by Dan Savage
We are looking forward to becoming parents, though we don't like the idea of changing diapers. We welcome frequent visits, so maybe you could come over and change the baby's diapers. We hope to provide a home full of love where a child can grow and thrive in an atmosphere of wonder, stability, and respect, but we know this probably won't happen.
Dan & Terry
While I was working on our anti–“Dear Birthparent . . .” letter, a picture of a girl who might give her baby to fags popped into my head.
Susan is sixteen years old; her parents are fundamentalist Christians. Susan gets pregnant, and her parents refuse to allow her to have an abortion. They insist that Susan choose life. Susan can't raise the baby herself and has no interest in marrying the baby's father. She was sleeping with him only because her parents hated him, not because she found him at all attractive. Giving her baby to her parents to raise was not an option. They were willing, but Susan wouldn't condemn the kid to a childhood like the one she'd suffered: home-schooling, Christian summer camps, prayer meetings, youth retreats. Susan decides to put her kid up for adoption instead. Short of the increasingly popular infanticide, what choice does she have? Her parents give their blessing.
By some miracle, this politically progressive, inconveniently pregnant sixteen-year-old girl contacts our agency. A counselor assembles a “Dear Birthparent . . .” book for her. Flipping through it, she finds our picture. Three months later, Susan gives birth, and we adopt her baby. “Mom, Dad,” Susan says when she gets home from the hospital, “I GAVE IT TO FAGS! I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY! YOU WOULDN'T LET ME HAVE AN ABORTION, SO I GAVE YOUR GRANDCHILD TO FAGS! FAGS!”
For Susan's parents, giving the baby to fags is the only thing she could have done that is worse than having an abortion. They would have preferred to see Susan give their grandchild to a couple of wolves to raise. This being my fantasy scenario, Susan's fundamentalist Christian parents get so worked up, they both have strokes and die, and Susan comes to live with Terry, little D.J., and me.
The Susan Scenario, as I came to call our best hope, was deeply satisfying. Once we went into the pool, whenever we were asked who we thought might pick us, we laid out the Susan Scenario. We knew it would be better not to adopt a child given to us out of spite or in an act of adolescent rebellion, but if that was the only way we were going to get a baby—and it did seem likely that it would be the only way we would—we were ready and willing. We talked about Susan constantly, in hopes that repetition would transform our fantasy birth mom into a living, breathing, knocked-up sixteen-year-old with fundamentalist Christian parents, sitting alone on the sofa at the agency's office flipping through birthparent letters, about to turn the page and find our picture.
This was a girl I could write to. I sat laughing and saying, “I gave it to FAGS!” over and over, and a real birthparent letter finally flowed out of my pin head, through my fingers, and onto my computer screen. The letter is almost too sentimental and embarrassing to publish. Though my mental image was of a bad girl, our birthparent letter wound up being about as bland and inoffensive as any of those in our book. If you added a line about Jesus Christ and Photoshopped a girl into our picture, you wouldn't be able to tell it from any of the others:
Dear Birthparent(s),
We're Dan and Terry. We are very excited about adopting a child, and we look forward to building a healthy, respectful relationship with you, the child's birthparent(s). We are committed to the concept of open adoption, and welcome a high level of contact. We understand that the decision to place your child for adoption is difficult. We admire you for considering adoption, and would be grateful if you would consider us as possible parents for your child.
Dan is thirty-three years old and a writer. Terry is twenty-seven years old and works in a bookstore. Very early in our relationship we began discussing the possibility of starting a family. Before we met, Dan explored having a baby with some female friends, but decided against it, as he wanted to play a more active role than this would have allowed. When it became clear that Terry was also eager to have children, we began exploring our other options. When we learned about open adoption, we decided this was the route we wanted to take.
We live in a two-bedroom town house on a quiet street, close to parks, schools, movie theaters, museums, and play-grounds. We are city people, and any child we're lucky enough to raise will be brought up in a diverse and interesting urban environment. While we're comfortable in the home we're in now, we have started looking for a larger house, and hope to move at the beginning of next year.
