Small but mighty, 6-year-old Hadley Peterson has been a spitfire since the day she was born.
“This one is sassy, sarcastic, funny — and that eye roll,” mom Kelly Peterson tells PEOPLE in an interview at home in Cedar Lake, Ind., as she watches her daughter in her full dramatic glory.
Four years ago, Kelly and Larry Peterson adopted Hadley. But it wasn’t easy. The family says one of their biggest obstacles was one of the things they all have in common: spina bifida, or birth defects affecting the spine that can result in mobility and other issues.
“Every agency that was willing to work with us had only dealt with families where one person had a disability, not two,” says Kelly, a 46-year-old special education teacher. “We were warned it would take a whole lot longer to be matched because of our disability.”
But Dr. Sue Mukherjee, medical director of rehabilitation services at Shriners Children’s Chicago, where Hadley is a patient, says firsthand experience with the condition is a plus.
“Living life with spina bifida is complicated,” Mukherjee says. “There is a lot of medical care and follow-up.”
“Who better to teach a baby with spina bifida how to grow up to be independent and to manage their own care?” the doctor tells PEOPLE.
About 1 in 2,875 babies is born with spina bifida in the United States each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And while the CDC says that “no two people with spina bifida are exactly alike,” many people with the condition have shared experiences.
“It takes a while for families to get onboard when they have no prior experience with a child with spina bifida,” Mukherjee says, adding of the Peterson family: “I thought it was lovely in this case how two adults with spina bifida found each other, so they bring their own lifetime of experience living with the condition.”
“Hadley has brought so much love, joy and fun into our lives since the moment she entered the world,” says dad Larry, also 46, who works at a car care call center. “She continues to amaze us as she grows and becomes more independent.”
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The couple and their daughter were all born with myelomeningocele, which is the most serious type of spina bifida and can cause moderate to severe disabilities, such as not being able to move your legs, according to the CDC.
Each of the Petersons has different vertebrae that are impacted, leading to different amounts of mobility: Kelly is completely paralyzed from the waist down, with some feeling in parts of her upper legs and thighs; Hadley and Larry both have movement in their legs. All three use wheelchairs.
“My husband can stand with support or holding onto something, and can actually throw his wheelchair in the trunk of the car and hold on to the car to get to the driver’s seat,” Kelly says. “For Hadley, she’s had a little more difficulty, but is able to move her left leg.”
What makes their family work, says Kelly, is not just the commonality of their disability but also the way both she and Larry were brought up by parents without spina bifida.
“We were raised that our disability wasn't a hindrance, that our disability wasn't the center of our world,” Kelly says. “It was just a part of who we are — but not all of who we were.”
The Petersons first met when they were just 10, at camp, and discovered they were both born on the same day, Dec. 22, 1978. They later reconnected as teens and even dated but broke up when Kelly left for college.
Fate, or more specifically social media, brought the two back together after being apart for a decade: "I happened to be on MySpace and he popped up on MySpace profile," recalls Kelly, who was then married. "So we started talking through there and for several years just talked."
Later, once Kelly was divorced, they started dating and have been together ever since.
“With Larry, there’s things we don’t have to explain,” she says. “They don’t have to be understood because we both have gone through it. That gives us a level of ease and comfort.”
After they married in 2016, Kelly and Larry decided to adopt.
In 2018, they submitted their application for Hadley through the organization Special Angels — just one day before it was due. They were presented in October of 2018, matched that November and Hadley was born on Dec. 14, 2018.
The Petersons met with Hadley’s biological parents on the day she was born and saw her the day after.
But it wasn’t until September 2020 that she was officially adopted, in part because of paperwork and other regulatory steps.
Kelly says they were determined to adopt and now want to educate prospective adoptive parents with disabilities on how they, too, can power through.
"We were warned it could take longer because there is that stigma out there that two people with a disability can't do this," Kelly says. "But we were realistic about what we could and couldn't do."
"I had a Christian agency that flat out told me, 'We don't work with people with disabilities,' " she says. "I said, 'Well, that's not very Christian of you.' "
Despite the ups and downs, the Petersons both felt Hadley was a perfect match for them because of their deep understanding of the issues she will be facing in life.
In addition to their spina bifida diagnoses, Kelly has worked as a teacher with children with special needs for the past 24 years.
Hadley’s other medical conditions include apraxia, a motor speech disorder that makes it difficult to talk, and 22Q, a chromosome disorder that can cause heart problems and other health issues.
“We don’t have experience in all of these things, but I know what to look for, how to help her and how to advocate for her,” Kelly says. (Hadley also has autism, and Kelly says she was the one who pushed for that evaluation and diagnostic support.)
Though the family is open and eager to spread awareness about special needs adoptions, they want to make clear that “we’re just living our lives like anyone else.”
“We don’t see our lives as that different, even though when we stop and think about it, we know it is,” Kelly says. “But when you’re living day to day, we just don’t see it that way.”
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