Sleepless in Omaha

How much love—and strength—does it take to provide compassionate, tender care to a newborn for days or weeks and then let the baby go to another home? That’s something Child Saving Institute volunteer Carmen Gottschalk did for nearly three decades while providing “Cradle Care” to infants making the transition from the hospital to home before placement with an adoptive family. 

“It was very emotional for three reasons,” Carmen recalls. “My own loss—after falling in love with each baby and letting it go—then returning home to a house full of reminders, like baby bottles on the kitchen table. There was also the emotion I felt from witnessing the adoptive parents’ joy with their baby. And, of course, the pain felt by the biological mothers—usually teenagers—who were making the toughest decision of their lives when placing their babies. I cried a lot.” 

Jodi & Tina with a baby awaiting adoption

Each baby not only made its way into Carmen’s heart, but into the hearts of her two daughters as well. Jodi was seven when Carmen took her first placement, and baby Tina was just six months old. In fact, it was Tina’s adoption from Child Saving Institute that prompted Carmen to volunteer in the first place. “I had called CSI to express my joy and happiness with our new daughter, and I asked if there was anything I could do to help them out. I loved the agency so much and everybody I’d worked with there. 

“I had a baby within a few days…and they just kept coming.” 

In the early days, the average stay for Cradle Care was two to four weeks between birth and adoptive placement. Over the course of 30 years Carmen cared for 98 babies awaiting adoption. “The transition to having an infant in the house was never hard. The biggest problem was being mobile,” she recalls. “Often times I had to call friends to bring formula by because I couldn’t leave the house.” 

The spontaneity of the drop-offs often resulted in some funny situations, too. On one occasion, Carmen was serving as a room mother at her daughter Tina’s elementary school on Halloween. She was in full clown costume when a staff person dropped a baby off at the school, prompting many curious questions from Tina’s young classmates. She also took delivery of babies on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and all major holidays. 

The babies came so frequently and so unexpectedly, young Tina thought Roberta, the Child Saving Institute caseworker, kept the babies in a drawer in her office, and would ask when bored or lonely, “Can you call Roberta and see if we can get a baby today?” 

Even John Gottschalk, Carmen’s very busy husband and former Publisher of the Omaha World-Herald, got called into service on occasion. “You could set him in the recliner and hand him a newborn and he was fine with that—very good at it, in fact.” 

Carmen holds a special friend

As you can imagine, Carmen slept little during the busiest years of Cradle Care. With most babies, they are wakeful at first, but grow out of that. Carmen never made it to the “sleep through the night” phase with the newborns she cared for—and sometimes she would have up to three infants a month. 

“All that went into it—all the emotions, humor, work, lack of sleep—it was definitely worth it,” Carmen says thoughtfully. “It was overwhelmingly positive in what it brought to our family and what it taught my daughters about compassion and recognizing and understanding the needs of other people. As adults, they are caretakers. 

“That’s always been my impression of Child Saving Institute, too. The caseworkers, everyone who works there—they give of themselves. They are compassionate problem-solvers.”