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

by Dan Savage

  Terry wasn't interested in skating; there was too much shopping to do. We had to get photos! Blankets! Something to eat! A gift for Melissa! I put my foot down: we didn't have to spend all morning on the ice; just a couple of spins. And since skating had brought us good luck at the seminar, maybe skating on the day we were bringing the baby home would bring us good luck all his life. Skating might prevent him from ever falling off a swing and cracking his head open, running with the wrong crowd, becoming a Christian, or taking a gun to school and shooting his home-room teacher. But when we got to the rink, thirty little girls in flouncy outfits were learning to skate, and the rink wouldn't be open to the general public until one, the same time we were supposed to arrive at the hospital for the hand-off.

  We dropped our film off at the one-hour photo place; meanwhile we checked out the jewelry stores, hoping there might be such a thing as a butch locket. No one had a locket we could picture on Melissa, but we spotted something else that was perfect: a man's ID bracelet. Heavy silver, it would go perfectly with Melissa's other chunky-punky jewelry. We had “David Kevin Pierce: 3/14/98” inscribed on the bracelet, ate BLTs, and shopped a little, and before we knew it, the three hours we had to kill were dead.

  Feeling dazed, we headed out to the van with our baby blankets, a couple of outfits from Baby Gap, and some more black-and-red toys we picked up at Toys “R” Toxic. Still feeling superstitious, I insisted we head to the car by way of the skywalk, which took us past the conference rooms where we grieved our infertility so many months ago with the infertile straight people. We'd left that seminar convinced that no birth mother would ever select us, and that we were wasting our time even considering adoption.

  Laurie was waiting for us at the nurses' station when we walked into the maternity ward. She told us Melissa was doing okay; she'd spent the morning with the baby, and she was “really touched” that, as promised, we'd dragged David's ass up to the hospital that morning.

  “Melissa said you guys always do what you tell her you're going to,” Laurie said, “and that's really important for building a trusting relationship with your birth mother. I don't think Melissa's had many people in her life who did what they told her they would.”

  Laurie asked where our car seat was. We'd left it in the van, assuming we would carry the baby out of the hospital in our arms, like in the movies, and strap him into his car seat when we got to the car. But the hospital's policy was not to discharge an infant until he was strapped into his car seat. While Terry ran down to the car, I asked about the hospital's policy concerning actual cars: what if we didn't have a car to strap the car seat into? Could pedestrians have babies?

  “All we have to do is make sure the baby leaves in a car seat,” the nurse said. “The assumption is made that if you have a baby and a car seat, you have a car.”

  When Terry got back, we all walked down the hall to Melissa's room, and Laurie softly knocked on her door. The shades were drawn, the lights were off, and Melissa was lying on her side, the baby asleep in her arms. We said our heys; Laurie sat on the edge of the bed, and Terry and I retreated to separate corners of the room, Terry in a chair next to the table, me on the window seat. Once again, we were hanging back, not wanting to appear too anxious to snatch the baby away.

  It was one, and Melissa was supposed to check out at two o'clock, so we had an hour. We sat chatting as if nothing special was going to happen, telling Laurie stories about the last two days: our mad dash down to Portland, the nurse who wanted Melissa to leave right away, that first poopy diaper, getting peed on, last night's steak dinner. Melissa made observations about the baby's eating habits, criticized my diapering, and showed Terry the right way to hold a bottle. We talked about the mall, our hotel, and David's visit. We were all acting as if Laurie had come to pay us a visit, and once she was gone the three of us would go back to lying around, watching TV and taking care of little David Kevin/Daryl Jude Pierce-Miller-Savage.

  The first sign that things wouldn't go on like this forever came when a nurse appeared with a case of formula, a few days' supply of diapers, and a gift baby bag filled with diaper and formula coupons. Melissa got up and changed into her street clothes— boots, baggy shorts, sweatshirt, and Guinness T-shirt—and when she came out of the bathroom her hair was down. She was transformed: for the last two days, she'd been the picture of a young mother, but now she was herself again, the Melissa we met six weeks ago at Outside In. She smelled like her old self, too; her clothes were gutter-punk filthy when she arrived Saturday morning, and for three days they sat ripening in a plastic bag on a shelf under the TV. When she sat back down on the bed, Melissa asked the nurse for something to wear over her clothes. She didn't want to get the baby dirty.

