The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant (5 page)

There are thousands of writers out there with books they've already written who can't get book deals, much less deals with fourteen-gazillion-dollar advances, and it must pain them to read that someone got a book deal with no book. I don't know what it's like to have a book already written that you can't find a publisher for, and I assume it's hell. But having a deal and no book has to be at least as hellish. The sun comes up, you think about your approaching deadline. You stare at the computer, which stares right back at you. “Why are you surfing porn sites?” your boyfriend says every time he walks into your office. “Don't you have a book to write?” Every time you leave the house a friend asks, “How's the book coming?” Every time the phone rings, it's your mother. “I'm not pressuring you,” she says when she calls to pressure you. “I just wanted to know if the book will be out by Christmas so I can give it to people as a gift.” Having a deal but no book maybe isn't the deepest pit in writing hell, but it's close, and anyway hell isn't a contest. In hell everyone suffers.

If being asked by your lover, friends, and family how the book is coming is hell, getting calls from your agent, editor, and publisher asking for the manuscript is dirty rotten stinking can't-sleep-at-night hell. Having a book deal and not a clue as to what you want to write a book about is like standing in front of an open trench. There are Nazis standing behind you— No, that's a
little extreme. Let's just say there are very insistent people with German accents standing behind you. If you don't fill that trench with words, hundreds of thousands of them, then one of those insistent people with German accents (your agent, your editor, your mother, your boyfriend) is going to march up behind you and put a bullet in the back of your head, filling the empty trench with your dead body.

With the deadline trench yawning before me, I asked myself what kind of book the world needed from a gay man right now. I'm not a complete idiot—I did get a book deal, after all—and I had some ideas. But I had wasted so much time surfing porn sites that other gay men with book deals and better work habits were coming out with books I might have written if I could have pulled myself away from bigcocks.com. The “Gay men should stop having sex” book came out, followed by the “Gay men should move to the suburbs” book, followed by the “Gay man giving sex tips to straight women” book, and then the “Gay men should get married” book. Anyway, by the time I was ready to write, the books I might have written were all on remainder tables at Barnes & Noble. Except one. Some gay men were writing books saying gay men should get married and have kids, but none had actually done it themselves—had the kid and written about it. So, I sat down and started writing the “Gay man actually having kids” book.

There was this book deal, and there was this squandered advance, and there was an approaching deadline. And I really did want kids, and I had almost made kids with lesbians before the book deal, and then the boyfriend started talking about adoption, and, well, why not kill two birds with one stone? Adopt a kid, and write the book about adopting the kid. That way, I wouldn't have to pay back the advance and I would get to write off every expense associated with the kid forever.

So while the adoption would have happened without the book deal, and the book deal happened without the adoption, I can't say that the book deadline didn't move the adoption deadline up just a tad.

So, that's why kids. And besides, I'm allergic to dogs.

T
hat last chapter wasn't very pleasant to write, so I can't imagine-it was very pleasant to read. When you write about kids, convention dictates that you go all mushy and magical: miracleof-birth, new-life-created-out-of-love, proof-of-God's-existence, blah blah blah. But there are always practical considerations, and as people get better about planning their pregnancies, more people, gay and straight, are applying a kind of
Wall Street Journal
hard-nosed cost-benefit analysis to timing when they have kids.

But let me emphasize this: the book deal that destroyed my carefree sex-columnist lifestyle (open the mail, read the letters, cash the checks) was not why were adopting. For the record, Terry and I began the “lifelong adoption process” before it even occurred to me that I could make it the subject of the book I was contracturally obligated to write. I need to write this to avoid offending the kid Terry and I will wind up adopting. Even when children are brought into this world as a result of practical, less-than-magical reasoning, or when children are brought into the world by accident, their parents usually don't share that info with them. Our kid would, we hoped, be able to read eventually, and if this book was one day required reading in all American high schools—as it should be—he would run across it, and one day be exposed to information that most kids are spared.

“My father never loved me,” he'd tell his therapist one day. “He just adopted me because he spent his advance.”

So you'll forgive me if I do something I swore I wouldn't when I decided to write about becoming a dad. I'm going to address my as yet unborn child, assuming that he can read.

Sweetheart, if you're reading this, rest assured that I was kidding when I wrote that last chapter. Kidding and drunk. Don't believe me? Ask your other father. We wanted a kid before I got a book deal, though once I decided to write about how we got you, kiddo, we moved your adoption to the front burner. Deadlines are deadlines, after all.

My advice for you would be not to read this book. It can be hard to put down a book that's all about you. God, for example, likes to have the Bible read to him every Sunday in church, as you would know if we had ever taken you into a church, and he never seems to tire of it. If you insist on reading this book, I'll understand. But take everything in it with a grain of salt, just as I assume God takes everything in the Bible with a grain of salt.

This advice I'm giving you—to put the book down and slowly back away from it—comes from experience. You see, my mother, your Grandma Judy, kept a journal all through 1964, the year she was knocked up with me. Her journals were never published, but I did manage to find them while digging around in her dresser. I stole them and read them, and it was a mistake. I learned things that I didn't need to know and things I would have been happier not knowing, risks you're running by reading this book.

For instance, my parents had sex, with each other, and quite a lot of it. For years before I found my mother's journals, I'd suspected my parents were sexually active, but I had no proof. Having my suspicions confirmed, in my mother's handwriting no less, was too much for my fifteen-year-old head! Suspecting something is different than reading all about it, especially in the same handwriting that signed “Mom & Dad” to all my birthday cards. Even more disturbing than the news that my parents had sex was reading about my parents having sex while my mother was pregnant with me.

But most disturbing of all was reading that my mother and my couldn't-keep-his-filthy-paws-off-a-pregnant-lady father were hoping and praying that the baby she was carrying—me—would be a girl. My parents already had two boys (your uncles, Billy and Eddie), and Mom and Dad wanted a girl this time. Mom lit candles, said Hail Marys, and buried saint statues upside down in the backyard. I guess my father had read somewhere—
Esquire
?
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to
Ask)
?
Field & Stream
?—that if he screwed Mom while she was pregnant—over and over again—this would turn me into a girl.

Now, back when I found my mother's diary, I was just beginning to understand that I might be gay; I was a little too excited whenever the Hardy Boys got tied up on TV. Not knowing what made boys gay, I wasted a lot of time wondering if I was gay because Mary, Mother of God, was only half-listening to Judy, Mother of Dan, when Judy prayed for a girl. Or because my mother had buried Saint Jude facing the wrong direction. Or because Bill, Father of Dan, had endowed me in utero with a taste for what he was giving my mom every damn night. Reading my mother's journals led me to believe I might be gay because of some Catholic technicality, or as a result of floating in a pool of my father's semen for nine months.

I know now that it wasn't Mary or Judy or Bill that made me gay, but genetic predisposition, Catholic school, high-tension wires, and sitting too close to the TV. But I could have saved myself years of anguish had I respected my mother's privacy and not read her journals when I was fifteen. So, kid, you might be better off if you didn't read this book. Just as I learned things about my parents I didn't need to know, there are things you'll learn about your dads from reading this book that you'd be better off not knowing. Like about those Polaroids, or how your other father once looked like Kate Moss with a dick.

If you put this book down now, you won't get to the chapter in which I discuss your father's and my sex life in detail. Being able to live your entire life in denial about your parents ever having had sex is a distinct advantage that you, the adopted child of two gay men, have over biological children raised by straight parents. Bio-kids can't live in denial forever about their parents' sex lives, because they're living proof their parents had sex at least once. But you, kiddo, you can live out your days without having to wrestle with the mental image of Daddy crawling on top of Daddy and drilling away, provided you put this book down before you read this paragraph.

N
egotiations with Lesbian Couple and Lesbian Single were just starting to fall apart when I first learned about open adoption. I wasn't immediately interested, being convinced at the time that the commingling of gay and lesbian genetic material was a beautiful, transformative, progressive notion, and an appealingly subversive way in which to breed. But a good friend felt differently. When I told my lawyer, Bob, that I was trying to get a lesbian pregnant, he said, “Why would you do something so stupid?”

Not the reaction I'd anticipated.

Bob didn't have anything against lesbians, the commingling of gay and lesbian genetic material, or progressive or subversive notions. As a lawyer, Bob had something against legal nightmares, which he was sure this plan of mine would become. When he got it out of me that I wouldn't be the legal parent, just a donor-dad, that the lesbians would have custody but that I would get to be “involved,” Bob promised me we would all wind up in court.

“What happens if they want to move out of state or out of the country?” Bob asked. “You're all friends now, but what if you have a falling out and they decide not to let you see ‘their’ child anymore? What if they want to send your beloved offspring to a vegan anarcho-syndicalist commune in Eastern Nevada? What if they break up? How are you going to work out custody and visitation among three adults? And if the lesbians die in a car accident or a plane crash, who gets the child? You? Their families? Some other lesbians?”

I confessed that I hadn't given any of these issues much thought.

“Well, give them some thought. If you do this, be prepared to take your lesbian friends to court, and be prepared to spend a buttload of money to win the right to see your kid.”

“I don't think we'll wind up in court,” I lamely offered.

