It’s funny how family happens

CHESAPEAKE

BETTY J. MEYER is one of the most important people in Chesapeake government.

Until last year, she was responsible for crafting the city budget, the hulking document that shows how they'll spend every penny of $963 million.

It's a stressful job. Especially in the spring, when the budget is hammered into finality. When residents get mad about their tax rates and city spending.

But Meyer, who wakes up at exactly 6:15 a.m. each weekday, never goes to the grocery store without a list and sets out her household budget every winter for the entire year ahead, is good at planning and structure. So good, she was promoted last year to deputy city manager, one of three in the top city administrator's inner circle.

When some people look at her, with her big job, her top-floor office at City Hall and her three college degrees, they assume this is exactly the life Meyer wanted.

"People thought I just consciously made a choice to be a career woman."

But she didn't at all. The life she has now is not the one she envisioned when she was a girl. Her career wasn't supposed to happen.

Betty Jean Meyer's plan was set from the time she was a teenager. Her life would be like "Leave It to Beaver." She'd be a stay-at-home mom with a husband she adored.

She spent years preparing.

Her mother taught her to sew when she was 4. Later, she baby-sat for other people's children, with the idea that it would be training for when she was a mother.

She spent money from summer jobs on monogrammed linens and china, which she put into a hope chest.

In 1976, Betty Jean purchased four copies of the U.S. bicentennial edition of Time magazine, one for each of the four children she planned to have.

By then she was 24 and single, with a degree in field biology and a new job as a health inspector in Norfolk. But she was ready to leave her career behind for her vision.

Family had always come first.

She was born in Beaufort, S.C., to a homemaker and a Navy officer.

She and her three sisters became worldly together, moving from Texas to South Carolina to New York and then to southern Japan as her father changed duty stations.

Frequent moves made the four girls feel like outsiders, but also brought them closer together. "We were everything to each other," said Betty Jean's sister, Pat Kunselman.

Their father taught them the importance of staying focused on the big things. When Betty Jean told him she didn't have time to write her mother from college, her father boiled it down in words she will always remember.

"There's not enough time in life to do everything," he told her, "so you decide what's important and you do it well. And then you let the rest go."

At first, the highest priority for Betty Jean was starting a family.

"I was raised in a family. To be happy, I thought I needed to be in a family."

At age 18, she moved to Virginia to go to Old Dominion University. Marine biology, she thought, was just something to do until she married and had kids.

While working as a health inspector, she started graduate school two nights a week for a master's degree in public administration.

Buying the Time magazines was "a little obsessive, but that's me," she said. Longtime friend Merrie Jo Milner remembers the hope chest Betty Jean kept in her room.

"I thought that was so brave. She was focused. It was just the direction she was moving."

Betty Jean got engaged in her late-20s, but that was called off.

Other relationships didn't work out. She stopped trusting men.

She remembered what her father had said about focusing on what's important.

She dove into graduate school.

"Grad school helped me keep goals, to have my life grow without a family."

She worked for 10 years toward a doctorate in urban services management.

In 1985, when she was in her early 30s, Betty Jean joined the city of Virginia Beach as a senior analyst. She stayed 14 years.

In her private time, she did what she would have done with the daughters she longed for.

She began to take Merrie Jo's daughters on afternoon sewing adventures, teaching the girls how to make their own clothes. "I feel like my sewing's a gift, and I needed to share it with someone."

Betty Jean became the childless aunt to Merrie Jo's children and others. She made stuffed animals and sewed quilts for all the new babies at her church, First Lutheran in Norfolk. And she was always baking for somebody.

Milner said her friend has never missed any of her three children's birthdays. Ever the budget director, Betty Jean gave them a practical gift each year: savings bonds.

She maintained a sense of humor about not having a husband and children. She once asked a professional to photograph her with her keeshond, Saskia, and joked about putting the portrait of her and the dog in the church directory.

But not having a family of her own hit especially hard at Christmas, as she watched her sisters' children grow. She sometimes felt like a lone unicorn on Noah's Ark.

She eventually made up her mind that she had to stop kidding herself that next year would be her year.

When she was about 40, she threw out the four magazines. She decided that romance and family just weren't going to happen.

It wasn't until nearly a decade later that things finally began to change.

 

The turning point came in church. Lanier Williams was drawn to the striking, smiling choir singer with the light-colored brimmed hat.

He was an art teacher at an elementary school in Norfolk, still single at 42.

By chance, it was the same woman he had been urged to meet by a music teacher at his school. (Betty Jean had taught the woman's daughter to sew.)

They had their first date at a coffeehouse across the street from the church.

"We just talked and talked and talked and talked," Betty Jean said. "We completely lost track of time."

Lanier, who was born in Richmond and went to high school in Fayetteville, N.C., was also raised in a family with religious roots. He grew up with siblings, two brothers. He also believed in maintaining strong family connections but wanted to be more creative, resourceful and daring than his parents.

Their initial phone conversations lasted two hours apiece, Betty Jean remembers. On their early dates, the two would just wander around Norfolk's Ghent area and chat.

They found that they both loved music, art and reading. Betty Jean admired his "strong will to be an extraordinarily giving person toward his family and friends."

Lanier had the same fondness for Betty Jean. "She's really quite a brilliant woman."

After two months, they were standing in the courtyard at First Lutheran Church. It was around 12:30 p.m., and services had just finished. It was sunny and warm, but not too warm, and he told her he was going to do some magic for her.