  Melissa told us some more about David's visit (“He figured out the baby's name when you guys wouldn't tell him what it was. He's not stupid, you know”), about her breakfast (“I couldn't eat it, it was terrible”), and about her last visit from her doctor (“She's cool”). Terry, Laurie, and I weren't saying anything now; we were just listening to Melissa, who sat on the bed with the baby in her lap, filling the time with her own voice, putting off the moment when Terry and I would leave with the baby. When Laurie met with Melissa yesterday, they discussed who would leave first. Some birth mothers prefer to leave the hospital first, leaving the adoptive couple in their room with the baby. Melissa wanted us to leave first with the baby; then she would leave with Laurie, who would drive her back to her apartment.

  Two o'clock came, and at Laurie's prompting we gave Melissa her I.D. bracelet and a small photo album full of pictures. Laurie said a few words, but none of the rest of us rose to the bait. We were all very quiet. Melissa asked about baby pictures, the kind taken at the hospital immediately after a baby is born. Laurie explained that these cost money and that you had to request them; they weren't taken automatically. Melissa shrugged, disappointed.

  “Well, we better get the little guy dressed,” Laurie said, falling in with our avoidance of names, but she didn't say why we should get him dressed. Melissa changed the baby's diaper and, with Terry's help, dressed him in the going-home outfit the three of us picked out a month ago: a brown terrycloth jumper and a matching hat. Terry and I put our coats on and gathered up the diapers, bottles, and bag.

  Melissa buckled the baby into the car seat the three of us picked out at Toys “R” Toxic, and the room got very quiet.

  Laurie sat down on the bed next to Melissa, and murmured, “It's time.” Terry rose from the bed, put his hand on the car seat's handle, and looked down at Melissa. Melissa didn't look up at us; she looked at the baby, who was wide awake, blinking at the incomprehensible world, blissfully unaware of what was transpiring in front of and because of him. David Kevin squeezed his mom's finger, and Terry and I stood there, like fools, not sure what to do. Should Terry pick up the car seat and walk out? Should we wait for Melissa to draw back her hand? What should we say?

  Time stopped, and we stood frozen, until Laurie put her hand on Melissa's shoulder, and Melissa pulled her finger out of David Kevin's hand. Laurie looked up at Terry, and nodded. Terry carefully picked up Daryl Jude, and Melissa's eyes followed her son as he was lifted off the bed. Laurie raised her eyebrows, indicating that this might be a good time to say something, anything.

  “We'll see you soon, okay?” Terry said. We'd agreed yesterday to come back down with the baby in two weeks, so Melissa's friends at Outside In could meet him. “Bye, Melissa. Thank you so much,” Terry said, and then he picked up the car seat, walked past me, and very tentatively stepped into the hallway with the baby. As soon as the baby was out the door, Melissa looked down at her bed and started to breathe in and out, trying to stay in control. Melissa didn't look up at me, and I wasn't sure what to do; was I supposed to say something now, too? Laurie nodded toward the door, and I started to go.

  Melissa crumpled into a ball sobbing, I could see Terry standing in the hallway, waiting for me. I looked at Melissa, and stepped up to the bed. Not on
ce in the last six weeks, not even over the last two days in the hospital, had Melissa and I touched each other. I walked over to the bed and placed a hand on her shoulder. She stopped sobbing, either from the shock of my touch or from the sudden realization that I was still in the room.

  “We're not the hugging type, you and me,” I heard myself saying. Melissa nodded. “But thank you, Melissa, thank you so much. You will be a part of this baby's life, he's going to know who his mother is. You'll get to see him, and you'll get to love him, and he'll love you. You'll always be his mom, his only mom.”

  Melissa's shoulders started to rise and fall. She didn't look up, but Laurie nodded at me, as if to say, “Nice try, amateur, now beat it.” As I crossed to the door, Laurie gestured that she'd like me to close it on my way out.

  As soon as the door was shut, Terry and I locked eyes for an instant and then looked away. We couldn't look at each other, or we'd both start to sob. We had to make it at least to the car before we let ourselves get sloppy, and there was a whole busy hospital to navigate. We stopped by the nurses' station to say good-bye and thank you. The nurses wished us the best of luck, and beamed at us in a way that made me uncomfortable. We smiled, but all we could think about was how Melissa was feeling in her room, alone with Laurie, waiting for us to leave. We walked out of the maternity ward and over to the elevators. When the doors closed, we were alone. We looked at each other again for a split second.

  “That was so hard—” I said.

  “Shut up, don't say anything.”

  The doors opened on another floor. We were doing all we could to hold ourselves together. We weren't alone on the elevator now.

  We walked through the lobby, across the street, and over to the parking garage. Terry opened the van; we locked the car seat in place, shut the side door, and climbed into our seats. Then we both folded up, sobbing, heads in hands. No one warned us about the moment when you pick the baby up and walk out of the room, leaving the birth mom sobbing in her bed. We were unprepared for all the planning and check-writing and seminargoing to end in a moment of such blistering pain. Sitting in the van finally a family, we felt no joy at having become fathers.

  “She looked so miserable,” I choked out between sobs.

  “I know, I know . . .” Terry sobbed in response.

  Suddenly, it occurred to me that Laurie's car might be parked near our van, and that if Melissa came down and saw us sitting there, her pain would be compounded. I told Terry to drive, and slowly, sobbing, we made our way down the hill.

  North Americans feel too much, latching on to grief that isn't our own, drooling over Princess Diana's all-star funeral or the televised memorial service for the dead in Oklahoma City or Littleton, Colorado. No one's allowed to grieve in private anymore, and pain has become one of the performing arts, one that the simpleminded and the talentless can excel at. We open up and let it all out for Oprah or Sally or Diane or Barbara, and private grief is public property. But to see Melissa's pain at the moment she gave up that baby, and to feel pain ourselves at that same moment, drove home the logic of open adoption, its absolute necessity.

  In a closed adoption, we wouldn't have witnessed the moment our son's mother gave him up. That we saw what we did, however painful, is to the ultimate benefit of the kid in the car seat. The idea of starting off as his parents without experiencing what we did was suddenly unimaginable. One day, D.J. may worry that his mother didn't want him, that she didn't care about him, that she didn't love him. Because of open adoption, we'll be able to sit him down and tell him about this day; we'll be able to describe the moment Melissa gave him to us, and how it hard it was for her. We won't have to guess at what it was like, or tell him that we're sure his mother loved him. We know she loved him; we saw it.

  And seeing how hard it was for Melissa to hand us her baby, and knowing that we would never have been a family if she didn't trust us with him, how could we even think of denying her the right to see her baby as he grows? Having seen what we did, how could we begrudge her visits, pictures, or phone calls? After what she'd just given us, how could we deny her anything?

  Somehow we made it to the Mallory. Terry pulled into a parking space, his head down on the steering wheel, and wept. When we walked into the lobby, the clerk cooed and ah'ed over the baby.

  “Whose is he?” she asked.

  “He's ours,” Terry told her, “we adopted him.”

  “Congratulations!”

  From our room, we called Laurie's voice mail and left her a message asking her to call and let us know Melissa was all right. (Later, Laurie called: Melissa was fine; it was hard, but she was home, and David was with her.)

  The baby's fingernails were long and sharp, and when he wasn't gripping our fingers or his blanket, he was scratching at his face. We didn't have a nail clipper with us, so I went out to buy one. On the way back to the hotel with the nail clipper, I passed the Eagle and if I couldn't skate at Lloyd Center for luck this morning, I thought, maybe I should duck into the Eagle for one last game of pinball. A youngish guy sitting on a bar stool next to my machine struck up a conversation. He asked me where I was from, and I told him Seattle.

  “What are you doing in Portland?” he asked.

  I told him I'd just adopted a baby, and he laughed.

