Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  In common parlance, diversity means that clubs should admit racial minorities and that colleges should admit some gay people. Selflessness is not the sole engine in honoring diversity, as is clear when the term indicates a balanced investment strategy or refers to the multiplicity of species in our forests, seas, and wetlands. The town where I went to college was long famous for its elm trees; indeed, it was called the Elm City until Dutch elm disease reached North America and denuded the town’s streets and parks. When change happens, monoculture is a problem. In an era of accelerating transformation, when social values are shifting dramatically and the physical environment is altering at a breakneck pace, it is impossible to foretell what will prove adaptive. I am not championing dwarfism or deafness or criminality or gayness as the answer to any pivotal problem. What I do know is that it would be a mistake to turn us all into elms. It can look pretty, the long alleys of matching trees, their noble trunks aligning in symmetrical resemblance, but it is an irresponsible way to plan.

  • • •

  I began work on this book at about the same time I met John, who is now my husband. I had always wanted children, had contemplated having a child with an old friend, had dabbled in research on fertility—but the possibility had lingered in abstraction. John gave me more courage to be extraordinary, and more confidence about being ordinary, but from the stories of these hundreds of exceptional families I gradually understood that those were not incompatible goals, that being anomalous does not deprive anyone of the right or ability to be typical. Emily Perl Kingsley helped get children with Down syndrome on television so that no one else would feel as alone as she had. Neurodiversity and Deaf rights activists claimed the acceptance of aberration as their due. Ruth Schekter said, “Children like ours are not preordained as a gift. They’re a gift because that’s what we have chosen.” Sue Klebold said, “Columbine made me feel more connected to mankind than anything else possibly could have.” Anne O’Hara talked about how helping her transgender daughter “has brought more blessings into my life than I could possibly give back to her.” Their tenor of persuasive wonder resonated deeply with me.

  I had struggled for years with childlessness, and just when I had reconciled myself to that sadness, I began to see its inverse hope and started to figure out how I could be fruitful and multiply. What I couldn’t know then was whether I truly wanted children, or whether I simply wanted to prove wrong everyone who had pitied my sexual orientation. When you have longed for the moon and are suddenly offered all its silver light, it’s hard to remember what you intended to do with it. I had a history of depression. Was I giving up on that cheerless self in favor of some new happiness, or was I going to be stuck with a lot of sadness for which I would need to find new structures? I could not bring children into the world if I could not protect them from my adventures in despair. Knowing that parenting is no sport for perfectionists, I had sought lessons in humility from the families I interviewed. In my anxiety, I also kept remembering something my mother said to me when I was heading off for my road test: that two things in life look incredibly daunting until you realize that almost everyone does them—driving and having children.

  I had been unpopular as a child, and children continued to intimidate me. I felt that in their eyes, I was still bad at dodgeball, with a funny gait, and emotionally gauche—that I had retained all the qualities that had made children shun me in my own childhood, qualities I had eventually understood to be aligned with my sexuality. I was still afraid of being called gay by children; my secure identity resonated like an insult when spoken by a child. I avoided children because of how much they made me feel. Like any powerful feeling, it was hard to read; what was manifest was its strength rather than its nature. I was usually relieved to leave other people’s children after a few hours. Would I feel otherwise if I had my own? My persistent dark fantasy was that I would have children and wouldn’t like them and would be stuck with them for the rest of my life. My link to my parents had been a source of great joy to me and to them, and I wanted to carry that forward, but much of my desolation had also drawn on the dynamics of my family, where emotions could run so high that it was hard to tell the difference between what happened to me and what happened to them. I had been consumed by being a son; recently emerged from that whale’s mouth, I was afraid to be swallowed by being a father. I was also afraid of becoming the oppressor of a child who was different from me, as I had at times felt oppressed.

