Then something happened during my deployment to the desert in 2005 that significantly changed our lives and our relationship. Just a couple of months into my six-month deployment, my appendix ruptured and I became very ill, almost septic. That event made me realize I didn’t want my entire life centered on hiding who I was and having to hide my family. I realized there was no way we could have the family we wanted if we stayed in the military full time. So we made a huge decision to leave full-time military service and move away.
Now a Lieutenant Colonel, I started job hunting and I eventually landed a federal job with the Department of Veterans Affairs in Louisville, Kentucky. It was a beautiful area, a big enough city where there was lots to do, yet not so big that it was a concrete jungle. I moved there just after Christmas in 2006 and Novia followed me there six months later after also getting a federal job. It wasn’t until we moved out of the “fishbowl” existence in which we’d lived for the previous five years that we realized the stress and emotional toll it had taken on us. We felt like we could finally breathe.
Novia and I were able to be more open at our new workplaces and live more authentic lives, so we moved forward with our plans to start a family. We wanted to get settled first, so we built a new house and moved in about a year later. Then the family planning process started in earnest. At that point, we wanted to just go straight to adoption. We ultimately decided against artificial insemination for a couple of reasons: My age was starting to be of concern in carrying a child and Novia had some health issues with childbearing, plus we only had finite resources to use in starting our family. If insemination didn’t work, we’d have exhausted them with no child to show for it and no further resources for an adoption. So adoption it was!
As with anything I do, I thoroughly researched everything I could find about adoption, including what types there were and how to go about it. I shared all I learned with Novia. We weren’t going to hide our family or pretend this child wasn’t going to be raised by two mommies. We thought about foreign adoption, but soon learned that many countries don’t allow gay couples (or single women, older women, etc.) to adopt. We also considered adoption through the state foster care system but decided against that, because we really wanted an infant—preferably a newborn—and didn’t want to risk getting a child who we would have to give back. I knew myself well enough to know I couldn’t stand that. With those constraints, our chances within the state system slimmed down considerably, so we opted for an agency placement approach.
I read everything I could find on how to pick a good agency. I searched for reviews online, sent e-mails and asked for references. There was a good deal to be leery of: a lot of scams are out there, as well as legal pitfalls with potentially disastrous consequences. Again, we couldn’t afford to waste resources by making any mistakes. I talked to quite a few agencies and the first question I always asked was: “Do you work with same-sex couples?” I got a variety of answers, from flat out “No” to “Absolutely, we have placed many children with same-sex families” to “Yes, but you’d only be eligible for our African-American program.”
It didn’t matter to us what race, nationality or ethnicity our child might be: white, African-American, purple or Martian for all we cared! But we were highly offended that an agency believed minority children were somehow less worthy and could “settle for” same-sex parents or that we weren’t “good enough” for a white child. I refused to even consider those agencies. Then there were some agencies that left me feeling like it was just a business to them, some sort of “baby transaction.”
We finally settled on an agency that we discovered through word of mouth. A gay coworker and his partner had adopted through them twice and described a very accepting environment that was focused on creating loving families. It was a small agency and we liked that aspect. They didn’t work with a large number of couples, but being smaller also meant fewer birthmothers coming to them. However, they seemed to have a pretty good success rate and had worked successfully with numerous same-sex couples. So we signed on!
That was when things got complicated. We had built our house and now lived in a small rural town in Indiana, just across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky. But like many in our area, we worked and most often “played” in Louisville. Our adoption agency was located in Louisville as well. Adoption law is state-specific, with each state setting its own rules and requirements. Most states have “agreements” with other states that allow adoptions to occur across state lines, but these are very tightly controlled. Because we lived in Indiana, our home study and all pre-placement requirements had to be conducted by an Indiana agency and conform to Indiana rules. But because we were working with a Kentucky placement agency, we also had to meet Kentucky requirements and follow that state’s laws as well. Upon placement, we were not allowed to bring the baby across state lines (even just the few miles to our home) until the state of Kentucky authorized it—and they likely wouldn’t do that until they had full termination of parental rights. We were told this could take as long as ninety days. During that time, we could not live in anyone’s private residence that was not home study approved, so we would have to stay in a hotel!
I have to admit, it was more than a little daunting to think about trying to care for a newborn baby in a hotel room for three months. But we pressed on with little choice, particularly since we hadn’t been able to find a placement agency in Indiana that we were comfortable with. So we began filling out forms and got our fingerprints taken multiple times. We were sent to three different government entities for checks and got letters of recommendation from what seemed like everyone going back to elementary school.
