by Dan Savage
“It ruined their relationship, Mom. They broke up from the stress. We don't want that to happen to us. Babies are born dead—”
“Stop being morbid!”
“—birth mothers change their minds. It's not just the jinx we're worried about. If this falls through, we don't want to be basket cases. A house full of bibs and diapers and toys will turn us into basket cases. Do not send presents.”
“But if it doesn't fall through, your baby will freeze to death! Danny!”
“The agency told us that we could get everything we need for the first week on the way home from the hospital. You are not to send anything until we get home with the baby, and that's final. You have the rest of his life to buy things for him, but until he's ours any packages from you go straight in the trash.”
There was a pause as my mother searched for a way out.
“Okay, I won't send anything. I'm not saying I won't shop. But I promise I won't send anything until you say I can, okay?”
“All right.”
Mom sounded very oppressed. To cheer her up, I told her that we'd chosen Daryl Jude for a name, for Terry's father and for her.
“Oh, Danny. I am so honored,” she said. I could hear her starting to tear up, and to avoid a scene, I changed the subject back to shopping.
“You're not the only one we're oppressing with a no-shopping order. Terry's friends from the bookstore tried to throw us a shower and we wouldn't let them.”
“How come they knew before me?”
“Because Terry got the call at work. You're the first person we told on purpose, Mom. I swear.”
“You're more Catholic than you know, Danny,” my mother said, and told me a family story I hadn't heard before:
When my mother was pregnant with my oldest brother, some of her girlfriends decided to throw her a baby shower. My mother, thrilled, invited her mother—my grandmother—and all of her aunts. They refused to attend.
“Good Irish Catholics didn't have baby showers then,” Mom said, “because to have or attend a shower was to presume God would let your baby live, and you don't presume upon God.”
According to my grandmother and great-aunts, having a baby shower was tempting fate. If our Heavenly Father got wind of your presumptiousness, He might kill your baby out of spite.
“The time to celebrate, your grandmother told me, was after you had the baby and it was healthy. You could have a shower and accept gifts after God blessed you with a healthy baby, not before, never before.”
My grandmother, like a lot of Irish Catholics in her time, believed the Lord her God to be something of a psychopath-cum-hit man. If He found out you had a baby shower, He'd send an angel down to wrap the umbilical cord around your baby's neck, or trip you at the top of a long flight of stairs. If you were just considering having a baby shower, maybe an angel would come down and put a horse head in your bed. Nice guy, our Irish Catholic God. My mother went ahead and had a shower over her mother's objections. Billy was born prematurely, and for a few days it looked as if he might die. My grandmother—who was not a well woman—informed my worried mother that the premature birth was her fault: she'd gone ahead and had a baby shower, and now God was going to kill her baby.
A priest rushed to the hospital to baptize premature Billy; this was before Vatican II, and if little Billy died unbaptized, he wouldn't have gone to heaven. But God, all merciful, took pity on my shower-havin' mother and let Billy live, much to my grandmother's dismay.
This story makes my grandmother sound like an ogre. While she was a suicidal alcoholic who took out her anger at the world on her oldest child, my mother, my memories of Grandmother Hollahan are sweet. But I didn't spend my high school years pulling her head out of the oven, and she didn't wear black to my wedding. Until I was ten years old, my family lived in the same two-flat apartment building my mother had grown up in. My grandparents and a couple of my mother's siblings lived downstairs; we lived upstairs. We were multigenerational in a way that seemed perfectly natural then—we weren't the only family on the block sharing a two-flat. All I remember is a sweet old lady with syrupy breath who used to pop her dentures out of her mouth to scare us, and handed candy out the back door to the kids in the neighborhood after school. When I was in the first grade, my grandmother died in her sleep.
“You're resurrecting a fine old tradition, Danny, not having a baby shower. Your grandmother would be proud.”
The same day I told my mother, Terry told his.