  John already had a biological son when I met him. He and the child’s biological mother, Laura, had been coworkers, and Laura had observed him for years before she and her partner, Tammy, asked him to help them have a child. Though not especially close to them, he had agreed, and they signed legal documents in which he forswore paternal rights and they forswore claims to support. He had offered to be in the child’s life to the extent he was able, if the child and his mothers so wished, but in deference to Tammy’s position as adoptive mother, he had remained largely uninvolved. He did not immediately make a point of introducing me to Tammy and Laura, but a few months after our relationship began, we ran into them with their toddler, Oliver, at the 2001 Minnesota State Fair. Oliver, unable to comprehend donor dad, called John donut dad, which made everybody laugh. But then who was I? Eighteen months later, they asked John to be their donor again, and Laura subsequently gave birth to Lucy. I was wary of John’s connection to this family, and also fascinated. John had fathered children, and I looked at them for clues to who he really was. I didn’t like them yet, but that was irrelevant to this grip of emotion and biology.

  I had been considering the possibility of having my own biological children for some years. In 1999, during a business trip to Texas, I attended a dinner that included my college friend Blaine. Blaine had always been magical to me: reflexively kind, with an acute intelligence that she never shows off, and possessed of timeless grace. She had recently divorced and shortly thereafter lost her mother, and she mentioned that the best tribute she could pay to her happy childhood was to become a mother herself. I said, in a lighthearted way at a table full of other people, that I’d be game to be the father to her child. She countered, brightly, that she might just take me up on the offer. That she might actually want to have a child with me was unimaginable; I suggested it with the rhetorical politesse with which I’d invited new acquaintances in remote countries to stop by for a drink if they ever found themselves in Greenwich Village. When I got home, however, I wrote her a letter and said I knew she’d probably been joking, but that I thought she would be the best mother in the world, and I hoped she’d have a child with someone.

  Four years later, Blaine flew to New York in 2003 for my surprise fortieth birthday party. We went out to dinner the following night and realized that we both wanted to follow through with the baby project. I had never been so honored or so alarmed. Our arrangements would be similar to John’s with Tammy and Laura in some ways, but different in others; I would be the legal father of a child who would bear my last name. Though our child would live in Texas with Blaine, the relationship would be explicitly paternal.

  I wasn’t ready to tell John right away, and when I did tell him, he exploded, as I had feared he might. He had been a sperm donor. I would be in an ongoing, profound relationship with Blaine that he feared might lethally triangulate our own. So began the most difficult epoch of our relationship. We talked about it for months—John and I, Blaine and I—and the negotiations escalated to Balkan intensity. It took three years to iron out the details, but John, whose benevolence always triumphs, finally relented, and Blaine and I created a pregnancy, working through an IVF clinic. Blaine, meanwhile, had met her partner, Richard, putting a reasonable if unusual balance in place.

  The more curious our arrangements became, the more traditional they started to feel. John had previously proposed that we get married, and I decided to honor the idea, though I was still a leery convert to gay marriage. Marrying was in part my way to reassure John of his centrality as we moved
forward with the Blaine plan, but it soon became, more profoundly, a means for me to celebrate his handsomeness, wit, and sense of moral purpose; the fact that my family and friends adored him; and the way he could see the same things in their hearts that I did. We tied the knot on June 30, 2007, at a wedding in the countryside, and I thought how if all my traumas had led me to this day, they were not so bad as they had seemed in the instant. In my wedding toast, I said, “The love that dared not speak its name is now broadcasting.” Tammy and Laura and their children came; Oliver served as John’s ring-bearer. Blaine, four months pregnant with the child she and I had conceived, came with Richard, and John ventured that we’d had the first gay shotgun wedding.

  In October, some complications in the pregnancy emerged, so John and I hurried to Fort Worth a month early for the delivery by Caesarean section on November 5, 2007. I watched the obstetrician pull little Blaine out of the convex surface of her mother’s swollen belly and was the first person to hold her. I kept trying on the idea that I was now a father, and I didn’t know what to do with it; it was as though I had suddenly been told that I was still myself and also a shooting star. I held the new baby; Blaine held her; Richard held her; John held her. Who were we all to this thrilling creature? Who was she to all of us? How did that alter who we were to one another? Already deep in my research, I knew that every child has a touch of the horizontal and reshapes his or her parents. I scanned my daughter’s small face for clues as to who she was, and for hints of whom she would make me become.

