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

by Dan Savage

  I also stopped using “D.J.” around certain of our leftist friends after offending one at a party. With a beer in me, I called the mass of tissue lolling about in Melissa's womb “Daryl” twice and “the baby” three times in one run-on sentence, which earned me a cold look from my friend. Until delivery, my friend pointed out, that was no baby in Melissa's womb, but merely a fetus.

  “Unless you're an Operation Rescue fanatic, fetuses don't have names,” my friend said. “Calling a fetus that hasn't yet been born ‘Daryl’ or the ‘the baby’ humanizes it.”

  This, of course, placed the rights of women to control their own reproductive systems in grave danger. As a result of my careless rhetoric, women and abortion service providers would surely die.

  I'd previously had a falling out with this same friend over late-term abortions, something I will admit to having some ambivalence about. Call me Randall Terry, but it seems to me that if you can't get it together and have an abortion sometime before month number seven, you might as well have the damn baby (provided, of course, that the mother's—oops, excuse me—provided the woman's health is not at risk). I said so when the subject of partial-birth abortions came up, most of which are performed to save the life of the mother. My friend informed me that I wasn't a woman, which I knew, and as I wasn't a woman and would never face this decision I really had no right to an opinion. Not being a woman didn't stop him—yes, my friend was another man—from having very strong opinions about abortion, I pointed out. As we stood and fought about abortion rights and rhetoric, the seven or eight real women in the kitchen got as far away from us as they could. It's a picture that pretty neatly sums up the abortion debate: two men who will never need or cause anyone else to need an abortion arguing semantics and driving everyone in earshot out of the room.

  Anyway, by the time we were headed back to Portland, I wasn't calling our designated fetus anything at all. We were only planning on staying for the afternoon this time, though Terry would rather have stayed overnight. He had to do all the driving, and seven-hour round-trips were hard on him. Seven hours of Björk and Fatboy Slim, the only “artists” he was currently willing to drive to, were hard on me, too, so we were both going to suffer. I wouldn't have minded staying overnight, but the amount of money we were spending on rental cars and hotel rooms was starting to concern me.

  The Mallory had become our home away from home, and they'd started to recognize us, I think: we were getting better rooms on higher floors with each successive visit. But we couldn't afford to blow a hundred dollars on a hotel room every week for the next six weeks. The agency was taking ever larger bites out of our checking account as we approached the adoption finish line, and on top of that we had just started paying $400 a month for an apartment for Melissa.

  Finding an apartment that would have Melissa took some time—not that we had to do the finding. The agency encourages birth moms to be as independent as possible, and so it was up to homeless, pregnant Melissa to find herself a place to live. We sent a check to the agency so that money would be on hand when she found a place, but even with Laurie promising various landlords that the agency would take responsibility for the condition of the apartment, Melissa was turned away by a half a dozen apartment managers. On paper, Melissa was not any landlord's idea of a dream tenant. Kinda dirty, unemployed, homeless, very pregnant twenty-year-old street punks don't appeal to most landlords. And, of course, there were her animals.

  When Laurie called to tell us Melissa found an apartment, Terry wanted some reassurance that it wouldn't become a crash pad for Melissa's street punk pals.

  “We're paying for a place for Melissa to rest,” he told Laurie, “not for a place for her friends to crash or do drugs.”

  Laurie gently explained to us that while we were paying the rent, we needed to respect the fact that it was Melissa's apartment and not ours. It would be up to Melissa who came to her apartment, how long they could stay, and what they did there.

  “It's an understandable impulse, wanting to control the apartment,” Laurie said. “But you can't control who comes and goes from her apartment without controlling Melissa. Not only isn't that possible, but it wouldn't be healthy for Melissa, for you, or for your relationship. You'll have to reconcile yourselves to letting Melissa control her own space.”

  We reconciled ourselves.