We both come from large families. Our families are excited about us becoming parents. Dan's mother lives in another part of the country, but visits regularly, and Terry's mother lives nearby and visits often. Dan has three siblings, and Terry has one older brother, so there will be lots of aunts and uncles and cousins. We also have a large circle of close friends who want to help us in our new roles, and want to be involved in the life of our child.
We are voracious readers and are very excited about sharing our love of learning with a child. Terry has already started a collection of children's books. We spend most of our free time going to movies, concerts, and plays, or reading. We have traveled widely, and hope to travel with our child once he or she is old enough.
Dan's work keeps him very busy. Terry will be the primary parent, and will be staying at home to take care of the baby. While Dan's work keeps him busy, he sets his own schedule, and is able to work from home. We're excited about the challenges that raising a child will present, as well as the great joy that can come from parenting. We would love to hear from you.
Dan & Terry
Eesh.
* * *
A friend scanned in our photo, laid out the text, and printed our five hundred copies. Terry took the stack of letters to the bookstore where he works, packed them in a box, and shipped them to the agency. We forgot to keep a copy for ourselves as a souvenir. We sent another check to the agency, this time for the pool entry fee, and a week later a letter came in the mail. We were officially in the pool.
Now we had to wait.
It was two days after Christmas. We walked around a Baby Gap in downtown Seattle later the same day, admiring cute and inexpensive kiddie duds probably made by cheap child labor in far-off sweatshops. We tried to keep from buying anything, and wondered if we'd be in the pool longer than the nine months we'd been told was typical. Some couples waited as long as two years. I predicted we'd set a new record. Terry was more optimistic, predicting we'd wait about a year, maybe a little less. Either way, the itty-bitty flannel shirt we bought at Baby Gap wouldn't swaddle anything for a good long time.
When you'd been picked, the agency would call. If your birth mom was six months pregnant, you got two calls: that first “You've been picked!” call, and another one when your birth mom went into labor. The first call was to adoptive parents what “ Congratulations, you're pregnant,” is to bio-parents. The second was the equivalent of your water breaking; it sent adoptive parents rushing to the hospital.
On the other hand, you might get a call from the hospital, with no warning, and have to make an immediate decision about a baby that had already been born.
“Since being picked can happen at any time, day or night, this minute or a year from now,” Ruth had said at the seminar, “every time the phone rings couples in the pool tend to jump.” Waiting couples, we were warned, go a little nuts.
We wouldn't be like that, we told ourselves. Since we didn't expect to be picked for a long time, we didn't think we'd start getting jumpy until at least a year had passed. It would take a while for a Susan to come along, and we were sure we wouldn't turn into basket cases when we got in the pool. But from the day the letter came announcing that we were officially in, we were both a mess. Every time the phone rang our hearts stopped.
To help couples stay sane while they wait in the pool, the agency runs support groups. Unfortunately, we don't own a car and the Seattle group meets too far away fo
r us to take the bus. Even if the support group had met nearby, or if we'd owned a car, we wouldn't have gone to many meetings. We're not the support-group type. Also, we'd misplaced the handout the agency gave us on things-to-do-to-keep-from-going-nuts-while-you're-in-the-pool. So we were really on our own.
Every time the phone rang, we glanced at each other. Maybe this is it, maybe Susan picked us. We could barely sleep at night, we were so excited. We would sit up and talk about where the crib would go, what we would do with D.J.'s room, what school he'd go to, how Terry's mother would get better about this. Taking the agency's advice, we didn't start putting a nursery together, buying baby furniture, or stocking up on diapers. We would have plenty of time to do that after the call came—hopefully, we would have the three full months to max out our credit cards.
Thursday night, the phone rang.
