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Photo courtesy of Pam Moore.
Steve, Pam and Shauna Moore
Steve, Pam and Shauna Moore at their Inverness home.
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Photo by Jeff Thompson.
Steve and Pam Moore, Moore Institute
Inverness residents Steve and Pam Moore in the Moore Institute in Cahaba Heights. Behind them is an angel Pam painted while the couple was waiting to adopt their daughter, Shauna.
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Steve and Pam Moore first angel
Pam Moore's first painting of an angel, which now hangs on her office wall in the Moore Institute in Cahaba Heights.
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Steve and Pam Moore angel
Pam Moore sat down at an easel with no particular purpose in mind. Painting wasn’t much of a hobby for her. In fact, it wasn’t part of her life.
But that day, after spreading greens and blues across her canvas, an angel took shape. Its face was looking away from Pam, shielded by a tall white wing. She didn’t know it at the time, but that angel had a name, Shauna Davy (pronounced dah-VAY), and it would soon become a symbol of success and redemption for her growing family.
All these peaks we’ve climbed
Pam and Steve Moore, Inverness residents and owners of the Moore Institute in Cahaba Heights, found each other more than two decades ago through exceptional means. Both were not only coming out of unhealthy relationships, but they were also climbing another mountain — sobriety.
“We were both in 12-step recovery programs,” Steve said. “Mutual friends of ours knew she was recently separated and I was divorced. So, one night, I was sitting outside the Alcoholics Anonymous clubhouse, and a friend came up to me and said, ‘Steve, I’ve got a girl you need to meet.’ ”
Steve jumped at the offer, borrowing a quarter and calling the girl that night. They talked for more than an hour.
Pam was four years sober, finishing her master’s degree in addiction therapy and working in the field the time. Steve, two years sober, was working in sales. They bonded over their shared path and agreed to meet at the next AA meeting.
“We’ve spent pretty much all our time together since that night,” Steve said.
The couple married and moved to a house in Homewood, and through their own relationship they began to challenge their philosophies of what it takes to have a happy marriage. They wrote ideas including “tell the truth,” “be happy” and “no good guy or bad guy, no winner and loser” on a sheet of yellow paper, signed it and stuck it to the wall in their kitchen.
Then, they committed to follow the rules.
What came of the experiment were three bullet points — feel your feelings, tell the truth and keep all your agreements. These “kitchen-tested” methods serve as the basis for Steve and Pam as they counsel couples, but the Moores know how tough it can be.
“We tell each other the truth about everything,” Pam said. “When we first signed it, we spent a long weekend together coming up with every secret we had kept our whole lives.”
“Which we don’t always recommend to people, but it is what we did,” Steve added.
After three years of refining the method, they found a house across the street from Murphrees’ Produce in Cahaba Heights and opened the Moore Institute in the attic in 1997. Their intention was to council couples, but they found their history of overcoming addiction was also an asset. The Moore Institute’s widening focus and growing success took shape.
Then, Pam got out her paintbrush.
To fill it up but spill instead
In the early 2000s, Steve and Pam were raising Steve’s son together. Pam, unable to have children, initially resigned herself to be a mother in that way alone.
“When we met, we thought we were done,” Pam said of growing the family. “We had been married about 10 years, and I had this epiphany that really I wasn’t OK — that I really with all my heart wanted a child that called me Mom.”
The couple was in their bedroom when the feeling overwhelmed Pam, and Steve said she followed their signed yellow agreement to the letter.
“She did the honesty thing,” he said. “She sat up, looked me in the eyes and said, ‘I’ve changed my mind.’ ”
“Let’s look into it,” he replied.
For any couple, adoption can be a difficult process. But the Moores, an older couple with a “colorful background,” the path ahead was more hurdles than track.
“I didn’t really think we could do it,” Steve said. “It was like Pam said, ‘I want to go to the moon.’ ”
But as promised, despite any reservations he might have had, Steve helped Pam dig into the adoption process. Pam said she felt God had put it on her heart that her daughter was in the Asian country of Cambodia, so the couple focused its efforts there. Then, almost in unison, serendipitous moments occurred in both their lives. Pam, to her own surprise, painted her first angel.
And Steve met it.
“This does not happen to me by the way,” Steve said. “This is not my thing. But I had a very powerful dream in which an angel came to see me and said, ‘My name is Shauna, spelled S-h-a-u-n-a.’ ”
Steve was all in.
The couple was fingerprinted twice. They participated in numerous background checks. They filled out boxes of paperwork and it all paid off. Finally, Steve and Pam received notice through the mail they had been approved to adopt. But the news was overshadowed.
They received the letter on Sept. 11, 2001.
The couple opened their letter as the country mourned. Shortly after, in response to the attacks of 9/11, the U.S. government canceled all Cambodian adoptions.
“I thought we were done,” Steve said. “I started working with [Pam] on giving up.
“Along with everyone else in world,” Pam added.
All in time we’ll be
For the next year, Pam went on a letter-writing campaign to members of the U.S. Congress. She received replies reporting the couple would never be allowed to adopt from Cambodia. With the expensive process seemingly over, the family moved to Inverness and Steve continued to work with Pam on letting go.
She kept painting, though. And one day something changed. Pam painted their faces.
“I went to Steve that day,” Pam said. “People had begged me to stop it. They said I was being a glutton for punishment. I told Steve no matter what I do still feel like my daughter is there, and she’s waiting on me. No matter what, I’ll never let it go.”
That day, in 2003, adoptions from Cambodia reopened.
This time the process was handled through the American embassy in Cambodia. The Moores completed additional paperwork and went through more background checks, all without ever seeing a photo of Shauna. Then, after six months of waiting, a fax came through at 5 a.m. On it was a photo of a young girl and her Cambodian name, Pich Davy.
From Khmer, the language of Cambodia, it translates to “diamond angel.”
“It still does it to me now,” Steve said. “When I tell it, a chill goes up inside of me. It’s so stunning.”
Shauna Davy Moore, now 12, is enrolled in the Shelby County school system. She’s in the gifted program, plays the oboe in the band and reportedly lives her life in song, the Moores said. For the couple, having Shauna in their lives is more than a success — it’s part of their deliverance.
“Us being together is a miracle,” Steve said. “But being together with her? The sequence of events necessary for all of that to happen, and for us to wind up where we are now is so unlikely. It’s just beyond miraculous. It’s such a part of our redemption story and our love story.”