Lanier pulled some stuffed penguins from a cloth bag and began to juggle them. And then he said "Abracadabra!" and pulled out a box with a diamond ring inside.

Betty Jean said "yes" without hesitation. The two put an open wedding invitation in the church newsletter, and more than 200 people showed up on Oct. 12, 2002. Friends and relatives were elated about her marriage. They were also surprised.

"It had been a long time," said Betty Jean's sister, Wendy Meyer. "I had figured she probably wasn't going to get married at that point."

They started talking about children soon after. The couple liked doing simple things together, making a meal or shopping or walking. And they wanted a child to enjoy all of it with them.

They would try to have a baby, they decided, if that was what God wanted. Betty Jean's doctor told her she probably had five years left to get pregnant.

But a year into the marriage, she was diagnosed with an ovarian cyst.

What was supposed to be a relatively simple outpatient surgery turned into a hysterectomy. Lanier had to break the news to her when she woke up.

"It was one of those moments you remember but wish you didn't," she said.

Betty Jean was devastated. After all these years, it seemed she'd finally come so close. "She wanted to be a mother so badly," Lanier said.

Once again, though, when life wasn't turning out the way she'd hoped, she made a new plan: She and Lanier would adopt, and they'd go all the way to China to do it.

It surprised some people that they would go through all that after the hysterectomy.

Not Merrie Jo. "That's just so Betty Jean that she didn't give up. I would have probably given up at that point, but she just went with it."

 

It was January 2005, and Betty Jean was sure the adoption wasn't going to happen. She and Lanier had spent five months filling out paperwork. Now they were waiting even longer for the Chinese government to match them to a child. Betty Jean had become depressed.

"It was so long. So long."

Then, one day in May, the Federal Express envelope arrived at the couple's South Norfolk home. Lanier intercepted it. He put it between the wings of a stuffed dragon and propped the dragon up on the rail of a crib in a room with bright yellow walls and ceilings covered with Chinese workers, acrobats and other cultural images he had painted in the months leading up to this day.

When she got home, Betty Jean took the package into the sunroom.

She tried to hold back tears as she signed the document accepting Huaqiu (pronounced Wah-cho) as her daughter.

By July, Betty Jean and Lanier were on their way to China to meet her and take her home.

Betty Jean became emotional again as she took the little girl in her arms for the first time.

"I didn't think she was going to let the baby go," Lanier said. "I didn't think I was going to get to hold the baby."

Betty Jean kept a journal of the trip to China and wrote of a moment when some Chinese women wanted to hold the "beautiful baby."

"Huaqiu would not let them and clung to me," Betty Jean wrote on July 22, 2005. "I felt bad, but the mommy in me rejoiced that in two short weeks my little baby clearly preferred me to people that looked like her."

Lanier said it was an amazing meeting of two personalities.

"Here was a mother who finally got to realize her lifelong dream. And here was a little girl who had been abandoned."

They'd requested a 1- to 2-year-old. Huaqiu was 10 months.

"I had read every book on toddlers," Betty Jean said, but this was a baby who didn't even crawl yet.

Cho-Cho, as they call her now, is 3-1/2.

Betty Jean makes her clothes, and Lanier has painted several portraits of her.

"Lanier is the artist and the musician," she said, "and I'm Mrs. Structure. Man, she'll be able to balance a checkbook with me around."

People told Betty Jean parenting would be stressful, but she doesn't think so, even though Cho-Cho can be a handful.

"She's headstrong, but so am I. We're a good match."

Those who know Betty Jean say Cho-Cho and Lanier have relaxed and brightened her.

"There's this glow to her that wasn't there," Merrie Jo said.

Said her sister Pat: "I don't think she was unhappy before. I think it's just 'more happy.' "

On one recent night after work, Betty Jean donned an apron and chopped onions, bok choy and celery to put into a lo mein dish.

"I had to learn to make it because my child is a lo mein freak," she said as Cho-Cho raced around the kitchen and den. "We're a two-wok family these days. We never thought we'd need two woks."

She admits that a lot of stuff doesn't get done around the house sometimes, but that's OK. "My dad was right. You have to let the little things go."

People at work all know how important Betty Jean's family has become to her. "It's very rare to have a conversation with her where she doesn't talk about Cho-Cho," said Chesapeake City Manager William Harrell.

 

A life of structure and planning has taught Betty Jean one thing about parenting:

"You need to raise problem-solvers, because you can't anticipate the future."

You can plan a day or week in advance, she said, but you can't map out your life.

"The environment is too uncertain for that."

Still, Betty Jean and Lanier are planning for another big addition to the family: a second daughter from China. This time, the wait has been longer. They've been told it could take until this fall.

She would be really disappointed if it didn't work out. Betty Jean and Lanier grew up with siblings, and Cho-Cho wants a baby sister. "It just sort of makes a nice, rounded family," Betty Jean said.

Still, she's got the "critical components" of the family dream she had as a teenager.

"It's a much more updated vision. Instead of 'Leave It to Beaver,' it's the 21st century. I'm working. I like working."

In a way, she thinks having an international child makes her feel more complete than if she had her own. The whole world is coming together, she said, and she feels part of that closeness. Also, she has a life rooted in "today," and not in her parents' time.

"So it's a better vision, maybe."

Mike Saewitz, (757) 222-5207, mike.saewitz@pilotonline.com