Terry gets annoyed when I describe his mother as cold. She isn't cold, he insists, just a little standoffish, and not so gabby as certain members of my family. While Terry's mom doesn't believe in asking intrusive questions, like “How are you?” she's still a warm and loving mom; just quiet and undemonstrative.
But she isn't cold. Nonetheless, when he picked up the phone he feared a cold reaction most. He told Claudia we'd been picked, told her the due date, told her the baby was a boy, and told her we were naming him after Terry's father and Claudia's late husband, Daryl. Terry's mother said, “Wow, that was really fast. You didn't have to wait long, did you?”
And that was all she said. She changed the subject, she and Terry talked for a few more minutes about other things: a trip she and Dennis, Terry's stepfather, would be taking to Alaska; her garden; Terry's absolutely fascinating older brother. Then they hung up.
A minute passed, and the phone rang.
“Do you want us to bring the crib over?”
The crib is a family heirloom: Terry's grandmother bought it in a Montana junk store in the forties, and no one knows for sure how old it is. It was Terry's mother's when she was a baby, then his older brother Tom's, then Terry's. It hadn't been used in twenty-five years, and was sitting in his grandmother's basement.
“When you went into the pool, I went over to Grandma's to see if it was still there, and to see what kind of shape it was in,” Claudia said. “It looks good. And the mattress you used is still in there, and smells fine. No mold or anything. I thought it might be nice for your son to have your, and my, crib. You want us to bring it over?”
Terry said yes, he'd like that very much.
“Dennis has a meeting in Seattle in two weeks”—the day before the baby was due—“and we'll bring over the crib then. Okay?”
Okay.
Before she hung up, Claudia asked Terry what my mother wanted to be called: Grandma Judy? Grandmother? Gramma Judy?
My mother had been signing letters to us “Grandma” since we went to the seminar six months ago.
“We're pretty sure she want to be Grandma Judy,” Terry said.
“Good. I want to be Grammy. Grammy Claudia, okay?”
Okay.
She asked if she could relay the news to Tom, and Terry told her that would be fine.
When he was about to hang up, Terry said, “Bye, Mom.”
“Oh, no. Call me Grammy. I have to get used to it.”
Apparently, Claudia was warming up to the idea.
When we let our families know, I forgot to tell my father. Not only didn't he know we'd been picked, he didn't even know we were adopting. He called me the day after I told my mother; he and his wife JoEllyn were coming up for a couple of days. Could we get together for dinner?
My parents divorced when I was seventeen years old, more than half my life ago. When my father moved out, in the summer of '82; he left my mother with four teenagers, no money, and no property. But the spookiest thing about his leaving was what little impact it seemed to have on our physical home. His desk disappeared, my mother was destroyed, and were it not for the generosity of our next-door neighbors and landlords, Kathy and Denis Paluch, who never raised our rent again, we would've been homeless. But everything else was right where it had been the day before. It was as if my father had never been there at all.
I'd been planning to come out to my mother that summer, but I couldn't bring myself to tell the weeping divorced lady that— surprise!—one of her kids was gay, too. I put off coming out t
o her for two more years.
My mother tells me that early in our lives my father was very involved, much more than other fathers were at the time, and that he was a great dad. My early memories of him are colored by the strain my sexuality put on our relationship and by the pain of the divorce. Quack therapists who claim they can “repair” gay men believe poor relationships between father and son are the root cause of homosexuality. If only I'd bonded properly with my father in childhood, they argue, I wouldn't spend so much time fantasizing about bondage with Matt Damon today.
These quacks fail to take the obvious into consideration: gay boys sometimes have strained relationships with their fathers because they're gay. My homosexuality damaged my relationship with my father; my damaged relationship with my father did not create my homosexuality. Of his three sons, I was the only one who hated sports, baked cakes, and listened to musical comedy. Something about me just wasn't right in his eyes, and while I know in my heart he loved me, I was painfully aware that he didn't understand me and that I embarrassed him. By the time I was old enough to realize what my thing for musical comedy meant, my dad had figured it out a long time ago.
