by Dan Savage
We sat at the computer in silence, clicking through pages, soaking up the bad news.
The symptoms of FAE and FAS included brain damage, mental retardation, a pointy chin, a flat nose, behavior problems, and the inability to learn or retain information. IQs in FAE/FAS babies range from 20 to 130, and these children are prone to hyperactivity, attention deficit disorder, oddly shaped ears, heart defects, small bones, and misaligned teeth. Drinking in the first half of the pregnancy, when Melissa was sucking down space bags, damages the brain; drinking in the second half results in physical abnormalities. Every site said that even one drink during a pregnancy was risky. Melissa had twenty-five drinks a week for the first four and half months, when alcohol damages the brain. That's three hundred and seventy-five drinks. An hour online convinced both of us Melissa's baby would be born without a head.
“Okay, I've had enough,” Terry said, and walked out of the room. I shut down the computer. We got undressed and crawled into bed—or climbed up into bed, I should say. A week before the call came and just before we had to move, we'd bought a new bed. A famous furniture designer we'd met built it for us at cost (he also did Jay Leno's desk, and Sandra Bernhard's bed, too, which Terry managed to work into just about any conversation), so after twenty years of sleeping on a mattress on the floor, I was suddenly sleeping four feet off the ground. It was rather disconcerting; in fact the first night we were in the bed, I didn't sleep at all. I was too afraid of rolling out and tumbling to my death. Now, sitting in bed with Terry, I wondered how any kid we adopted would ever manage to crawl up into this bed on a stormy night.
“I don't want a stupid kid,” I said. “That makes me terrible. If we had a bio-kid and he was born stupid, I'd love him. But if we can avoid a stupid kid, I want to avoid it.”
“But if we say no,” Terry said, “will we ever get picked again?”
“We could go to China, or pay a surrogate to have a baby,” I said. “We don't have to do an adoption; we're only out a couple of grand at this point.”
“So we say no, then, I guess.” Terry turned off the light.
“This is what I'm afraid of,” I said in the dark. “We get picked again, and the next girl is smart enough to lie about whether she drank, and we adopt her baby. And this other baby has FAS. Or if it doesn't have FAS, we're at a park when he's two years old and God says, ‘There are those fags who didn't want to take a chance on an FAS baby and broke that gutter punk's heart.’ And God makes our kid fall backwards off a swing, cracking his head open, and leaving him a vegetable for the rest of his life. That's what I'm afraid of.”
“Jesus, I am so glad I wasn't raised Catholic.”
After a long silence, I said, “So, what do we tell Melissa?”
“We tell her no, right? And we go back in the pool. That's what you want to do, right?”
“Yeah, I think so. What do you want to do?”
“Whatever you want to do,” Terry said, rolling over, “is fine with me.”
Two hours later, I was back in front of the computer.
Terry fell right asleep, as usual, but I couldn't sleep. I got out of bed, turned the computer on, and started surfing through more FAS sites, hoping to firm up my resolve. If we were going to tempt fate by saying no to Melissa, I wanted to be certain it was the right decision. To be certain, I needed to be absolutely sure that Melissa's baby would have FAS.
Every site was gloomier than the one before. FAS kids can't learn anything, they can't remember anything, they can't think. And as they grow, their problems don't get better, they get worse. FAS children grow into FAS adults, and in adult situations, their inability to learn or control their impulses magnifies the severity of their condition.
At about four in the morning, I clicked to one last site, “ Personality and Learning Traits of FAS/FAE Children,” promising myself it would be the last one I'd read tonight. After this, I would go back to bed or surf some porn. But first, I would read about the personality traits of FAS children. At the top of the page, the site warned that FAS/FAE children may exhibit one or all of these personality traits, and that some FAS/FAE children showed symptoms that weren't yet listed.
“Kindergarten through 6th grade: easily influenced by others; difficulty separating fantasy from reality; temper tantrums; lying, stealing, disobedience; delayed physical/academic/social development; memory loss; impulsiveness; inappropriate social behavior; need for constant and consistent reteaching and repeating.”