It wasn't the Call, but Jack of Carol and Jack, the straight couple from our seminar who'd predicted we would be the first from our group to be picked. They wanted to meet for dinner. They lived out in the burbs, but would be in town a week from Tuesday for the pool parents' support-group meeting. Did we maybe want to come to the meeting and then go get some dinner? “We'll show you our birthparent letter if you show us yours.”
When I got off the phone with Jack, I told Terry we should think about joining the support group. It might help to be around other couples going through the same things we were.
“No, it would be awful,” Terry said. “Every other couple in the group will get picked before us. There'll be new couples every week, and couples leaving the group because they get picked, and we'll be there forever. It'll make waiting much worse.”
Terry had a point. We were going to be in the pool a long, long time.
Gestation
Picked
Two days after Carol and Jack called to invite us to the pool parents' support-group meeting, we were picked.
Not only wasn't our wait as long as we had anticipated; frankly, it wasn't as long as we would've liked. Expecting a long wait, we'd behaved as if our wait would be long. We hadn't drawn up plans, laid in provisions, or made lifestyle changes. The night before we got the “You're pregnant” call, we'd gone out drinking. Terry and I had pretty much stopped going to gay bars soon after we met, but with diapers and day care looming, we suddenly wanted to spend more time where the boys were, wanted to take one last lap around that dog track while we still could.
It was a Saturday morning in January when the call came. I was at home in bed, reading The New York Times and waiting for my hangover remedy to kick in. Aspirin with codeine can be purchased over the counter in Canada, and every once in a while we head to Vancouver to stock up. When the phone rang, I ignored it, letting voice mail pick up. Ten minutes later, it rang again. I ignored it again. It's bad luck to get out of bed before the codeine does its job. Then the phone rang once and stopped. That was Terry's pick-up-the-goddamn-phone-you-lazy-asshole signal, so I slumped out of bed and sat by the phone.
It was about ten-fifteen, and Terry was at work. Seven years younger than I, he could still go out drinking all night, get completely smashed, and jump out of bed the next morning and go to work. I could drink only when I had nothing to do the next day. I'm three-quarters Irish, which should have blessed me with a high tolerance, but the infrequency of my drinking has lowered my defenses. As my eldest brother remarks whenever we go out for a drink, I am a lightweight. The word sits in his mouth like a spoonful of spoiled mayonnaise. The fact that I can drink only one beer to his three is pitiable. How I struggle through life with this infirmity, he can't fathom.
Terry, on the other hand, is made of more absorbent stuff. I was in bed with a hangover, and I'd had three beers; Terry'd had eight beers and he was at work, listening to Madonna's new CD.
When the phone rang, I picked it up and said, “What is it, honey?” In our relationship, “honey” is code for “You're annoying me, but I love you; what is it already?” I have pet names for Terry, but if I revealed them he'd kill me, or reveal his pet names for me, and we can't have that. The tone of my voice made it clear that I was not thrilled about being dragged out of bed before the codeine I'd had for breakfast undid last night's damage. If this was something that could wait, I was gonna be pissed.
“Terry's on the phone with the agency.” It wasn't my honey, it was Dave. He's one of Terry's coworkers, and a friend of mine, and he's no man's honey. “You've got a kid! Terry will call you as soon as he gets off the phone. Don't go anywhere.”
Then Dave hung up.
I sat there by the phone, thinking, Got a kid? Dave didn't say we'd been picked, or we had a birth mother. He said we got a kid.
“Oh, my God,” I said out loud. “It's a hospital birth.”
That would mean the kid had already been born. A birth mom called the agency from the hospital, they rushed over a “Dear Birthparent . . .” book, and she picked us. We were going to be dads.
We were going to be dads today. Right away, no mediation, no three months to get used to the idea, no time to go shopping. As I sat by the phone waiting for Terry to call, I imagined myself having to change diapers with this hangover. All we had in the house was that flannel shirt from Baby Gap. We had more women's underwear in the house from when I used to do drag than we had baby clothes.
I tried to stay calm waiting for Terry to call back. I drank some tea. I took some codeine. I ate some cereal. I about had a stroke. When was he going to call?