Next, we found an agency to do all of the pre- and post-placement work required by Indiana. We drove two hours to Indianapolis on multiple occasions to take the agency’s training and complete the interviews needed for our home study. We wrote ten-page-long biographies of our lives and answered dozens of questions about our relationship and how we envisioned raising a child. We hired someone to create our “profile book,” essentially a photo storybook of our lives, interests and home—something a prospective birthmother could look at to get a sense of our family. We found an experienced adoption attorney licensed in both Kentucky and Indiana, since there would be legal actions in both states. And it seemed like every time we turned around, our Kentucky agency discovered something else we needed to do, because of our “dual state” situation.
I can honestly say my top-secret military security clearance seemed easier to obtain than an approved home study and adoption package for the states of Indiana and Kentucky! But finally, FINALLY, we were approved. We started this paperwork and training process in the fall of 2008 and were able to go on the active list in May 2009.
Then the real waiting began. I don’t know how to describe waiting for “the phone call” other than you feel like your life is on hold. Do you put the deposit down for that cruise knowing “the call” would cancel those plans? Do you consider a new job or make large expenditures knowing your financial obligations could drastically change at any time? How do you plan your life knowing that, at any moment, it could turn upside down?
So we joined a “While You Wait” support group through our Kentucky placement agency. We shared updates, talked about concerns and just generally provided an outlet for things that most of our friends and family couldn’t relate to. There were other same-sex couples in the group, so we weren’t alone in that respect, either. It was nice to have that group connection, but at times it was very difficult to participate, especially as the wait became longer. It seemed there was always another new couple joining the group and we felt guilty for viewing them as our competition. Every couple who joined was one more family that a potential birthmother had to choose from.
We were constantly figuring the odds: how many birthmothers the agency told us they were working with against how many waiting families were there in the support group. Each time a family was matched, we were genuinely happy
for them, excited they would soon take their child home. At the same time, however, we couldn’t help but ask ourselves, “Why not us?” and then later, “What’s wrong with us?” After a while it became very disheartening to continue attending the meetings. Then there were moments when we heard the “disruption” stories, about how a match didn’t work out for one reason or another. Those always brought tears to everyone’s eyes. Our hearts ached for the families and then we prayed it didn’t happen to us.
After the first year with no match, Novia and I decided that we just had to get on with our lives. We had to make plans and do things without worrying about “what if we got a phone call. So we went on a cruise and visited family, all the while making sure the agency knew how to contact us and having contingency plans in the backs of our minds, just in case.
We also started buying baby stuff, the big-ticket items like a crib, dresser, stroller and car seat, all of those things that cost a fortune if you buy them all at once. So every couple of months we picked up something else we knew we’d need. We didn’t set up the nursery yet, but we still wanted to make sure we were fairly ready. That way, when the call came, all we had to do was prepare the room.
There was a lot of debate among the members of our group as to whether or not couples should set up a nursery ahead of time. Some families, like ours, were planners and wanted to be ready. Others thought it would be too hard to see that empty nursery every day. Now, I can see both points of view.
For a long time, we really didn’t have much luck. Apparently, the poor economy had a pretty devastating effect on the country’s birth rate, so there just weren’t very many birthmothers coming in. Later, when the traffic did finally pick up, we still weren’t getting any interest. Our caseworker became concerned and suggested we revamp our profile book. She thought that maybe it wasn’t conveying the right message. So we reworked it, this time asking our best friend to put it together for us. The new profile book was more personal and I think it showed more of our personalities. We gave it to the agency and, again, we waited.
Then came the near-misses, the times when our caseworker called and said something about staying in touch or a birthmother being interested. We got our hopes up, only to have them come crashing quickly down to earth when “the call” never came. And every group meeting, we continued to hear the numbers: the number of birthmothers, the number of families. We calculated the odds and still no call came. One year turned into two and we became pretty discouraged. I was silently glad we hadn’t set up the nursery yet and we stopped making purchases for the baby. It got even harder to go to the group meetings and we started to skip some.
At that point we began to consider some alternatives. We talked to our Indiana agency and learned they were starting to do actual placement work, rather than just pre- and post-placement work. Their approach was more modern, though, with more responsibility placed on the families for some of the marketing legwork. We thought about it and decided to put our hat in their ring as well. Now we had two agencies working for us and all it cost Novia and I was a few thousand dollars for the Internet and marketing training. So we started that process as well. We took the online courses, worked on our social media profile page and waited some more.
Then it happened: We got a call! A birthmother about six weeks from her due date had chosen us. The caseworker gave us the details: She was a young African-American woman, not yet twenty and pregnant with a seemingly healthy baby boy. However, the problem was that this birth-mother was considered “high risk” for disruption, meaning the agency wasn’t really confident that she would place the baby. We had heard these stories before and knew it could be heartbreaking, but what were we going to do? Turn down the match? We’d waited so long and had no idea when or if another birthmother might choose us, so we forged ahead and accepted the match.