I read that paragraph again. Temper tantrums? Impulsiveness? Disobedience? Sounds like me at five. What five-year-old doesn't have at least one of those symptoms? Or all of them? I had a very hard time separating fantasy from reality until I was twelve. For the first time that night—or rather for the first time since reading aloud to Terry the extended FAS-child-as-garden metaphor—I laughed. When I was five years old, apparently I had FAS/FAE, as did every other kid in my kindergarten, and no one knew.
I scrolled down the page. Under “Personality Traits of High School Age FAS Kids” was this list:
“Poor sequencing; lying, stealing, cheating; poor reasoning; memory loss; self-centered; high level of frustration; unwanted pregnancy/STDs; low self-esteem; poor motivation; depression; alcohol involvement . . .”
Depression? Lying? Self-centeredness? Apparently, I had FAS in high school, too, as did my brothers and my sister and everyone else who's ever been a teenager. Who wasn't depressed or self-centered or unmotivated in high school?
I clicked onto a dead-porn-star-shrine site and flipped through some photos of the late, great Matt Gunther. I looked Matt over, trying to think about something other than FAS, but my mind kept wandering in a disturbing direction toward my mother. She drank a little when she was pregnant. So did Terry's mother. So did everyone's mother. Despite displaying almost every last one of the FAS/FAE symptoms on the list I'd found, I was pretty sure I didn't have FAS. My siblings didn't, and my boyfriend didn't, and no one we knew whose mom drank did.
I tried to concentrate on Matt Gunther, but my mind wandered off my mother and onto that absurd list of FAS/FAE symptoms. When did drinking during pregnancy become so self-evidently dangerous that women shouldn't have even one drink for fear of pickling their unborn baby's brain? Every FAS site made it sound like spilling a beer in a pregnant woman's lap was more dangerous than kicking her in the stomach or throwing her down a flight of stairs. One site recommended that sexually active women obstain from drinking at all: If a woman was pregnant and didn't realize it, whatever drinking she did during the first few weeks could seriously harm her baby.
If this was all true, how come I didn't have FAS? My maternal grandmother was an honest-to-God miserable Irish Catholic drunk—my mother used to pull her head out of the oven once a week—but none of my grandmother's six kids, my mom or any of my aunts and uncles, have FAS/FAE. How come we were all fine?
Tuesday morning, Laurie called. She was just checking to see where we were in our “decision-making process.” We explained that the more we learned about FAS, the more concerned we were about Melissa's drinking. We were also concerned about the inconsistencies in her story. She'd told Laurie the low figure— nine to twelve beers a week—and told us a higher figure—twenty to twenty-five. Which set of numbers was correct? Melissa was coming in that day for a regular counseling session; Laurie would nail her down on the drinking and call us back later today. I told Laurie that we still had to talk to the doctors she and Bob and Kate had referred us to, but that after looking at stuff on the web we weren't feeling very positive.
Then one of the docs we'd left a message with called us back. When I told her we had a copy of Melissa's ultrasound, she asked me to fax it to her. Twenty minutes later, she called back. Terry had left for work, so I took notes.
“Judging from the amount of alcohol we're talking about, the drinking pattern you've described, and the ultrasound report, I would say that the risk of this baby having FAS is very low. The head circumference, the estimated body weight—everyt
hing on this report indicates normal fetal development.”
What about the stuff on the web? What about the warnings that even one drink could damage an unborn baby? What about FAE?
The doctor, a leading FAS researcher, sighed, and there was a long pause. Then, slowly, she began to undo the damage the Internet had done.
“I'm not convinced there is such a thing as FAE,” she said. “Out of every thousand births, fifteen children have learning disabilities. If a child has a disability and there was any drinking during the pregnancy, any drinking at all, the temptation is to blame the drinking. But honestly, we don't always know the cause.”