  John and I headed back to New York ten days later. When we got home, I was preoccupied with my new child, but kept imagining that I was being supportive of something wonderful Blaine had done, rather than being engaged with something I had done. I didn’t yet understand that the biological thrill of dawning parenthood was only a ghostly suggestion of the passion that is parenthood itself. I had to separate the relief of having escaped that defining tragedy to which my parents had given so much airtime from the more enormous reality of a new human being for whom I was responsible. I did not want to be so attached to little Blaine that her living in Texas became intolerable; I did not want to be so unattached that she felt neglected. I was just self-aware enough to know that what I wanted of my emotions was irrelevant.

  Getting married and having babies are both public events. Like many public things, they reify what they expose. I had had a vision of our life, and suddenly everyone else had a vision of it, too. Implicating others in your reality strengthens it, and we had dragged a large number of friends and family into the process through which love creates a household, a process in which interior truth receives a carapace that protects and sustains it. I was grateful that our friends had celebrated our marriage; I was grateful that John welcomed the daughter he had dreaded; I was grateful, too, that John and Blaine had begun to trust each other. I finally noticed how much Blaine had in common with my own mother—the same ability to find humor in the dailiness of life; the same careful restraint with her own emotions; the same wild imagination hidden from almost everyone by decorous elegance and obdurate reserve; the same intelligent empathy tinged with sadness. I had, like many men, found an echo of my mother to produce my child. Blaine’s eighty-six-year-old father, whose values I had thought might be challenged by our arrangements, was delighted, and my father was thrilled.

  I soon realized that I wanted to bring up a child at home with John, to be a pledge between us. John’s original arrangement with Tammy and Laura had answered a question; the arrangement with Blaine was more intimate; and the prospect of having a child who would live fulltime with the two of us was an explosion of everything we’d been taught to expect from life as gay men. I hadn’t wanted to get married; then the reality had entranced me. I exacted a child as fair trade, believing John, too, would end up entranced. Because John was less sure about wanting this child than I professed to be, I had to act as cheerleader for the enterprise. I was full of hopeful infatuation with a person who did not yet exist and sure that fatherhood would exalt everything I already cherished about John, but the conversation stalled there. Our love for each other was a prerequisite for a child, but not a reason for one. We could not procreate as a social experiment or a political statement or to make ourselves whole, and I could not be the sole enthusiast in our decision. Then John gave me an antique cradle tied up with a bow for my birthday and said, “If it’s a boy, can we call him George, after my grandpa?”

  A lawyer laid out the legal advantages of having one woman provide the egg and another the womb, so neither would have a full claim as mother. John had proposed that I be the biological father of this child and said that he might sire the next, if there were one. Like many middle-age couples with fertility issues, we began the blind-dating egg hunt. We flew to San Diego to ingratiate ourselves with our preferred donor agency. Joyful though our decision was, I felt sorry that I would never see what might come of mixing John’s genes with my own. I was thankful we could get an egg, regretful that neither of us could produce one; happy we could have a child at all, and sad about the aura of manufacturing that clung to the venture. Without assisted reproductive technology, I would not have the children I have, but it would have been fun to produce them in an ecstatic moment of physical love rather than through draining bureaucracy. It was costly, too, and though the money was well spent, we both rued that economic privilege was the necessary condition of what we preferred to consider an act of love.

  My research made me acutely conscious of the quasi-eugenic aspect of the donor search—the ways we were opting for a donor who conformed to our standards of intelligence, character, health, and appearance. For me, these personal decisions had worrisome political overtones. I did not want to devalue the extraordinary lives I had come to respect, yet I couldn’t deny that I wanted a child who would be familiar enough so that we could soothe him or her with our mutualities. At the same time, I understood that genetic lineage comes with no guarantees. The catalog of attractive attributes touting each donor made me feel as though we were choosing online a car we would be driving the rest of our lives. Sunroof? Good highway mileage? Red hair? High SAT scores? Grandparents who lived past eighty? The whole quest was absurd, depressing, morally troubling. Yet, the care of choosing the egg donor seemed like one concrete gesture we could make in a time of petrifying abstraction, an iota of knowledge in this vast mystery.