We met with the birthmother, talked about our plans, answered her questions and just tried to make sure we didn’t say or do anything that might cause her to change her mind and pick another couple. We began the whirlwind of preparations for welcoming a newborn: painting and decorating his room, putting the furniture and equipment together, buying more supplies and clothes and diapers. We got everything ready. We even went to one of the birthmother’s doctor appointments with her.
Then we met with our attorney and learned about the various hoops we’d have to jump through for both Novia and I to become the child’s legal parents. We knew through my earlier research that Indiana was one of the few states that allowed second parent adoption, meaning a person not married to the biological or legal parent could adopt the child without that legal parent giving up their parental rights. In essence, it meant gay couples could both be legal parents, which was not the case in most states. But it also meant I had to legally adopt the child first. Kentucky did not allow gay couples to adopt, so in their eyes, I was the only one adopting him. After I adopted him, Novia would then have to file a separate petition to legally adopt him in Indiana as his second parent. Two separate adoption actions and two sets of adoption expenses! But we were prepared to do whatever was necessary to make sure our family was legally protected. So again, we pressed on.
As the due date drew near, we grew increasingly excited and anxious: excited to welcome our son into the world, yet anxious about whether the birthmother might change her mind. We made plans to take an extended leave from work following the birth and arranged for family to help take care of our house and pets while we stayed in the hotel with the baby for what could be weeks. The due date came and the social worker told us they were scheduling an induction for the following week if the baby hadn’t arrived by then. When the induction date came, the social worker called again. This time she told us not to come to the hospital; the birth-mother wanted to wait until she was discharged before we could come get the child.
The red flags couldn’t be ignored any longer. We knew it was a bad sign and that she was likely to change her mind. In the end, that’s just what she did. After the baby was born, the birthmother decided she wanted to parent the baby herself. We got another call, the one that all prospective adoptive parents dread, telling us she had changed her mind and that we wouldn’t be taking him home with us after all. To say we were devastated doesn’t adequately convey the loss and grief we felt. We both left work immediately and went to a restaurant to talk and try to digest what had just happened. It was a very, very difficult experience. But we also knew we weren’t ready to throw in the towel and give up on our dream of having a family, so we told the agency to keep us on the active list.
More months passed and we were now the oldest family in the agency, the couple that had been waiting longer than all the others. We’d watched family after family come and go. Some came back again for child number two while we still waited. We revamped our profile book one more time after seeking some feedback. I did this one myself and made it even more personal, displaying what I thought was our fun personalities and lifestyles.
Going on our third year, we got a call one day from our caseworker in late April 2012, almost exactly one year after our first matching call. She told us we needed to get our paperwork updated: It had to be kept current every year and we were a little behind in the update. She came right out and told us, even though she wasn’t supposed to, that we had to do it immediately, because they had a birthmother who was due “very soon.” The birthmother had decided she didn’t want to choose the parents for her baby and would let the agency do it. This happened on occasion and when it did, the agency would match the child to the family who had been waiting the longest. That was us! But they couldn’t match us if our paperwork wasn’t current, so we scrambled for several days to get it done.
The caseworker wouldn’t tell us anything more about the situation for privacy reasons. We didn’t know what “very soon” meant, so we had no idea when we might expect “the call.” We anxiously waited and tried very, very hard not to get our hopes up too high. A week went by, then another, then another. We finally de
cided that something must have happened and the birthmother had changed her mind, either about placing her baby or about choosing the parents. This was probably just another near miss. So again, we went on living our lives and waiting.
On Monday, May 20th, I stayed home from work, because I wasn’t feeling well. I slept in and once I got up, I was lounging around the house in my pajamas. My cell phone was still on vibrate mode from work (we have no home phone, just cell phones). A little after 11:00 A.M., I happened to check it and saw five missed calls and numerous text messages from Novia. I immediately called her back and she told me to call our caseworker. After she couldn’t reach me, our caseworker had eventually called Novia but couldn’t tell her anything, because, according to Kentucky, I was technically the adoptive parent. She did, however, tell Novia that I would want to take this call!
To say my heart was racing would be the grossest of gross understatements. I think it raced so fast it stopped while I made that call. My hands were shaking so badly I “fat-fingered” the numbers on my cell phone and had to erase them and redial. When our caseworker answered, she said the words I had hoped to hear for more than three years:
“We have a baby for you!”
I think she tried to give me all the details, like the baby’s race and health status, but I didn’t care. We had a baby! I know she asked if we wanted to adopt him and I’m pretty sure I screamed “Yes!” into the phone. She told us to come to the hospital and pick up our son. I don’t think I breathed again for about an hour. I called Novia right back and somehow I passed on the information to her, although I think I mostly just said, “Come home!”
Journey to Same-Sex Parenthood Page 4