There was still more doctors didn't know: for reasons not understood, she explained, firstborn children almost never have FAS regardless of the amount of drinking the mother did. Same goes for children born to women under the age of twenty-one.
The kind of drinking Melissa described—sharing several beers over a period of hours—was also a good sign. “It's in children of women who binge-drink, who have five or more drinks in a very short period of time and then black out, that you're likelier to see FAS. But looking at this ultrasound, and considering this woman's age, and that this is her first child, and that she stopped drinking when she did, I would have to say that it is highly unlikely that this baby will suffer from FAS. Does that mean this child absolutely won't have a learning disability? Or some other problem? No. Any number of things could be wrong. But there's no indication from this ultrasound that anything detectable at this point is wrong. But if something is wrong, it probably has nothing to do with the drinking. There's always a risk of something, you understand? I can't give you a guarantee. But I can tell you that, in my professional opinion, you shouldn't say no to this adoption on account of the drinking.”
I was stunned.
“Why were the web sites all so scary?” I asked.
“A lot of the information out there about FAS is designed to scare pregnant women away from alcohol, not to provide them with an accurate picture of what we do and do not know about FAS. The people who put those web sites together have a public-health agenda, not a medical agenda. You have to read them with a grain of salt.”
Laurie called back as soon as I hung up the phone. Melissa was with her. I asked Melissa to give us all the details of her drinking. We needed to know everything. She drank when other people bought beer, but she didn't spend money on it herself. Some weeks, she drank five or more days a week, and some weeks she drank less. She almost never got drunk, she never blacked out, and she never threw up. Two weeks during the first or second months, she didn't drink at all. Melissa was traveling at the time, riding the rails, and didn't have access to beer. That was all she remembered.
I thanked Melissa and Laurie and said that Terry was getting off work at ten tonight, and we would sit down and make a decision.
“We'll call you tomorrow morning,” I said.
A few hours later, Bob and Kate's doctor called. Terry had already faxed him the ultrasound results, and he listened to me describe Melissa's drinking.
“The risk for FAS, I would say, is minimal. Considering everything else you know about the mother and the father, you should worry more about this baby being predisposed to depression or mental illnesses than about FAS. Most people on the street are mentally ill, a lot are schizophrenic, and there's a hereditary predisposition to many mental illnesses. That's what you should be concerned about.”
I didn't want to take the time to explain gutter-punk culture to Bob and Kate's doctor, so I told him we'd think about it and got off the phone.
Ten minutes later, the phone rang. It was my mother.
“Where have you been? I've called a million times.”
Should I say anything now?
“We were in Portland, doing some stuff with the adoption agency.”
“Did you get picked?” My mother was already hip to the open-adoption lingo.
“No, we had to go and do one more interview. We're in the pool now.”
There was a pause.
“You told me you were in the pool two weeks ago. Did you have to get out of the pool and get back in?”
Now what do I tell her? I could tell her the truth, I supposed, but telling my mother meant telling everyone else on earth, and I wasn't ready to do that. I didn't want gifts to start coming in the mail, and I didn't want to jinx anything.
“We forgot to sign something,” I lied. “So we went down and signed it. Now we're in the pool, officially.”
There was a longer pause.
“Mom, when we get picked, I'll call you right away, okay? You'll be the first to know, I swear.”
Considering the headaches alcohol had given us over the past few days, the last thing you'd expect Terry and me to want set down in front of us was a drink. But, as Homer Simpson once said, beer is at once the cause of and the solution to all life's problems. I walked down to the bookstore and met Terry out front as he was locking up. We walked down the street to Cafe Septième, the last place I'd waited tables and one of the few places with soul left in a Seattle rapidly filling up with Planet Hollywoods and Wolfgang Pucks.
Stephanie, Seattle's best waitress, put a big bottle of Chimay and a couple of glasses on the table. Terry pulled Melissa's ultrasound and some things he'd found in the store about FAS out of his bag and handed them to me. I pulled the notes I'd taken during my phone conversations with the FAS specialists out of my bag and handed them to Terry.
