Love of adoptive parents helping student succeed
Published: March 26, 2006
In many ways, Eric Iczkowski is the All-American boy. A senior at Pinnacle Peak High in Phoenix, he runs cross country, is in National Honor Society and was recently accepted into the Air Force Academy.
Hearing him talk about his achievements and goals, it’s hard to imagine that the 18-year-old had a rocky start in life. But as Iczkowski will tell you, a solid belief in oneself combined with the love of two parents can help a person overcome just about anything.
When he was a baby, Iczkowski’s birth mother died of breast cancer. When he was 2, he and his two sisters were removed from their father’s home and placed in foster care.
For the next 12 years, Iczkowski’s life consisted of a series of group homes, treatment centers and foster homes.
Iczkowski said that life began to change for the better at age 8, when he met a northeast Phoenix couple, Betty and Louis Meyer.
Betty Meyer, 68, clearly remembers the first time she met Iczkowski.
“He was a short, chubby, freckle-faced boy with a bowl haircut that was the most god-awful thing you ever saw, and we fell in love,” she said.
The Meyers, who have mentored about a dozen children over the past 10 years, began spending time with Iczkowski, eventually going from eating dinner together once a week to having him home for holidays and summer vacations.
As the amount of time the Meyers spent with Iczkowski grew, so did their love for him.
“Every time we took him back to the group home it was like tearing out our insides,” Betty Meyer said.
Although the Meyers wanted to adopt Iczkowski, Betty said they were concerned about their advancing age.
“We thought we were too old, but we decided with his caseworkers that love might trump old age, and it did,” the mother of three adult sons and grandmother of six said.
When Iczkowski was a freshman in high school, he moved in permanently with the Meyers, and they became his legal guardians. For him, this was the beginning of a new life, one filled with normalcy and love instead of chaos and confusion.
Iczkowski said he loves his new life with his new parents, and has enjoyed finally getting the chance to act like a regular teenager, something that was unusual in the days of living in group homes.
“I didn’t do what normal kids did, like going to the malls, movies, going to other kids’ houses, or having sleepovers,” he said. “I’m more social now, I’m involved in cross country, I’m in the National Honor Society, and I volunteer at a nursing home, and I’ve done speeches through the governor’s Blue Ribbon campaign. I’ve been able to have friends.”
Betty Meyer is modest about her and her husband’s contribution to her son’s success.
“We opened the doors, but he had to be the one who wanted to walk through, and he did, and he did a great job of it,” she said. Iczkowski, who leaves for the Air Force in late June, plans on legally changing his last name to Meyer.
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