  The place Melissa finally found turned out to be the best of all possible apartments. It was a studio right across the freeway from Outside In. The apartment manager, Mary, was nervous about renting to Melissa, but Laurie worked on Mary and she came around in a big way. Mary scrounged up some furniture, loaned Melissa pots and pans, and even managed to score a TV.

  The day before this trip we had a close call.

  Since Terry got the call from the agency while he was at work, everyone there knew that we'd been picked. Most of our friends knew people whom Terry worked with, so they found out what was going on, and soon after that people we barely knew were stopping us on street corners to say congratulations. But our families didn't know anything yet, and we weren't ready to tell them. While the baby was due in five short weeks, we'd only just met Melissa, and we didn't dare take anything for granted. We didn't want to jinx this kid. And if things fell through, the way they had for that other gay couple, we didn't want to have to explain to everyone; we just wanted to slip back quietly into the pool.

  Tracey, one of Terry's coworkers, called me at home the day before we left, wanting my help getting Terry to a surprise baby shower at the bookstore.

  “We don't want a shower!” I about shouted into the phone.

  “Okaaaay . . .” said Tracey, sounding hurt.

  I explained to Tracey that we were concerned about jinxing things. This fetus wasn't ours yet and we didn't want to make any fate-tempting mistakes. After our first meeting with Melissa, “Babies are born dead”/“Birth mothers change their minds” had become our daily mantra. It was a little cumbersome as mantras go, and we shortened it to “BBD/BCM.” Whenever either of us felt we were getting carried away—if we went on too long talking about how great it was going to be, or if we stayed too long in a Baby Gap—we would look at each other and say, “BBD/BCM.” Tracey agreed that jinxing was a bad thing, and said she'd throw us a shower after the baby came.

  Contemplating the baby's death on a daily basis sounds awful, but obsessively dwelling on the worst-case scenarios has always been my way of coping with stress. If I'm flying somewhere, I imagine my awful death in a plane crash and picture Terry's stunned face when he realizes that I never made a will. At this writing, none of the planes I've been on has crashed, which I credit to my overworked, underpaid, and unsettling imagination. I'm convinced that the day I get on a plane without first forming a clear mental picture of it bursting into flames and falling to earth will be the day I'm on a plane that crashes.

  It's not just plane crashes that I picture. I also see car wrecks, train crashes, muggings, earthquakes, gay-bashings, waiters licking my silverware, and my mother walking in while I'm masturbating. Contemplating worst possible outcomes is my insurance that they won't come to pass. Once I've imagined the worst possible outcome I can generally let it go, sit back, and enjoy the flight/drive/ride/straight boys/meal/wank/etc. I know it works because none of the planes I've been on has ever crashed, I've never been in a car wreck, and my mother has never walked in on me masturbating (so far as I know, and if I'm wrong, Mom, I DON'T WANT TO KNOW). When I hear or witness a worst-possible-outcome scenario that I wouldn't have foreseen, I get very upset. For instance, there's a moment in Titanic when the ship is sinking, and people are jumping into the water. Suddenly, the ship breaks in two and the Titanic falls on the heads of hundreds of people bobbing in the water beneath it, killing them. The Titanic, of course, was the largest moving thing ever built by the hand of man (LMTEBBTHOM). Had I been on the LMTEBBTHOM's maiden voyage, I would've run the worst possible outcomes through my head. LMTEBBTHOM might sink and I'd drown; or a fire might break out on board and
I'd burn to death; or some bad food might be served on the LMTEBBTHOM and I'd die of food poisoning. But I would never in a million years have imagined the LMTEBBTHOM could be lifted into the air and dropped on my head. I had to leave the theater.

  I believe I inherited this kind of morbid Irish superstition from my mother, and I know where it leads. One day, I will be my mother, worrying whenever my children are out of sight, convinced they're dead when they're out five minutes later than they said they would be. My mother has always insisted that we let her know where we are at all times so that she doesn't have to worry, but she worries nonetheless. Only when we were home, as kids, or when she gets us on the phone, as adults, would she stop imagining worst possible outcomes for us, be they car crashes, falls out of trees, or collisions with trains. But you know what? My mother has lived in terror of some tragedy befalling her children all her life, and so far no tragedies have befallen us. Coincidence? I don't think so. Clearly this system of my mother's works.