We read.
We drank.
But neither of us said anything.
Stephanie saw that our bottle was empty and dropped another off. We were done reading; while Terry poured us each another beer, I broke the silence.
“The good news is that no one thinks Melissa's baby will have FAS. The bad news,” I said, holding up the list of FAS/FAE personality traits I found online, “is that you and I have FAS.”
Terry read the list out loud, and laughed. “Temper tantrums, impulsiveness, inappropriate social behavior; I didn't know it, but it looks like I had FAS as a child.”
“If that list is correct, you still have FAS.”
Terry dipped his fingers in his beer and flicked them at me.
Even while I was wiping the beer out of my eyes, it seemed obvious we'd already come to a decision. My mind had been pretty much made up after I spoke to the FAS docs, and I could tell Terry was making up his mind while he was reading my notes. Last night's Internet-induced gloom was gone, and each of us sat waiting for the other to go first. We were both suppressing smiles, as if somehow the importance of the decision we were making required us to look serious while we made it.
“I talked to my boss about it,” Terry said. Barbara was a lesbian who didn't understand why anyone would want kids. “Her mother had three martinis a night, every night of her adult life, during all her pregnancies, and none of her kids was born without a head.”
There was a pause.
“What's your worst-case scenario?” Terry asked.
“The baby has FAS.”
If we said yes, and the baby turned out to have FAS, I pointed out, well, adoptive parents could change their minds at the last minute, too. Birth moms weren't the only ones who could disrupt an adoption. We could say yes to Melissa, and if the baby was born with FAS or any other problem we could back out at the hospital, and the agency could find another couple for Melissa's baby.
“We have that right, you know. If the baby is born messed up, we don't have to take him.”
Terry looked at his beer.
“We wouldn't be able to do that, and you know it. We wouldn't show up and say, ‘Oh, sorry, pointy chin, no thanks.’ ”
“It's just a hypothetical.”
“No way would you, Mr. Guilt, be able to back out at the last minute. And once I see that baby, no matter what's wrong with him, I won't be able to just walk away. So it's not even a hypothetical, really. You're too Catholic, I'm too sentimental.”
Terry was right. If we said yes to Melis
sa, that would be that. We'd be pregnant, too, and we'd love that kid no matter what was wrong. We wanted a healthy baby, and this was the moment to decide whether we thought the odds were good that Melissa was carrying one.
“If we think she's going to have a healthy baby, we should say yes right now,” Terry said. “And if we think she isn't, we should say no. So . . . what do you think?”
“I think even if the kid turns out to be the healthiest newborn baby on earth, there are still swing sets, E. coli hamburgers, and car accidents to worry about.”
There was a long pause, and we sipped our drinks. We looked at each other.
“What if we say yes, and Kate's right and Melissa changes her mind after she sees the baby?” Terry asked. “This is the girl who can't be parted from her dog and cat.”
“If she changes her mind, we go back in the pool. In the meantime, we don't let ourselves get carried away. We don't fill the house with baby stuff or have showers.”
“So, what do you want to do?” Terry asked.
“No, you go first.”
“If you were going to say yes,” Terry said, “well, then, I would say yes. But if you don't want to . . .”
“I was going to say yes if you were,” I said.
“So it's yes?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
We both let out loud sighs, and sipped our drinks. I held out my arm for Terry, showing him the gooseflesh. Terry picked up my notebook and walked over to the pay phone. It was almost midnight, and when Terry called the agency he got someone at their live twenty-four-hour answering service. He left a message for Laurie, telling her we wanted to go ahead with this placement, and that she should tell Melissa yes. Then he came back to the booth and sat down beside me.
Kurt, Septième's owner and my old boss, came over to say hello.
“What's the news?” he asked.
We both looked up at Kurt, and then one or the other or both of us said: