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

by Dan Savage

  I showed the newsletters to Terry and told him that reading these kids' stories made me want to adopt a DG kid. He rolled his eyes and advised me to stop reading the newsletters. Terry was unashamed of his desire to adopt a healthy baby, and refused to feel guilty about it or any of the other things I wasted hours every day feeling guilty about. I felt guilty about having enough money to rent cars and buy children, but besides overtipping whenever we ate out, I didn't do anything about other people's poverty. I felt guilty about the decimated rain forests, but I shopped at Ikea.

  When Laurie called us into her office, Melissa was sitting against one wall, staring at the floor. Terry and I sat down on a low couch against the opposite wall. Laurie sat at her desk. Laurie asked us how our meetings were going. Terry and I did almost all the talking, telling Laurie that things were fine—we went out to eat; we attended Melissa's prenatal appointment last week at OHSU. . . . Laurie listened and nodded.

  “It sounds like things have been going very well,” Laurie said.“Would you say that, Melissa?”

  “Yeah.” Melissa shrugged.

  Laurie asked whether Melissa had given any thought to how many visits she wanted per year. Melissa stared at the floor and mumbled, “I don't care.” For Melissa, this should have been enough—she didn't care, end of discussion. But Laurie pressed her, calmly laying out all her options and encouraging her to make a decision. Melissa was in hell. “I haven't really thought about it,” she said, sinking into her chair, miserable.

  Laurie turned to us. Had we given visitation any thought?

  I gave a little speech about how we wanted the baby to know his mother. One of the reasons open adoption appealed to us, I explained to Melissa while looking at Laurie, was that we wanted our kid to have a relationship with his mom. Some couples were threatened by the presence of an “extra” mom: they might want to limit the number of visits, so the adoptive mother could feel like the “real” one.

  “We welcome,” I heard myself say in perfect agency-speak, “a high level of contact. We wrote that in our birthparent letter, and we meant it. We're not threatened by the baby having a relationship with Melissa.” Finally, I turned and looked at Melissa. “We want him to know you. So as far as we're concerned, Laurie can put any number of visits on that form. She can write down three hundred and sixty-five visits per year. You can see the baby as much as you want.”

  Laurie intervened.

  “Why don't we write down four visits per year?” She looked from me and Terry to Melissa. “If you want to get together more, that's fine. But most couples and birth moms set four as the minimum. Does four sound good?”

  We nodded; Melissa said, “I guess,” and Laurie wrote down, “Four.”

  “Remember,” Laurie said, “that this is the minimum number of visits. You can get together as much as you care to, if you're all willing. But Dan and Terry can't give you less than four visits per year.” Laurie had clearly pulled this maneuver before. Overly Solicitous Adoptive Couple makes unrealistic offer of daily visits to Birth Mother. Counselor steps in, brings the couple back to reality, writes down a workable number, and saves Adoptive Couple from the logistical nightmare of legally enforceable daily visits from Birth Mother.

  “How many photo exchanges?”

  Melissa asked for two sets of photos per year, except in the first.

  “Kids grow a lot in the first year,” she informed us all. “So more photos during the first year would be good.”

  Laurie wrote down four sets of photos during year one, and two sets per year thereafter. Since Melissa didn't have an address, we agreed to send the photos to the agency, which would keep them in Melissa's file.

  Phone calls? We put down one a month, though we told Melissa she could call as much as she wanted.

  “I'll have to call collect, you know.”

  “That's fine,” Terry said.

  All these numbers we were tossing around—four visits, two sets of photos, one phone call per month—bound only Terry and me. Melissa wasn't compelled to call every month, nor did she have to come for her four yearly visits. The amount of contact Melissa had with the baby would be up to Melissa. The day after the placement, the birth mom was free to disappear, if that was what she wanted, and we were told at the seminar that some did just that. The adoptive couple was not free to disappear. Until the baby was eighteen years old, we had to make sure the agency had our current address and phone number.