  “No, really, my boyfriend and I just adopted a baby. He weighs just under seven pounds, he cost us about fifteen thousand dollars, and we broke his mother's heart when we picked him up and carried him out of her hospital room this afternoon. The baby is back at the hotel, with my boyfriend, and they're waiting for me to bring back a fingernail clipper.”

  “Right.”

  I pulled the infant-sized fingernail clipper out of my pocket and showed it to him.

  He still didn't believe me. He excused himself and walked off.

  Afterbirth

  Father Days

  Two days after we brought D.J. to the Mallory Hotel in Portland, the state of Oregon gave us permission to bring D.J. home to our messy condo in Seattle. We checked out, put the baby in his car seat, and drove up I-5.

  During those first few weeks at home, we cleaned and packed. D.J. ate, slept, peed, and pooped. Brand-new babies are all about excrement: there's no crawling, no cooing, no smiling—no nothing—in those first few weeks, only poop. And since he wasn't a cryer, poop was the only feedback we were getting from D.J. on our parenting. Every bowel movement became a referendum. Terry and I were soon having long, involved conversations about the consistency, frequency, and hue of D.J.'s Gross Domestic Product. We each set aside diapers with suspiciously large GDPs for the other's inspection, as well as any diapers whose contents were oddly colored, too thin, too thick, or too stinky.

  D.J. was devoid of personality in the first few weeks, and I'm going to resist the anthropomorphic urge and refrain from endowing our human infant with any human characteristics. The expression on his face changed occasionally, but only when he was taking a crap, cutting a fart, or preparing to throw up. He made cute gurgling noises now and again but rarely smiled. He looked angelic when he slept, and he couldn't move much on his own, so he was always right where we'd left him. Every once in a while he would open his eyes wide, give us an astonished look—“What the hell is going on? Where the hell am I? Who the hell are you?”—and then drop off to sleep.

  We pored over several how-to-keep-your-baby-alive books, consulting them daily at first, and then as we grew more comfortable, less and less. The best book was on the first year, with each month getting its very own chapter. Every four weeks or so, we pulled this book out and read the next month's chapter. It made parenthood seem like a college-level biology class, one with a lifelong lab, where to pass all you really needed to do was not fall too far behind on your reading.

  Our mothers descended on us to share their “parenting expertise” and made sure we weren't doing anything that might imperil their grandson. But so much has changed in the thirty years since their kids were in diapers that their advice was, according to t
he books we were reading, a little dangerous. We had been told to put D.J. to sleep on his back, not his stomach, to prevent sudden infant death syndrome. Our mothers told us to put him to sleep on his stomach, not his back, to prevent sudden infant death. We'd been told not to put our baby in a playpen, or his brain would turn to mush. Our mothers pointed out that we'd spent time in playpens and our brains weren't mush. With both grandmas in the house, Terry and I slipped away for an hour. When we returned, D.J. was wearing a diaper backward. Terry picked him up, and it fell off. Neither of our mothers had ever encountered a high-tech, Velcro-tabbed disposable diaper before.

  Terry took the baby to see Melissa two weeks after he was born, as promised. (My mother and I stayed in Seattle to pack.) Until May, Melissa could stay in the apartment the agency had arranged for her, but she met Terry at Outside In. (She was about to age out of the drop-in center; she would be turning twenty-one in June.) With Terry carrying the baby in his car seat, and Melissa carrying her cat and leading her dog, they walked down to Pioneer Square, and hooked up with a group of Melissa's friends.

  After our mothers left, my sister came to visit. Thankfully, she had encountered disposable diapers, and proved to be a great help during our move from the condo to our friend's basement. After we moved, and my sister left, my dad came to meet his second grandson. When my dad left, my mom returned with Jerry and helped us move into our new house. When my mom and her husband left, Claudia and Dennis came to visit. Then my mom came back. Then Terry's mom came back. Then my sister called and asked if she could come back. We had no choice: Terry and I called a halt to family visits. We needed time alone with the baby, and while we couldn't forbid anyone from visiting Seattle, we forbade our mothers, fathers, brothers and sister from getting anywhere near us for two months.