You know Rick Jackson’s adoption story. Keisha Lance Bottoms has four of her own.

“I went through a period of being hurt, being angry and just not understanding why God had done that to me,” she said. “But my grandmother used to always say, ‘It always works for your good.’”

Eventually it did. The Bottoms now have three boys, Lance, 24, Langston, 18, Lennox, 15, and a girl, Lincoln, 15, who is Lennox’s twin sister.

“I say with all of the physical and emotional anguish that we experienced, I’d do it all over again if it got me back to these four,” Bottoms said.

Credit: Jason Getz/AJC

Credit: Jason Getz/AJC

Although fertility treatments were difficult, she said nothing prepared her for how challenging the adoption process would be. Applications, fees, interviews, and home visits all came before the wait for a baby. The Bottoms were passed over several times before the call came that their first son, Langston, was ready for them in Mississippi.

“Adoption is a process,” she said. “You don’t just show up one day and say, ‘I want to be a parent.’”

The couple discovered other difficult realities of the adoption process as they built their family, including the fact that wait times for biracial and Black children are usually shorter than those for white children.

“For us, it was our blessing,” she said. “But it’s heartbreaking at the same time that these children, in so many ways, are not deemed as what one might consider the most ‘desirable’ to adopt.”

After adopting their second son, Lance, Derek Bottoms mostly decided that their family of four was large enough. But a call from their adoption counselor came through one night as the Bottoms were waiting in line to see a show in Times Square.

“They were calling about our twins and asked if we would be open if they were placed,” she remembered with a smile. “I said, ‘We absolutely will be. We’ll take them both.’ And then I got back in line and told my husband.”

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Bottoms does not usually talk about her family’s experience with adoption during campaign stops. But she detailed the process in her memoir “The Rough Side of the Mountain,” and she and her children talk openly about it together.

“It’s something to be celebrated,” she said. “For my kids, It’s like a badge of honor. I’m constantly reminding them, ‘You were chosen. You were an overcomer. Even before you made it into this world, you were already winning.’”

Looking ahead, Bottoms said she would focus early and often on overhauling Georgia’s long-troubled foster care system if she’s elected governor.

Likewise, Jackson has said he would “transform” Georgia’s child welfare system.

“It’s an issue that the state needs to address once and for all,” Bottoms said. “It’s not going to be an easy fix, but we’ve got to get to the root causes of the challenges in the system.”

Along with foster care, Bottoms said she’d work to improve the adoption process, too, by increasing caseworker training and lowering the cost to become an adoptive or foster parent.

“It’s providing that financial support, but also making sure that safeguards are in place so that children are going into loving homes,” she said.

Of course, she’ll have to win the election first, and it won’t be easy. Jackson has already reserved more than $87 million of television ad time ahead of the November contest. Plenty of that will be spent trying to convince Georgians not to vote for the former Atlanta mayor.

But for everything that separates Jackson and Bottoms, their own experiences with foster care and adoption unite them in a way that neither could have predicted. Before our interview wrapped up, I asked the Bottoms if finding out about Jackson’s time in foster care had changed her opinion of him at all.

“It humanizes him, of course,” she said. “Going through the foster care system, I would imagine, can’t be easy on anyone. It’s a reminder that we all have a story, whether we publicly share that story or not.”

Speaking of being public, the Bottoms family has not been a fixture on the campaign trail so far and are unlikely to become one in the future. The kids have varying degrees of interest in her campaign for governor, she said, although Lincoln introduced her at an April rally with Sen. Jon Ossoff. Their mom’s focus is just that they’re all OK.

“I’m always protective of my family in general,” she said. “Now I tell them, maybe turn off the TV, stay out of the comments section and we’re going to be just fine.”