The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant

by Dan Savage

  When our food came, Melissa ate her potato first, then her carrots, then her steak. Melissa eats very slowly. Terry and I were finished before Melissa was done with her carrots.

  We'd been together four hours or so, and we'd done very little talking about the baby. At our first meeting, Laurie asked an ice-breaker question about naming the baby, and Melissa shrugged and said she didn't care if we changed his name after we adopted him. While we ate, Melissa talked more about her family. Like a lot of people estranged from their families, when Melissa wasn't complaining about how she'd been mistreated, she talked about her family with pride. The boy she was carrying would be the first of his generation, and there weren't many boys in her extended family. She wanted to give the baby her last name, Pierce, even if he only got to keep it until the adoption was finalized.

  In closed adoptions, the birth mom names her baby when he's born, and the names she picks out appear on the child's original birth certificate. When the child is adopted, a new birth certificate is issued and the original is sealed. The adopting couple changes the child's names, and the new birth certificate lists the adopting couple as mother and father. In most states, adoptees can get a copy of their original birth certificate after they turn twenty-one, learning not only the names of their biological parents, but their “real” name as well. Many adult adoptees will then change their names back to their original names, the names their adoptive parents “took away” from them.

  In open adoption, many birth mothers and adoptive couples agree on one set of names, which then appear on both birth certificates.

  “What are you thinking of for names?” Terry asked Melissa.

  “I don't know. Maybe after his father.”

  “Bacchus?” I asked.

  “No, not Bacchus,” said Melissa, rolling her eyes. “That's not his father's real name. His name is Kevin. I wouldn't call a kid ‘Bacchus.’ ”

  We wanted to avoid having two sets of names, if possible, but we also had already picked out first and middle names. Terry told Melissa that he had wanted to name the baby we adopted after his father, Daryl, who died at the hospital where Melissa's baby was going to be born.

  “You guys can change his name when you adopt him, Laurie told me that's what happens, and that's fine, I don't care.”

  Terry looked at me.

  “We're kinda nervous about the kid having two sets of names,” I said, “the names you give him and the ones we give him. We don't want him to get mad at us when he's grown about ‘taking away’ the name his mother gave him.”

  “Kids look for things to get mad at their parents about when they're teenagers,” Terry said to the girl living on the streets because of a fight she had with her mother over “bullshit.” “It seems like an obvious thing for him to get upset about. ‘You took my name away from me! You had no right!’ Maybe we could pick his first name, and you could pick his middle name?”

  Melissa didn't respond. She didn't seem upset; she chewed her steak and looked like she was thinking it over.

  “Dan kinda wanted to name the baby after his mother, too,” Terry said. “We were thinking Daryl for my father, Jude for Dan's mother. D.J.”

  Melissa pushed her plate away and sighed.

  “I want to name him. You can change his name later on, I don't care. But I want to give him his names and my family's last name; it's important to me. When you adopt him, you can do what you want.”

  Pool Parents

  When Jack had called to invite us to the pool parents' support-group meeting, we were in the pool. Nine days later, drivingto the meeting in our fourth rental car in four weeks, we'd been picked, discovered that we both have FAS, met with our birth mom twice, said yes, learned the baby was a boy, and picked out a name. Back at Lloyd Center, Carol and Jack had predicted we would be the first couple from our seminar to be picked. Tonight we were going to tell them just how right they were.

  We were twenty minutes late for the meeting, and by the time we slipped into two empty folding chairs in the meeting room off the lobby, we'd missed the group introductions. Some of the people sitting in the room looked at us uncomfortably. We didn't appear to belong. Not only were we two guys, but today we were both looking particularly scruffy: I hadn't shaved in a week, and Terry's shoulder-length hair was fashionably greasy, with a crooked center part. For all anyone could tell, we were a couple of thugs from the bowling alley across the street who had come to crash the support group and make fun of the infertile people.