  Before our session ended, Laurie told us Melissa had one special request that she wanted written into the open adoption agreement. If she ever patched things up with her family, she wanted us to let the baby meet her mother, father, and siblings.

  “Is that acceptable to you guys?” Laurie asked. Before we could answer, Melissa broke in. “This baby is their first grand-child, you know, and they'll probably want to meet him at some point,” she said. “And my little brother might want to know he's an uncle.”

  Holding her pen over the form, Laurie looked up at Terry and me. Birth grandparents have no rights in Oregon, nor do birth uncles, and we didn't have to agree to this request. All we were required to do was allow Melissa to visit the baby in our presence, but we had no obligation to Melissa's extended family.

  “Is one mandatory visit with the birth grandparents acceptable to you guys?”

  I looked at Terry, who shrugged the question back into my lap.

  “Of course.”

  We left the agency's offices and headed over to Lloyd Center. With the baby due in two weeks, Terry and I had decided that it was time to buy a few things we'd need right away. Like a car seat. The hospital, Laurie told us, wouldn't let us leave with the baby unless he was strapped into a car seat. Laurie also told us that shopping for a car seat was a good thing for birth moms and adoptive couples to do together: “It makes the birth mother feel like she's doing her part to get the baby home safe from the hospital.”

  We wound up at the Toys “R” Toxic that Terry and I had wandered through when we got lost on our way to the seminar back in May. In the aisle with the car seats, we had our first encounter with hot-plastic injection-molded products. Maybe one of the reasons I'd been putting off shopping, and letting others shop for the baby, was to temporarily stave off the onslaught of plastic products that would fill every last bit of our house once the baby did arrive. Plastic baby carriages, play stands, car seats, walkers, high chairs, toys, baby baths—how did people raise kids before plastic came along? “Everything for Baby,” said the sign over the aisle we were in. It should have said, “Everything for Baby Is Made from Molded Plastic in Ugly Primary Colors.”

  Terry, always prepared, pulled Consumer Reports ratings for car seats out of his wallet and began to search for the top-rated model—the only one that would do. Melissa and I sat down on the floor and watched Terry do what Terry does best: shop. Melissa and I were equally uncomfortable and out of place in Toys “R” Toxic. Once Terry found the car seat, we made our way to the “newborn” aisle. Some boldly patterned red-and-black toys hanging on one wall caught our eyes. We read the packages and were all shocked—shocked!—to discover that babies needed to be exposed to red, black, and white colors, in bold patterns, or else their brains would turn to poo and dribble out their ears. How did any of us survive the light pastel shades and fuzzy edges that decorated everything for baby when we were newborns?

  While Terry waited in line to pay for our pastel plastic car seat and a couple of red-and-black toys (“Just in case . . .”), Melissa and I sat down on the floor again, this time by a jungle gym display near the doors. Melissa was enjoying our shopping mall field trip about as much as she enjoyed walking into that steak-house. Two blond girls walked by, staring at Melissa's dirty clothes and knee-high Doc Martens boots. Once they'd passed us, they started giggling, looking back at the freaky pregnant girl and her . . . what am I? Her brother? A security guard? Her parole officer? Melissa's eyes narrowed and followed the girls as they left the store.

  “That's everyone I went to s
chool with.”

  We ate dinner in a fifties-nostalgia diner off Lloyd Center's food court, and talked about David, a friend of Melissa's who was staying in the apartment with her.

  “He eats the food I cook and doesn't help clean,” Melissa said, shaking her head. “You would think that if you cooked for someone they would at least offer to, like, do the dishes.”

  Terry kicked me under the table. Terry cooked for me, but I resented having to do dishes. As I saw it, Terry liked cooking—he enjoyed it, he told me so. Well, I didn't enjoy washing dishes—I hated it, and I'd told him so—and didn't see why I should have to do something I hated after he got to do something he liked. I mean, that wasn't fair, was it?

