BLAINE, Minn. — Betsy Sathers wears the glow of a new mother as she perches on the couch in her family room, smiling and chatting with visitors while still managing to keep an eye on the 2-year-old twins cavorting at her feet.
Sathers — whose husband was killed when a Minneapolis freeway bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River in 2007 — is realizing her dream of being a mother with the adoption of Ross and Alyse from Haiti.
The twins, a boy and a girl brought to Sathers’ home days after the earthquake in Haiti, suck from baby bottles and drag toys across the floor. On the wall hangs a framed wedding-day photo of Sathers and her late husband, Scott.
“I wasn’t sure if I would ever be a wife again, and I was really all right with that. But I knew that I wanted to be a mom, and I thought about it and I prayed about it a long, long time,” Sathers said.
Betsy and Scott Sathers had been married 10 months when he died. She started the paperwork to adopt from Haiti in January 2009.
“I was grieving the loss of my husband and the family we had hoped to have together,” she said. Now, the children she hoped for are here.
“I don’t think I rescued them,” Sathers, 33, said of the twins. “I feel like if anything, they’ve rescued me.”