  Carol and Jack nodded, and seeing that someone in the room knew us set the five other couples at ease. Everyone was sitting in chairs arranged in regulation support-group formation—a squared circle; besides Carol and Jack, no one was there from our seminar back in May. One couple looked close to our age, another looked closer to my mother and stepfather's age. Everyone else was in their late thirties or early forties. One couple had a baby, and they were telling their story.

  Until last week, the couple with the baby were members of the support group. Carol and Jack told us later that every meeting began with a couple who recently adopted sharing their story. These new-parent visits boosted the morale of couples who were still waiting. And the boost was needed: some of the couples in the support group had been waiting a year or more. Seeing former members of the support group with their new babies reassured the languishing that they would get a baby, too, if they hung in there.

  Tonight's baby was only a week old and had a dark pelt of hair on her head. The baby was Hispanic, her adoptive mom was white, and her adoptive dad was black. When we came in, the couple was telling their story. They'd been in mediation with a different birth mom, but they “experienced a disruption” before that baby was born.

  “Our first birth mother was like a dream birth mother,” the woman said, pulling a bottle of formula out of their baby bag. “She was seventeen, she'd been accepted at Stanford, she hadn't touched drugs or alcohol during her pregnancy, and she wanted to do an adoption because she wanted to go to college.” At the last minute, the girl and her boyfriend decided to get married and raise their baby themselves.”

  “The disruption was quite a blow,” the adoptive dad said. “We were really disappointed.”

  They jumped back in the pool, and a few months later they were picked again. The birth mom this time was not a dream. There were issues: she had done drugs during her pregnancy, and she drank.

  “We thought about saying no, because of FAS—” said Mom.

  “—but we took a chance,” said Dad. “And she's perfect.”

  “Perfectly healthy,” said Mom. “Not a thing wrong with her. Now, looking at her, we feel like all this was supposed to happen, that this is the baby we were supposed to adopt.”

  The new mom and dad rose to leave. Marilyn, the agency counselor running the meeting, thanked them for coming in, and as they gathered up their bags and blankets and baby and walked out of the room, all eyes followed them. The yearning in the room was palpable. A newborn baby at an adoptive-parents support group is like a five-pound bag of heroin at Narcotics Anonymous. Everyone was staring at the couple carrying the smack out of the room, and there were a lot of brave faces slapped over a deep and nearly desperate desire to have what they had. Everyone wanted to be the couple with the smack, and some were losing hope that they'd ever get their hands on any.

  Carol and Jack had been attending pool support-group meetings religiously since before they were even in the pool. Carol was a businesswoman, Jack an industrial engineer, and they were applying to adoption the drive and determination that made them successful in their careers. They came to these meetings because they believed in doing their homework.

  Terry and I don't believe in homework. Even if we did, the support group meets once a month and we weren't in the pool long enough to make it to a single meeting. The only reason we'd come to the meeting tonight was to see Carol and Jack, and to tell them in person that we'd been picked.

  Not that we came to gloat. Naturally, I felt guilty
about being picked before they were. By all rights, they should have gotten a kid first. They'd been trying to start a family for a lot longer, and they'd been through a lot more hell than we had. Their infertility story was a long and harrowing one. After years of trying to make a bio-kid—sex, fertility drugs, surgery, in vitro fertilization—Carol and Jack finally started to investigate adoption. They looked into closed, open, international, and state adoptions before finally choosing open adoption. If this was a contest, Carol and Jack deserved to win. They had earned that “You're pregnant” call; we hadn't. We'd lucked out.

  Once Baby left the building, Marilyn paused to allow some oxygen to enter the room before introducing this month's speaker, a gaunt lawyer who specialized in finalizing adoptions. He was here to answer any questions we might have about adoption law in Washington State.