And, of course, by that time much of the damage was already done. One of my most painful childhood memories is of my father explaining to my mother why Anita Bryant was right about “the gays.” I was in the backseat of our green Chevy Nova, wedged among my three oblivious siblings. “The gays are a threat to society economically because they don't fall in love, get married, settle down, and have kids. They don't buy cars or washing machines or lawn mowers. So gay rights will mean fewer jobs for people who make cars, washing machines, and lawn mowers. Gays should be tolerated, but they couldn't be trusted with kids.”
He spoke out of ignorance, not malice. But I didn't know that at the time, and his comments hurt me. The irony is that of my father's four children, only the homo has fallen in love and settled down. I'm the only one who can afford to buy a washing machine right now.
It didn't help that my dad was a Chicago homicide detective whose beat included Chicago's gay neighborhood. In the seventies, gay neighborhoods were not filled with trendy restaurants, pricey condos, and rainbow geegaws. They were filled with sleazy bars, male hustlers, and violent predators. Before I came out to my father, most of the gay men he'd met were murderers.
When my parents' marriage began to fall apart, I was fourteen years old. I knew I was queer and no longer felt welcome at the neighbor boys' reindeer games. So, I spent a lot of time hiding in the attic, up a tree in the backyard, or lying under the dining room table listening to musical comedy on eight-track tape. I was home a lot during the two years when my father was pulling away from my mother. My siblings were not around, so they missed out on most of the fights. My dad would storm out, and I would find my mother sobbing in her bedroom. There were fights where things were thrown and broken, usually by my father, and the things broken were usually very important to my mother, tchotchkes that had belonged to her grandmother. Once, after they had separated, my dad came over. He and my mother went for a walk while I lay under the dining room table listening to Camelot. They walked back in the front door just as Robert Goulet started singing, “If ever I would leave you . . .” My mother burst into tears; my father looked at me and sighed, and then walked back out of the house.
As things fell apart with his wife, my dad made a lot of promises to his four kids, all of which he seemed to break. He promised he wouldn't move out. He did. He promised he wouldn't divorce my mother. He did. He promised there was no one else. There was. He promised he wouldn't marry JoEllyn. He did. He promised he wouldn't move away. He moved to California.
On a visit home years later, my father took my brothers and me out for drinks. Out of nowhere, he announced that he and JoEllyn weren't going to have any children. He wanted us to know that. It was a promise. When he got up and went to the bathroom, my brothers and I looked at one another in stunned silence.
Finally, I said, “JoEllyn must be in labor.”
“With twins,” said Eddie.
“Conjoined, I hope,” said Billy.
As a result of the lies and the pain I believed he'd caused, for years I refused to speak to my father. I wouldn't see him at Christmas, or talk with him on the phone. If he walked in the front door, I walked out the back. By the time I was willing to talk to him again, I was almost twenty. By that point, I'd pretty much forgotten how to talk to him.
That was when he married JoEllyn.
JoEllyn is a very nice person, she's good for my father, and the time I've spent with her over the last decade has been very pleasant. She knows, I think, that the divorce was very hard on me and all these years later she still tiptoes around me. But the day my father married her was among the most painful of my life. It ripped open and rubbed salt into every one of my mother's wounds, and put my relationship with my father back on ice for five years.
My dad married JoEllyn on Mother's Day, 1985.
Billy and I often argue about that. I don't know if the choice of Mother's Day was intentional, but it was a terrible thing to do. If my father or JoEllyn picked the date on purpose, it's unforgivable. If they picked it by accident, they should have changed it the minute they realized. They didn't, and early in the morning on Mother's Day, 1985, my mother helped dress her four children in formal wear and waved good-bye as we headed out to her husband's second wedding. On Mother's Day.