  So despite the fact that we were heading down for our third meeting and every indication was that we'd be coming back from one of these trips to Portland with a baby, we weren't allowing ourselves to get excited about Melissa or her fetus for fear that we might “experience a disruption.” We behaved with everyone as if a disruption were the likeliest outcome. That meant no showers, no gifts, no announcements to family or friends. And no shopping. If our house filled up with diapers and pacifiers and baby wipes, and the adoption fell through, we'd be tortured by the sight of it all. So we hadn't said anything about Melissa to our families.

  And we hadn't forgotten what we'd been told at the seminar: everything we needed for the first few weeks could be picked up on the way home from the hospital. There would be time for showers, presents, and shopping sprees after the kid was ours. Privately, we were excited, but publicly, we weren't letting on. Until that fetus was signed, sealed, and delivered, we weren't going to tempt fate.

  Returning to OHSU for the first time since his father had died four years earlier was going to be traumatic for Terry, so I decided to indulge him. We couldn't afford to stay overnight, so I let him listen to whatever music he wanted to in the car. I let him play the CDs of his choice for as long as I could stand it.

  Which was about fifteen minutes.

  Our conversations on these drives to and from Portland had become routines, parodies of themselves and of our relationship. We should have taped one and played it every time we got in the car, saving ourselves the trouble of having the same argument over and over again. I complained about the music; he complained about my complaints. I pointed out that my complaints would stop when the music did. He pointed out that I don't have a driver's license, and invited me to shut up or walk to Portland. I pointed out that we'd both be walking to Portland if it weren't for my credit card. Then, around the halfway point, just outside Chehalis, Washington, Terry snapped off the music and we drove the rest of the way in silence.

  As we drove, I thought about the time we'd spent with Melissa so far. In our previous visits, we'd covered a lot of ground but neither of us had said anything to her about how excited we were about becoming dads or how happy we were that she had picked us. In our effort not to get too carried away about the kid in public we'd made the mistake of not letting ourselves get carried away with Melissa in private. We hadn't even thanked her for picking us. Her drinking gave us a scare, but we liked our birth mom-to-be, and the three spooky coincidences—the Seattle conception, the likelihood that Melissa had spare-changed us on Broadway, and the fact that the kid would be born at OHSU— made our coming together seem somehow preordained.

  But Melissa didn't invite mushy talk or touchy-feely anything. In addition to what we hadn't said, we also hadn't hugged, laughed much, or cried at all, which were all things we'd been told adoptive couples and birth moms did together during prebirth meetings. We'd never even shaken Melissa's hand.

  We knew we'd be talking with a social worker on this visit— not Laurie, but Melissa's social worker at the hospital. Melissa had told us the day we met that she hated meeting with Laurie because Laurie asked her questions about how she felt. But today, with the help of her hospital social worker, I decided I would try to tell Melissa how we felt.

  We were supposed to pick up Melissa in front of Outside In, not at her apartment—her idea. When we pulled up, Melissa walked over to the car, said she'd be a minute, and disappeared into the building. People over twenty-one are not allowed in Outside In except on official business, like our first meeting with Melissa and Laurie. Now that our calls on Melissa were social, we had to wait outside with the rest of the grown-ups. While we stood on the sidewalk, three homeless kids came out of the building and stood on the porch. They were checking us out.

  We smiled and nodded like a couple of squares. Two went back into the building, but a large girl with pink hair and a ring through her nose lit a cigarette and came down to get a closer look.

  “You're the guys?” she asked. It wasn't a question, but an assessment. Terry confirmed that, yes, we were the guys.

