Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, December 9, 1993 TAG: 9312090406
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: E-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: NANCY BELL STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Impoverished, exhausted and filled with despair, he left his six small children at an orphanage, vowing to return for them when he found a better job.
A pajama-clad Nichols recently opened the door of his Vinton apartment to find his long-lost, 28-year-old twin daughters grinning, with open arms.
"I'm still in a daze," a smiling Nichols said a few days later.
"After all this time I never thought I'd see those kids again - ever."
When Nichols' first wife abandoned him and their children more than 20 years ago, he tried to be both mother and father to his three boys and three girls.
Nichols worked while the children were at school, rising early to get them dressed and fed, allowing time to walk to a baby sitter's house and to his job making furniture.
He moved the family to a public housing development and accepted food, money and clothing from church members.
After two years of struggling, Nichols remembers waking exhausted and depressed one morning, watching his first-grade daughter changing diapers and washing dishes, her childhood slipping away. He also remembers asking himself if that was the kind of life he wanted for his children.
He reluctantly decided it was not.
"My father-in-law asked me if I loved the children enough to let them go. He was really the one that convinced me that it would be best for the children," a teary-eyed Nichols remembers.
Nichols' father-in-law, an Episcopal minister, found the children a home at a church-sponsored North Carolina orphanage.
"After the children left, it was like a knife had been stuck in my heart forever," Nichols said. Friends and some family members treated him coldly. Many times he wondered if he had made the right decision.
During a brief reconciliation with his wife, Nichols retrieved two of his older children - a boy and a girl - from the orphanage. When his wife left a second time, he was determined to hold at least part of the family together.
"I was not about to lose them kids again," Nichols said.
Although he was never able to support all six, he raised the older two. Eventually, convinced that it was in the children's best interests, he released the others for adoption.
Mary Jane Nichols and Betty Lynn Nichols were 5 the last time they saw their father. After spending six years at the orphanage, the twins were adopted by a New Jersey family, and their names changed to Susie and Becky Haberer.
Susie Haberer Levine sat on her father's couch, bouncing her 10-month-old daughter on her lap.
"I spent years feeling rejected - like they must not even care about me," she said.
But when Susie and Becky got the call from an adoption worker that their father would like to see them, they did not hesitate to dial the Nichols number and speak with Carolyn Nichols, Harry's wife of four years.
Levine said she is grateful for the opportunity to be reunited with her father and older siblings.
"There will always be questions, but I have forgiven," she said. "I am happy with my life."
Becky Haberer, however, said she's glad the contact was made with her father, but, she said she will not pursue any further relationship with him.
"Yeah, I have some hard feelings. It's really hard to try to be a family again after all these years," she said, adding " . . . I have my own family now."
But, "It would be nice to get the whole gang together, just once," she said.
Nichols knows each of his children's birth dates, how much they weighed and personality traits that distinguish them from one another.
He remembers that Susie, whom he still calls Mary Jane, had two dimples. Betty Lynn had one.
"All I heard about was them kids," said Carolyn Nichols, who said she mounted a search for the girls to surprise her husband. "But no one wants to give you information about adopted kids."
Carolyn Nichols persisted. "I told them that brothers and sisters don't give each other up for adoption."
Social workers finally agreed to initiate contact with the twins on behalf of the two siblings Harry Nichols raised. Carolyn Nichols also has located the two brothers.
"Losing the kids was a part of my life I'll never get back," Harry Nichols said.
He said he thought about trying to find the kids for years but was discouraged by adoption regulations and fear of rejection.
"She's the one that got the courage to find them," he said, pointing to his wife.
"I'm glad she went to the trouble to locate the twins."
"Somewhere, down the road, I feel we'll all be together," he said.
by CNB