“No one ever thinks they're going to wind up in court. But when people do stupid things, that's just where they find themselves. Don't do this,” he implored me. “If you want kids, adopt.”

I promised Bob I'd think about adoption, and decided I wouldn't tell him about my recent talks with our next-door neighbor.

Bob and his wife, Kate, have three kids. When Bob and Kate had difficulty getting pregnant, their first impulse was to head to a fertility clinic. After one unsuccessful, intrusive, stressful, hightech procedure (involving Dixie cups), they figured they weren't able to make bio-kids, accepted their infertility, and didn't waste more time by extracting eggs or implanting fetuses. First they adopted Lucy, and then, just after bringing home their second child, Gus, Bob and Kate discovered they weren't infertile after all. Kate very suddenly got very pregnant with Isobel.

Months later when I finally lost patience with the lesbians and things with our neighbor fell apart, I asked Bob for more information about adoption. Where had he and Kate adopted Lucy and Gus? What agency did they go through? Was the agency any good? How much did it cost? Did he think the agency would work with a gay couple?

“I know they've placed kids with lesbians,” Bob told me, “but I don't know if they've managed to place any with gay men.” The only gay couple he knew who had attempted to adopt through the agency “had a disruption,” agency-speak for having an adoption fall apart at the last minute. This was a newish agency, founded in Oregon, and Bob had helped open a branch in Seattle. It was organized around a radical new way of doing adoptions, and Bob felt confident they'd want to work with us.

“Open adoption may not be as subversive as gay men and lesbians making babies,” Bob said, “but it's still pretty subversive.”

Open adoption? I'd never heard the word adoption qualified before. Adoptions were adoptions, I thought, and all adoptions
were alike. You could adopt at home, go overseas, go through an agency, go through a lawyer, or go through the state. A woman who couldn't take care of her kid handed it over or had it taken away; then an agency or the state handed her kid over to a straight, married, middle-class couple. The records were sealed, the woman was encouraged to forget she ever had a kid, and when or whether to tell the kid it was adopted was left to the straight, married, middle-class couple to decide. That's adoption. Openness only came into play if an adult adopted child wanted her records unsealed, or if she went looking for her biological parents.

“Open adoption means the adoptive parents know their kids' birth mothers,” Bob explained. “The birth mom picks the adoptive parents from a pool of wannabe adoptive parents. We know Lucy and Gus's birth mothers. They met us before deciding to place the kids with us. They can visit us and the kids; we have an ongoing relationship.”

Open adoption sounded a lot more complicated than what I had wanted to do with lesbians. It sounded more complicated than even my deal with the next-door neighbor. The birth mom chooses? She comes to visit? What if she's a drunk or a drug addict? Won't the kid be confused? What if she wants her kid back?

Bob listened to my questions, told me I had it all wrong, and invited me and Terry over to dinner. He and Kate would explain things for us.

A week later, over pizza, Bob and Kate told us about open adoption.

In an open adoption, the birth mother selects the family her kid will be placed with out a pool of prescreened couples. Then the agency introduces the birth mom and the couple. If they hit it off, the agency helps them come to an agreement about the amount of contact they're going to have after the adoption takes place. Everything is negotiable. The agency works with the birth mom and the adoptive couple on an adoption agreement that sets out a minimum number of visits per year. If a birth mom wants more contact than the adoptive couple does, she's not the right birth mom for that couple. Before the adoption goes forward, the agency makes sure the birth mother and the adoptive couple are
on the same page. Doing an open adoption ensures the birth mom an ongoing relationship with her child. She doesn't have to pretend she never had a baby or that her baby died, as birth moms who do closed adoptions are still encouraged to do. Ironically, while the subject of visits is a touchy one initially for the adoptive couple, Bob and Kate told us that it's usually the adopting couples who want more contact once the adoption is final.

Fears about birth moms using drugs or showing up trying to reclaim their kids are rooted in false assumptions about the kind of women who give up their children for adoption.

“They say that women who have the least to offer as parents are likelier to keep their kids,” said Kate, who is also a lawyer. “Women who see that they have a future and who have something they want to accomplish in life, they're the ones who tend to place their kids for adoption. Women with little to look forward to tend to keep their kids. What else have they got, who else to love them?”

“But what if the birth mom sees the baby and decides she wants him back?” asked Terry.

“Apart from the fact that birth moms have no legal rights to have their kids ‘back’ once the adoption is final, women who place their kids in open adoptions are much less likely to
want
them back,” Bob said, picking up another slice of pizza. “Women who don't know where their children went, who adopted them, or how they're doing are the women who wind up regretting doing an adoption.”

