After years of separation, 32-year-old man to be adopted

From Paul Vercammen and Lateef Mungin

CNN

(CNN) — A boyhood wish is finally about to come true. But Maurice Griffin had to wait until he was a man for it to happen.

At age 32, the California man is about to be adopted.

“It has to happen,” Griffin said. “I didn’t fight for all those years for no reason.”

Adopting the burly, muscular, mohawk-sporting man is Lisa Godbold, his one-time foster mother.

“I just feel like this makes it official,” Godbold said. “And we don’t have to keep explaining it now.”

Good time

The story dates to the early 1980s, when Godbold and her husband saw Griffin at an orphanage near their Sacramento home. The smiling child seemed to fit perfectly with their family.

“Interracial relationships weren’t as common or accepted as they are today and the fact that Maurice was biracial. And we were a biracial family made us a great profile. So to speak,” Godbold said.

In addition, Griffin got along well with the couple’s other children, two boys younger than him.

“We were best friends,” Griffin said. “We’d run around, we did mischievous things and fun things. It was a good time.”

The good time lasted for years — until Griffin was 13 — and was two months away from being officially adopted by the family.

Family ripped apart

One day, foster care officials took Griffin away, saying he could not live with Godbold’s family anymore.

The whole issue came from a dispute over whether they could spank him, according to Godbold.

“You can’t spank foster children. Maurice very much wanted that,” Godbold said. “We wanted him to feel like the rest of our kids. And there was a difference of opinion with some of the (child welfare) supervisors.”

Godbold said she fought to keep Griffin and was told she could lose her biological children.

CNN contacted the state agency responsible for the case, but its officials would not comment because it’s still considered a juvenile case.

So she had to let go. And as time moved on Griffin, says he lost touch with what he felt was his only family.

“It was just an emptiness,” he said. “I couldn’t talk to anybody about it because nobody was there. I couldn’t call somebody; there was just a void in me.”

Searching for each other

Despite several obstacles, they never stopped searching for one another.

Godbold’s husband died in 1998. She remarried and changed her last name, and moved. Griffin bounced from one foster home to another, never finding what he lost.

“I didn’t let anybody get close to me again,” Griffin said, holding back tears. “I hurt a lot of people. It was a rough road.”

But six years ago, Godbold found Griffin on social media. They communicated online and then one day she called him.

“She said, ‘hey baby,’ and I said I got to call you back,” Griffin said, trying to explain how overwhelmed he was by the reunion.

And now the two are heading to a San Diego courtroom Friday, to put their family back together.

A juvenile court.