  At the seminar, everyone was pretty shy. Not tonight: these couples had gotten to know one another, and they fired questions at him. Since this was the Seattle support group, all the couples expected to do a Washington state adoption, not an Oregon adoption; consequently, everyone seemed most concerned about the rights of birth fathers—and how to terminate them. The gaunt lawyer had a dry sense of humor, and managed to make us all laugh as he explained this unfunny business. Everyone in the room had seen the news clip of a screaming three-year-old being removed from the arms of the only mother he'd ever known.

  In Oregon, of course, the birth father couldn't jump out of the woodwork and claim the baby. If he wasn't offering emotional and financial support during the pregnancy, he had no rights. But in Washington, couples adopting babies from women who couldn't find the birth father have to make a good-faith effort to locate the guy.

  “If you have a name, you go to the phone book or the DMV and look him up. If you don't have a name, you take out ads in papers in the city where you think the birth father resides. In many cases, you have no information about the birth father at all. We try and find those missing-in-action birth fathers. The temptation is not to try too hard,” the lawyer said, and a few of us chuckled, “but if you think there's any chance your birth father may turn up at a later date, you should do your damnedest to find him. You don't want to adopt the child of a birth father who may want his kid, or adopt from a birth mother you think may be lying about who or where the birth father is. If he pops up three or four years after the adoption, and can prove that you didn't make a good-faith effort to find him, or that the birth mother concealed the pregnancy from him, he can sue and gain custody of his child.”

  No one was chuckling now.

  “That's a rare occurrence, however. In most cases, birth fathers are happy to sign whatever they need to sign to make us go away. A guy who knocks a woman up and disappears isn't usually interested in being a father. He's usually very young or already married. Most birth fathers who refuse to consent do decide to raise the baby themselves, which often results in the paternal birth grandparents raising it. That's the father's right. But most who deny consent don't want custody. They're just trying to punish the woman they got pregnant. You can go to court and have their rights terminated, but that can take years and isn't always successful.”

  The younger couple asked whether a birth mother could get around the birth father by having her baby in Oregon.

  “Nope, you can't just run the birth mother over the border when her contractions start. Adoptions have to be done in the state the birth mother resides in. Family courts frown on fraud, and hold birth mothers and adoptive families to different residency standards than, say, the Department of Motor Vehicles.”

  “If we have a situation with a birth father, what's our best hope?” asked the older couple.

  “Your best hope,” the lawyer said, “is getting picked by a birth mother who lives in Oregon.”

  Marilyn cut in, pointing out that in forty percent of the adoptions our agency did, the birth mothers lived in Washington state.

  “Birth mothers do open adoptions so they can have contact with their children,” she explained. “And they're likelier to pick a family that lives in the same state they do. So all of you are likely to be picked by birth mothers in Washington, and you should think about what it will mean if you adopt a baby whose birth father is unknown.”

  Terry nudged me. “Melissa got pregnant in Washington,” he whispered.

  I raised my hand.

  “What if a birth mother lives in Oregon, but was in Washington for a few months at the time she got pregnant?” I asked. Carol and Jack both looked over at us. “What about the birth father then? What state's laws would the adoption be done under?”

  “If she was only visiting Washington—if she hadn't done anything to imply her residency here was permanent, like register to vote or buy a house—it would be an Oregon adoption.”

  Whew.

  After the meeting, we followed Carol and Jack to a Chinese restaurant in a strip mall a few blocks away.

  Before the food came, Carol took their birthparent letter out of her bag and passed it to Terry. Since we forgot to hold back a few copies of our birthparent letter, we brought our anti–birthparent letter for show-and-tell. Soon we were stuffing our faces, swapping stories about home studies (Ann did their home study, too), background checks, paperwork, and medical exams. Carol and Jack had the same problems writing their birthparent letter we did, and they went into the pool at about the same time. We were all a little breathless after telling our stories.

  “So, are you guys jumping every time the phone rings?” Carol asked.

  A slight pause.

  “Yeah,” I said, “we got jumpy when we went in.” When I looked up, Carol and Jack were staring at me.

  “You guys got picked, didn't you?” Jack asked.