  We told Laura and Tammy about our plan, and Laura said to John, “We couldn’t have had Oliver and Lucy without you, and we’ll never be able to thank you enough for that, but I could be your surrogate to show how much you and Andrew mean to us.” It was a gesture of spectacular generosity, and we accepted it. There followed medical screenings of Laura, the egg donor, and me; samples (the bright hospital room, the leatherette briefcase of dated girlie magazines provided by the staff); fertility treatments for Laura; embryo transfers; and ultrasounds. Like many of the families I had met, mine was touched in equal measure by changes in social norms and changes in technology. Their fortunate concurrence was the precondition of our children.

  We got pregnant on our second IVF protocol. Although we had been extremely deliberate in egg selection, we ultimately decided not to have amniocentesis. This decision caught me by surprise when I made it with John and Laura. The risk of having a disabled child (highly unlikely according to less invasive but less conclusive tests) no longer seemed frightening enough to risk a miscarriage. I could have imagined terminating if we had received bad amnio results, but I could no longer have done so with the logic that would have guided me before I wrote this book. My research had shattered that clarity, so I succumbed to avoidance.

  You never know anyone as admiringly as you do when she is carrying your child, and I marveled at the way Laura wove the life she was building for us into the life she had built for herself. We drew inexorably closer to her and to Tammy and the kids. Oliver and Lucy referred to the yet-to-come baby as their brother. I was shy of their enthusiasm at first, but John and I went to Min
neapolis for the late stages of the pregnancy and ended up staying there for more than a month, seeing the four of them almost every day, which gave me a chance to observe how Oliver and Lucy echoed John’s wit and gentleness. When they learned that little Blaine called us Daddy and Papa John, they told their mothers they wanted to call us Daddy and Papa, too.

  I was not prepared for the idea that all of these children were in various degrees mine, but the sweetness with which John had come to celebrate the Blaines modeled a path to acceptance. Having set out to have two children, I was suddenly contemplating four, and I now believed that I could love them all profoundly, even if I loved them differently. To bring us closer had been part of Laura’s purpose in helping us, and it worked. John’s insistence that we were all one family made it happen. Without my campaigning, we wouldn’t have had little Blaine, or this new child, but without John’s optimism, we’d have stayed compartmentalized. That would have been the easier path, and I mistook it for the better one. I taught John a great deal about doing things instead of simply imagining them, and he taught me a great deal about experiencing those things once they were done. By little Blaine, by the imminent baby, by Oliver and Lucy, and by the extraordinary families I’d come to know, I had been changed, and children no longer made me sad.

  • • •

  The day of George’s birth—April 9, 2009—was emotionally charged before it began. My awareness of the perils of childbirth outstripped Laura’s and John’s; I had heard too many stories that started, “The pregnancy seemed to go so well, and then suddenly, when she went into labor . . .” I tried to quell my anxiety, but by the time George’s head showed, my palms were damp with fear. Laura had chosen to deliver without pain medication, and I found myself newly in awe. For nine months, I had felt the favor she did us as though someone had offered to carry an increasingly heavy bag of groceries up an increasingly steep staircase, but suddenly I understood that she had made a life for us. Seeing her give birth, I witnessed the pain of the final dilation and pushing and felt the radical newness coming out of her. I saw clearly for the first time something wild and heroic in her, an acreage of heart and valor beyond anything male experience had taught me. Then she pushed twice and out George popped, instantly proving the strength of his lungs with a good cry, and wiggling his arms and legs. The obstetrician pronounced him healthy. And then we noticed his umbilical cord, which was knotted.