After twenty minutes, I called the bookstore.
“He's still on the phone with the agency,” said Dave, and I hung up.
And I waited.
We didn't have a crib, we didn't have a single diaper, and the only bottle in the house was the nearly empty bottle of codeine in my hand. It was too soon. We weren't ready, we didn't have anything we needed. I had a hangover.
Pretty soon we wouldn't even have a place to live. Earlier in the week, we'd sold our condo. We had to be out in two months, and were just starting to look at houses. We wanted to escape the courtyard, buy a house somewhere else in town, and be moved in and settled before the baby came. We'd have time, we'd thought, to find a new place, sober up, and get rid of my old drag. Now I found myself wondering if we would able to get everything we needed on the way home from the hospital, the way they told us at the seminar.
Finally, the phone rang. It was my mother.
“Can't talk, Ma. I'm waiting for Terry to call about—”
Do I tell her? No. Don't want to jinx things, and what did I know anyway? If I told her what I knew—“We got a baby”— she'd have a million questions. I had no answers.
“—something important. I gotta get off the phone.”
“Is it a baby?” Mom asked.
“No, it's a—job,” I lied.
“What job? Whose job?” Mom asked.
“Um a different one, for Terry. Mom, I gotta get off the phone.”
“Terry doesn't want to work at the bookstore anymore?”
“Mom, I gotta go.”
“All right, but call me later.”
“I will,” I lied.
The phone rings.
“Her name is Melissa.” Terry sounds as freaked out as I am. “She lives in Portland, and we need to get down there as soon as possible.”
“Did they call from the hospital? Did she give birth already?”
“No,” Terry said, to my relief and disappointment. In the half-hour I'd spent in a panic about a baby coming right way, I'd started to like the idea. Maybe being spared the three-month build-up was a blessing.
“She's a little over seven months pregnant, and it's a boy,” Terry said.
“It would be Daryl Jude, then” I said.
He'd been talking with Laurie, Melissa's counselor and the agency counselor who would take over from Ann if we decided to adopt Melissa's baby. They'd been on the phone a long time because there were, as they say in the adoption biz, issues. Terry told me to get some paper and a pen, sit down, and take n
otes.
Melissa was homeless. She was “homeless by choice,” Laurie had explained. She wasn't a bag lady, she wasn't crazy, she wasn't a prostitute or a drug addict. She wasn't what we've been trained to think of when the media talk about “the homeless,” even if she was technically homeless. She was a smart, resourceful, intelligent kid who, for reasons of her own, chose to live on the streets in the company of other smart, resourceful, intelligent kids. She could find a job and a place to live if she wanted to, but she didn't want to.
“She's a gutter punk,” Terry said.
The gutter-punk stuff wasn't the only issue, though.
Laurie explained that we were not Melissa's first choice; she had picked two other couples before us. Her first-choice family was nabbed by another birth mom before Melissa was six months pregnant. Her second choice turned her down because she drank for the first four and half months of her pregnancy. And she'd taken LSD a couple of times while she was pregnant. And she smoked some pot. As soon as she'd found out she was pregnant, she'd stopped drinking and using drugs, but her second-choice couple didn't want to risk adopting a baby that might have fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS).
Melissa was pretty upset about the rejection, Laurie told Terry. Finally, Melissa came in for a counseling session with Laurie, and she spotted our home study sitting on top of a stack of files in a corner of the office, and we were her third choice.
“She told Laurie she would have picked us first, if she had seen our birthparent letter, but we weren't in the pool when she started looking at them,” Terry said.
Since Melissa was seven months pregnant, Laurie was anxious for us to come down and meet her. If we didn't want her baby, then she'd have to pick another couple, and she'd have to do it soon.
The drinking was a problem. We didn't know much about FAS, but we knew enough to know it wasn't something you put in the plus column. But what if we said no to Melissa and then never got picked again by another birth mom? Buggers can't be choosers. . . .