Malori Filippin has endured many bad days along the way, including being plucked from a filthy trailer when she was just 2 years old.
But Friday wasn’t one of those days. Malori, now 9, stood in the lobby on the 17th floor of the Daley Center wearing a red lace dress and holding a framed, hand-made poster that read: “I was in foster care for 2,430 days, but today I was adopted. November 22, 2019.”
“I’m going to go ahead and sign this,” said Cook County Judge Patrick Stanton, peering at her from the bench. “Is that what you want me to do?”
Malori, twisting a rubber bracelet between her fingers, grinned and nodded. Then the courtroom broke into applause. Malori’s was one of four adoptions finalized in Cook County on Friday — on National Adoption Day.
Malori’s grandparents, Daniel and Janet Filippin of Orland Park, both 61, are now her legal parents. And Friday, though overwhelmingly happy, was also a little bittersweet.
“This was not where we planning [to be] at 61, but we jumped at the opportunity when the court system asked,” said Janet Filippin. “We said, ‘absolutely.’ ... There was no way that we would let Malori go back into foster care, into the system.”
Bittersweet, because Malori’s biological parents have no contact with a little girl who loves Barbie dolls, loves to sing. Both parents succumbed to drug addictions, meaning a baby Malori often found herself neglected.
“We counted 18 different locations we have had to pick up Malori, everywhere between hotels, garages, street corners, cars,” Daniel Filippin said.
The low point, perhaps, was when the Filippins picked up a 2-year-old Malori at a trailer in Chicago Ridge. Daniel Filippin told Malori’s mother, his daughter-in-law, that he’d report her to child protective services if he saw his granddaughter again in such squalid surroundings. She threatened to cut off all contact.
A few months later, social workers with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services picked up Malori in the south suburbs after police raided an apartment where Malori’s mother had been staying. Malori moved in full time with her grandparents in April 2013, but her mother fought for years to regain custody of her child.
“That’s why this took so long,” Janet Filippin said. “The court systems were giving the parents every opportunity to get together. They were trying to get the families together. We were just there as protection for Malori.”
It was an “extremely difficult” time for Malori — a stark contrast to Friday, when the little girl who is in her church and school choirs submitted to dozens of hugs from so many well-wishers.
“What a great day,” the judge said as Malori left the courtroom with her new parents.