  While we ate our hamburgers and BLTs, a family sat down in the booth next to ours. Their little boy started playing peekaboo with me, popping his head over the booth. I played along, wiggling my ears, raising my eyebrows, making faces. This, naturally, drove the boy wild. He was jumping all over, shrieking, and his mother couldn't get him to calm down—I was just too amusing. Finally, I got caught making faces: the little boy's mother turned to me and said, “Would you stop.”

  Melissa laughed her low, quiet laugh. “Just wait,” she said, “people are going to do that to you when you're out with the kid, and you're going to be the grouchy parent. Just wait.”

  On the way back to Outside In, Terry and Melissa made plans to hook up next Monday, as I couldn't come down next week. When we dropped Melissa off, her inconsiderate roommate David, looking every inch the crystal addict, was waiting on the porch with Melissa's dog and cat.

  Melissa said good-bye, got out of the car, and made her way up to the porch. She took her dog's leash and turned and waved at us. Terry shouted, “See you Monday!” from inside the car, and Melissa nodded. As we drove off, I turned and looked back. Melissa was sitting on the porch, petting her dog and talking with David.

  It was the last time we saw her pregnant.

  Birth

  David Kevin

  When we got home with one plastic car seat and red-and-black toys, I had a small panic attack. Besides what we bought in Portland with Melissa, and the flannel shirt we'd allowed ourselves to buy at Baby Gap, we had nothing we needed for the kid. No crib, no diapers, no bottles, no formula, no changing table. Nothing. This was our own fault, of course. Actually, it was my fault, since my fear of jinxing things led to the shopping ban. But with Melissa's due date only two weeks off, we had more bondage stuff in the house than baby stuff.

  With the religious right threatening to go after the gay adoptions, I probably shouldn't mention the bondage stuff in our basement. Gay men with bondage stuff adopting little baby boys will give Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell screaming nightmares. I don't want to play into hands of my mortal enemies, but I shouldn't have to lie. In a corner of our basement, there was a box filled with nylon rope, some leather restraints, a paddle, and a blindfold. Some of these were gifts: when a sex-advice columnist has a birthday, he gets sex toys and you can't return sex toys. While bondage wasn't something Terry and I did—which is why the bondage stuff was in a box in the basement and not in our bedroom, where it was with my last boyfriend—I'm not going to lie and say I haven't done it. Or dug it.

  Like a lot of people—Madonna comes to mind—I've been tied up with erotic intent, and I've tied others up. Bondage and SM aren't the depraved nightmare stuff the religious right fantasizes about; they're cops and robbers for grown-ups, with full frontal nudity and orgasms. And anyway, even if I wanted to deny ever having been tied up, I couldn't. I've been writing about sex—and my sex life—for too long to cover it up effectively. (And there are those awful Polaroids floating around out there somewhere.) If having been tied up and fucked disqualifies people from having kids, how come no one wants to take Lourdes away from Madonna? In Sex, Madonna's pictured all tied up with lesbian SMers, male strippers, and Vanilla Ice, for Christ's sake. No one has suggested Madonna's an unfit parent—not because of Sex, anyway.

  During our interviews with the agency, we were never questioned about our sex practices by any of the counselors. None of the straight couples I know who've adopted were asked about their sex practices either. The assumption is, I think, that if you're an adult without a criminal record or a North American Man/Boy Love Association membership you're capable of making a distinction between your sex partners and your children. I assume that Pat Robertson enjoys missionary position sex with his wife, but not with his daughters (if he has any). Like Pat, I am capable of making a distinction between my spouse and my kids. My straight mom didn't sleep with my straight brothers, my father never slept with his daughter, I've never made a pass at my brothers. Incest isn't something we Savages do.

  Some straight people worry gay people aren't capable of making distinctions between appropriate and inappropriate sex partners. Since we reject the taboo against same-sex sex, the “reasoning” and the far-right fund-raising appeals go, we're necessarily inclined toward rejecting taboos against incest, necrophilia, and gerbils. There are sexual taboos that I am comfortable with, and have not only observed all my life but also done my best to shore up. I come down very hard on incest in my sex-advice column, and will continue to do so as long as I can crawl to my computer and type. But how can I convince someone who believes being gay means I want to sleep with all men, any man, alive or dead, any species, whatever his relation to me, that I've never been interested in having sex with my brothers? Or my father? And that I will never be interested in having sex with my son?

