Love Story - There's Holiday Spirit For All In This Family Built On Love

LOVE STORY

There's holiday spirit for all in this family built on love

By JANE MYERS

NEWS STAFF REPORTER

Twenty-one years ago, Bill the cook and Linda the carhop fell very much in love at Friar Tuck’s, a now-defunct Ann Arbor restaurant where they both worked. They could hardly wait to get married, and less than two months later they did.

Their love for each other filled their little house in Ypsilanti, just as the piney aroma of evergreen boughs fills a happy house at Christmastime, and their delight in one another danced all over the place like the lights on a sparkling Christmas tree. It was a quite splendid love, really, and there was more than enough for the two of them.

To share their love with a child, they thought, would be just perfect. But years went by and no child arrived.

So Bill and Linda Canter went looking for the child they wanted.

IT DIDN’T OCCUR to them to specify what kind of a child they wanted, to ask for a child who was healthy, or who had blue eyes, or who was a newborn, or who had never been treated badly or whose parents both had skin that was the same color.

There is a phrase in the adoption world known as “hard-to-place.” It has never been a part of the Canters’ vocabulary. Their translation is “easy to cherish.” There is a phrase in the adoption world known as “mixed race.” The Canters’ translation is “she was meant for us.”

All of the Canters’ 11 adopted children are ones that the outside world called “hard-to-place” for one reason or another. To the Canters, every one of them is in that extra-special category labeled “the one we wanted for our very own.”

First they found Mary, a 10-year-old who is now 26, and then they found Susan, a three-month-old baby who is now 14. And then they said, “We have two girls, we should get a boy.”

And so they found baby Michael, now 13, in Saginaw. Then they heard about Melissa, 12, in College Park, Md., and they said, “We’ll take her.”

SOON THEY LEARNED of Matthew, a three-year-old in Des Moines, Iowa, and they still had plenty of love left over, so they took him, too.

Then, surprise of surprises, Eric, now 8 - the baby they had waited for years before - was born to them.

But love, wonderful love, the kind that fills a house to overflowing, doesn’t stop. In fact, it grows. “We were so thrilled with Eric, we thought we should add one more,” Linda remembers thinking.

And so they found Robert, then 10 and now 17. And they forgot that they wanted just one more, and pretty soon they had five-month-old Kimberly, now a kindergartener, and Brian, then 12 and now 18, and Lori, then nine and now 12, and Daniel, then four and now seven, and baby Kristi, the two-year-old who came to them this year. And in-between, they also cared for 50 foster-care children, moving to a bigger house along the way and remodeling it themselves.

Bill and Linda Canter don’t think there’s anything special about them. A love that grows and grows and never runs out just seems ordinary to them.

THEIR LOVE CAN deal with cerebral palsy and cystic fibrosis and emotional damage. Their love can encompass a dangerously enlarged heart and extreme nearsightedness, Down’s syndrome, mental impairment and learning disabilities.

Secrets? They don’t have any.

Three of their sons had been previously adopted and then given up by other families.

“I just always wanted a big family,” Linda says simply, as though that explains everything.

“I always wanted to be a bachelor,” adds Bill, a janitor at the Ford Motor Co.’s Ypsilanti plant who was a bachelor until the age of 33, and whose wry humor is one of the treasured ingredients in the Canters’ recipe for success. '

The Christmas story of love, of the adored babe in the manger, is a story the Canter family knows and loves. With the rest of the Christian world they will celebrate it today - as they do 12 times over every day of their lives.

NEW PHOTO ROBERT CHASE
Bill and Linda Canter pose for a Christmas portrait with their children: They "just always wanted a big family."

There is a phrase in the adoption world known as 'hard-to-place.' It has never been a part of the Canters' vocabulary. Their translation is 'easy to cherish.'