  Terry and I smiled, and slowly nodded.

  Jack, like any good engineer, was thrilled his calculations were correct.

  “Ha! Didn't we tell you! We told you guys you'd be the first couple picked!” He slapped the table.

  “We knew it when you asked the lawyer that question during the support-group meeting,” said Carol. “ ‘What if the birth mother lives in Oregon, but the baby was conceived in Washington?’ That was just a little too specific to be a hypothetical. I thought, That's it, they were picked!”

  We filled them in: Melissa finding our home study sitting on a stack in the office, our first meeting, the FAS scare, Melissa's Seattle connection, our second meeting, the name problem, and Bacchus our absent birth father.

  “We feel awful about being picked before you guys,” I said. “You really should have been picked before we were, you've been trying for so much longer.”

  “That's not the way it works,” Carol said, shrugging. “If we get picked, we get picked. What matters right now is that you got picked, and that's just so wonderful.”

  “So what happens after the baby comes?” Jack asked. “Who's going to stay home?”

  When and if we got a baby, we explained, Terry would cut back to two days a week at the bookstore, and I would do more writing at home; Terry was going to be the stay-at-home mom.

  “What about you?” I asked.

  Jack's work had taken him all over the world, so when he and Carol got a baby he wanted to be the stay-at-home mom. Carol was running huge parts of her company, and was moving up the ladder, so she would be the bread-winning dad. In hopes of something panning out with a birth mother, Jack had just turned down a job that would've taken him out of the country for a year. He would do consulting work in the meantime, but if they weren't picked after a year in the pool, Carol and Jack planned to take that as a sign that they weren't supposed to have kids.

  “If open adoption doesn't work for us, we're done,” Jack said. “We've been trying for a long time, and this is our last attempt. We figure if we don't get picked, we're not supposed to have kids.”

  “You guys will get picked,” Terry said. “If we got picked, you will, too.”

  “We'll see,” said Carol. “But we're not going to die if we don't.�
��

  Carol and Jack had made up their minds to wait only a year. The older couple at the meeting tonight, Jack told us, had been in the pool for almost two years.

  “They come to the meetings every month,” Jack said, “and watch couples that got in the pool a long time after they did get picked and get babies. They've both been made a little crazy by the experience. Every meeting begins with someone dragging in a baby that could've been theirs. After a while, that's gotta hurt.”

  Two years. The couple knew that dozens of birth mothers had seen their letter, looked at their picture, and turned the page. Since the “Dear Birthparent . . .” letter was about the only thing adoptive couples had any control over, the agency allowed them to rewrite their letters and get new pictures taken as often as they liked; the longer a couple was in the pool, the more they tended to tinker.

  “I think they've changed their letter three or four times already,” Jack said. “So far, nothing works. We're not going to put ourselves through that.”

  Oh my God, I thought, listening to Jack, what is that straight couple-going to say when they hear that the homos at tonight's meeting got picked after two weeks?

  “You know,” I said, “I was feeling guilty about getting picked before you. What would I say to them?”

  “We are not showing up at that meeting once we get the baby, no way,” said Terry. “Their heads would explode.”

  Worst-Case Scenarios

  Two weeks after our first meeting with Melissa, we headed back down to Portland for our third getting-to-know-the-birth-mom visit. We'd be tagging along on one of Melissa's prenatal care appointments at OHSU. We had been calling the baby D.J. ever since we picked his names, but after our last visit with Melissa we'd stopped. Somehow, calling him D.J. when we knew Melissa would give him another name at birth felt disrespectful. Melissa had made it clear that the baby wasn't ours to name until after we adopted him, and that she didn't even want to discuss coming to an agreement about a name. She wanted to name him first. She didn't tell us what his name would be, only that it wouldn't be Bacchus. We wanted to respect Melissa's rights, including her right to change her mind and keep the baby, and somehow calling him D.J. felt like jumping the gun. Until he was ours he wasn't D.J. He was . . . the kid.