Why did I go? Why didn't I stay home? The divorce left my mother with fears of abandonment that will last the rest of her life. And we abandoned her on Mother's Day, left her alone in an empty house. My father asked Billy and Eddie and me to usher, and at least I refused to do that. But I wish I'd stayed home. My father had the bad taste to select that love-never-dies, love-never-alters passage from Psalms or Corinthians or somewhere, and as it was read, I started sobbing. The video camera recording the service was set up right behind the pew I was in, and all you can hear on the video is me crying.
My father and I have a perfectly cordial relationship these days. He's come to Seattle to visit, and he's met Terry. A hesitation and tentativeness linger over our relationship, though. Sometimes I get the sense that my father still worries that I'm angry. I'm not, not really. The wedding was a long time ago. But we were alienated from each other for so long, from the time I was about nine years old, that I'm not sure we'll ever have the kind of relationship that he has with his other children.
When I have news to share with my family, it never occurs to me to call my father in California. So Terry and I were two weeks away from getting a baby when I told him we were adopting, and even then it was only because he came to town. It wasn't even until we were standing on a sidewalk outside a restaurant in Seattle, waiting for a table, that I realized I hadn't told my father we were going to be dads.
My father was also the last to know I was gay. I waited until I was twenty-one and away at college to tell him, afraid he would react badly. He drove down with my sibs and my mom to see me in a play, and while the rest of the family waited inside the Courier Café, my father and I stood on the sidewalk out front and I told him what he already knew. He was upset, but not about me being gay.
He was upset that I didn't tell him sooner.
Spelling Out Melissa's Rights
For the first time since we met Melissa at Outside In six weeks ago, the three of us were going to get together with Laurie. Melissa was hugely pregnant now. When we picked her up in front of her apartment, she had trouble getting in the car. The last time we saw her, Melissa had a kid-induced barrel chest, but now the baby had “dropped,” and she was carrying him lower to the ground. She was having trouble sleeping, sitting, standing, and walking.
She told us she was anxious to get this whole thing over with. She was sick and tired of being pregnant, being counseled, and being housed. I got the feeling that Melissa was sick and tired of our weekly getting-to-know-you meetings, too, but she was too polite to say so. She was looking forward to not having to ta
lk with Laurie about her feelings anymore, and she was happy she wouldn't be living in an apartment for much longer. She wanted to get back out on the streets with her friends, and she wanted to travel with her animals. But while Melissa was looking forward to not being pregnant, she dreaded giving birth.
“I hate pain,” she said flatly. She was worried the doctors wouldn't give her pain meds in the hospital because she was a street punk. “They might think I don't need the drugs, that I just, you know, want to get high or something.”
We'd come to Portland to hammer out our Open Adoption Agreement. This was the last piece of paper we had to sign before the birth, spelling out Melissa's rights: how many visits per year, how many phone calls, how many times per year we'd send photos. The numbers are floors, not ceilings. If we wanted to get together more, we could. If there was any conflict down the road, the agency would mediate, using the Open Adoption Agreement as a guide. The birth mother's visits could be terminated only if she was abusive, or became a danger to the child.
When we arrived at the office, Laurie was in the waiting room. She wanted to speak privately with Melissa for a few minutes. We plopped down on the couch; Terry picked up a People magazine and I flipped through the world's most depressing publication: a newsletter published by the state of Oregon profiling adorable-looking but hard-to-place children. DG kids. Three years' worth of newsletters were in a binder, and I flipped through them as we waited. Under each photo of a smiling child, three paragraphs detailed the “tremendous progress” little Susie/Mikey/Jenny/ Andy had made since being placed in foster care. Next, the horrendous abuse that got little Susie/Mikey/Jenny/Andy taken away from his or her biological parents and placed in foster care was detailed. Reading about these DG kids sandpapered every guilt nerve in my body, which is to say every nerve in my body. That we were adopting—or hoping to adopt—a healthy baby boy when there were abused children out there who needed homes made me feel . . . rotten.