  The religious right maintains that gay men who want to teach or lead a Boy Scout troop or be Big Brothers are somehow a threat to children. The implication is that gay men who want to be near children, or adopt children, must want to fuck them. Forgive me if that's indelicately put, but it's the truth. This is the fear that led two states to outlaw gay men and lesbians adopting children (though one, New Hampshire, recently overturned its antigay adoption law) and made it nearly impossible for gays and lesbians to adopt even in states where it was technically legal. Like most gay men, I have a sense of humor about the lies told about my life.

  What's funny about the whole evil disco-dancin' gay baby-rapist nightmare is that the truth of why gay men want to be dads is so much more disturbing. When I fantasized about becoming a dad, I didn't picture myself having sex with my children. No, in my dad fantasies, I saw myself going to work, making money, and coming home to Terry and the kid. I help the baby learn to walk and talk. Years later, I help him with his homework while I half-listen to Terry tell me about a PTA meeting. I wanted to be a dad so I could take my kid to ball games and McDonald's and on camping trips.

  What the religious right fears most about gay adoption is not that we'll be bad parents, or that we'll have sex with our kids, or that we'll try to make them gay. What they fear is that we'll be pretty good parents. I've done drag. I did Barbie drag, dominatrix drag, nun drag, and glamour drag. Now I'm going to do dad drag. I pulled Barbie off pretty well, and I was gonna be good at this dad stuff, too. And that's what worried Pat Robertson. The more gay men and lesbians raise children, the harder it's going to become for the right to convince people that we're monsters. Once straights have seen boring gay parents at a PTA meeting bitching about class size and school uniforms (I'm in favor of smaller formers and mandatory latters), we're not going to seem so scary anymore, even if (like a lot of straights) we do have old bondage equipment in our basements.

  Terry got on the phone with his mother. She'd been planning to bring the crib over the day before the baby was due. They were coming to Seattle for an antitobacco meeting, and because the heirloom crib couldn't be disassembled, she and Dennis were planning on driving over the mountains in their six-blocks-to-the-gallon motor home. For the crib to arrive the day before the baby was due was cutting things a little too close, in, uh, my opinion, so Terry asked Claudia if they could bring the crib over sooner.

  The next day, Claudia and Dennis pulled up in their motor home and carried in the he
irloom crib. The crib I'd heard so much about was . . . pretty ugly. I'd been imagining something tasteful, something we might discover was worth a lot of money when the Antiques Roadshow came to town. Terry's family crib looked like something built from scrap during the Depression. It was covered with a thick layer of cracking white paint—you could smell the lead—and had large forties decals of pastel rabbits on the head and baseboard.

  Terry's mom handed us a bag full of baby clothes she “just couldn't resist.” We had some tea. Claudia took our picture standing in front of the crib, and then she and Dennis climbed back in their motor home for the six-hour drive back to Spokane. Terry promised me the crib would look fabulous, “once we clean it up,” but even in the hour it had been in the house the crib had already started to grow on me, maybe because it was Terry's. When I pictured him in the crib, weighing seven pounds, and fourteen inches long, my heart melted. The crib was clunky and the decals were peeling, but who cared? The crib's history was its charm. We'd just have to get another one before the baby could roll over and chew the lead paint off the bars, but Terry's son would spend his first couple of months in the same crib Terry did.

  I started picking through the clothes, and when I looked up at Terry he was standing over his crib, looking as if he might cry.

  “My mom drove all the way to Seattle and back to Spokane in one day, so that her grandchild could have this crib. She's okay with this.”

  And so she was, and so apparently was Dennis, who actually did the driving. My family loves to talk, but in Terry's family actions speak louder than words. This action—an expensive twelve-hour round-trip in a motor home on one day's notice—spoke very loudly.