  “Melissa likes you. She's cool, totally my favorite person. I think this is great, you know, this whole thing you three are doing. It's really radical.”

  We hadn't sought their approval, but it was nice to know Portland's homeless youth approved of gay adoption. What appealed to the girl with the pink hair and the nose ring wasn't Terry and me becoming parents, though, but how “radical” it was for gay men to adopt a homeless girl's baby. She and Melissa were outsiders—literally—and gay people are outsiders too. If Melissa was going to give her kid away, the girl with the nose ring said it was only right the kid should go to other outsiders. That was “radical.”

  Melissa came out of the house, tied her dog up on the porch, and walked straight up to us. She didn't look at the girl with the pink hair, who turned and walked back into the house. We exchanged heys.

  “Your friend approves,” I said. “She thinks this is radical.”

  Melissa shrugged. “She's not my friend.”

  We had about an hour to kill before Melissa's appointment, and Terry asked if she wanted to get something to eat.

  Melissa looked away, shrugged, and said, “I don't care.”

  By now I was beginning to suspect that in Melissa-speak, “I don't care” meant yes, and “I don't know” meant no. So I insisted we go get some food. Ten minutes later we were sitting in Hamburger Mary's, an antiques- and tchotchke-filled burger joint that had definitely seen hipper (and cleaner) days. Melissa, another week bigger, had trouble squeezing into the booth, and while we waited for our food to come, Terry asked her how things were going.

  Melissa had been caught sitting in a park the police had banned her from for three months. The same cop had caught her sleeping there a couple of times and warned her that if he found her in the park again, asleep or awake, he'd arrest her, she'd have to spend a night in jail, and she'd be fined.

  “They think that's supposed to scare us,” Melissa said. “ ‘You'll have to spend the night in jail.’ You sleep in a bed, they feed you, and you walk out. It's better than sleeping in the rain.”

  What worried Melissa was the $200 fine, which she had ninety days to pay.

  “I told the judge I couldn't pay it, that it wasn't like I had any money. I mean, that's why I was sleeping in the park. But he didn't give a shit.”

  If Melissa didn't pay the fine in ninety days, a warrant would be issued for her arrest. If she was stopped for anything by any cop—and gutter punks are always getting stopped by the police— she'd have to spend a couple of months in jail.

  “It doesn't really matter for me,” Melissa said, “but who would take care of my animals?”

  It occurred to me that we didn't know the names of Melissa's dog and cat.

  I wasn't sure Melissa had even told us their names. We'd seen her dog twice, and Melissa didn't introduce us, and we'd never seen her cat, which was always inside Outside In. Melissa took pride in how well she cared for he
r animals despite living on the street. She didn't like to be separated from them even for the hour or two she had to spend with us or at the doctor's. But when she talked about them it didn't seem as if she enjoyed them much. They were a burden; she had trouble finding people she could trust to watch them when she had to be away, and she had a hard time traveling with them.

  “No one will pick up a hitchhiker with two animals,” she explained, “so that rules out cars.” Melissa rode the rails instead, jumping on box cars in train yards and hoping they were going in the direction she wanted to go. Listening to her talk about jumping trains, I asked how she managed when carrying two animals.

  “My cat goes in my pack,” she said, looking at me as if I were the dumbest person she'd ever met, “and I don't have to carry my dog. Dogs can jump, you know. Anyway, getting on trains is the easy part,” said Melissa. “It's getting off that can be hard.”

  She pointed to the scar above her eye. She was riding the rails with another kid late last summer, pregnant at the time though she didn't know it. The train was pulling through the town they were headed to in Montana, and it started picking up speed.

  “Right after this town there's, like, a seven-mile-long tunnel. The tunnel fills up with the engine's exhaust and you can suffocate in it.” They stayed on the train as long as they could, hoping it would slow down. It didn't. The train started into the tunnel.

  “We had to get off so we jumped.”

  “With the dog and cat?” Terry asked.