first held Klaus, the young birthmother, who was adopted herself, told her mother and Marie that she felt so lucky to have been adopted by such wonderful parents that she just wanted to pay that back to this child, and give him the opportunity to experience the love and security she’d experienced.

“[She] is the most amazing birthmother ever,” Marie said.

At home in El Segundo with their baby son, the Fellhauers are over the moon. Justin said he’s never seen Marie happier, and his mother nodded knowingly. “Just wait until he’s a teenager, and you’ll never see her angrier,” she said.

“Now, all the miscarriages, all the crap we went through, all the baby supplies went gathered a couple months leading up to the birth where the baby didn’t make it…Now it all makes sense,” Marie said. “Because Klaus is supposed to be ours.”

Justin said he’s learned something he could never have fathomed. A lesson in love.

“To me, one of the lessons I learned was even though he is adopted, he is our child,” he said. “In the beginning, I was a little bit skeptical that adoption would still feel like your own child. It took a year to come to terms with it — it just wasn’t in my life plan. But looking back on it, it was foolish to have that reservation. That is the lesson I’d hope to pass on to others.”

“I’ve never been happier in my life,” Marie said. “It’s amazing.”

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