“Think about it,” Kate said. “You're a woman, you're pregnant for nine months, you feel this little person growing inside you, you go through the incredibly emotional experience of giving birth and seeing your baby emerge from your body. If you chose closed adoption, your baby disappears. All your life you're going to wonder, ‘Is my baby okay? Is my baby happy? Who are his parents?’ The only way you can ever answer these questions is by trying to get him back. In open adoption, the birth mom can come and see that her baby is okay, and go on with her life. She is empowered by her decisions and soothed by the information she has about where her baby is. She knows, she doesn't have to worry. This isn't to say that there is no grieving or even remorse. But the birth mom doesn't have to deal with her emotions in a vacuum.”

I asked if open adoption confused their kids, Lucy and Gus.

“No, it only confuses adults,” said Bob.

And a two-minute conversation with five-year-old Lucy and three-year-old Gus made it clear that they weren't confused. They knew they were adopted. They knew who their birth-parents were. They knew who their real parents were. And they knew the difference.

At the seminar in Portland, we were learning more about open adoption, but thanks to our dinner with Bob and Kate, we had a leg up on some of the other couples in the room. Still, we had some things to learn.

A lawyer who specialized in adoption spoke on the first afternoon, and we learned that open adoption was legal in only three states: Oregon, Washington, and New Mexico. For an open-adoption agreement to be legally binding, either the birth mom or the adoptive couple had to live in one of these three states. Birth moms and adoptive couples in other states had drawn up open-adoption agreements, but these were not legally binding.

“The birth moms in these cases have no legal recourse, as their adoption agreement is just that, an agreement, and not a legally binding contract,” the lawyer said. “There have been cases of adoptive couples entering into open-adoption agreements, signing the papers, and then disappearing with the baby. These adoptive parents will, I hope, spend an awful long time in hell.”

The mood in the room was not much more relaxed than it was at the start of the day. The only couple sitting at the table that didn't seem so fragile that a loud noise could shatter them were Jack and Carol, who were sitting to our left. They were quick to laugh at the small jokes the lawyer made during his presentation and, sensing that we, too, had a sense of humor about this, they smiled at us conspiratorially.

The lawyer went on. In most states, before an adoption could be finalized, the agency had to make a good-faith effort to find the birth dad if he wasn't in the picture. Once he was found, the agency had to convince him to sign away his rights, which in most cases wasn't a problem. But some birth dads threw a wrench in the works.

“Birth fathers who deny consent aren't required to raise the
baby themselves, and the child can wind up in legal limbo, not wanted by his biological parents and yet not adoptable, either. It's a real problem in most states—but not in Oregon.”

Oregon's adoption laws were radically different from those in most other states. If a birth dad wasn't around, if he wasn't providing emotional and financial support during the pregnancy, under Oregon law he had already signed away his rights. The law in Oregon recognized that guys have orgasms and women have babies. Ignorance of pregnancy was no excuse: if a birth dad wasn't aware that the woman he'd screwed was pregnant, that was an indication he didn't have much of a relationship with her. Again, he had an orgasm, she was having a baby. Being present at the moment of conception didn't entitle a guy to much in Oregon.

“The best-case scenario,” the lawyer told us, “is that the birth mom who picks you lives in Oregon—or, if she lives in Washington or another state, that the birth father is supportive of her decision to adopt.”

Unfairly, if a woman decides to keep her baby, that guy who only had an orgasm could wind up making child-support payments for eighteen or twenty years. If the law in Oregon were consistent, guys should have had the option of accepting or rejecting paternity. That would have required a change in the law, which would have opened politicians to charges of being soft on deadbeat dads, so the law wasn't likely to change. My impartial advice to guys having one-night stands in Oregon would be to have them with other men.

As a consequence of eliminating the birth-dad problem, Oregon was widely considered the best American state in which to adopt. Those high-profile adoption disruptions of the last few years (which resulted in kids being taken from the only homes they'd ever known) were the result of birth fathers surfacing after the kid had been adopted. The twin specters of Baby Richard and Baby Jessica haunt couples adopting children, which is why when you flip through adoption magazines you'll see agencies advertising themselves with this line: “We specialize in Russian, Chinese, and Oregon adoptions.”

After the lawyer's presentation, some birth mothers were going to visit the seminar. Before they arrived, one of the agency's
“adoption specialists” talked with us about the kind of women who put their children up for open adoption.

“Adoptive parents tend to confuse women who have their children taken away from them by the state with women who make the choice to place their child for adoption,” said Jill.

We weren't supposed to say “put their kids up for adoption,” we learned. This expression was frowned upon in adoption circles, as it comes from the practice of loading orphaned urban children onto “orphan trains” and sending them out of cities and into rural areas to be “adopted.” When an orphan train arrived at a station, the children would be placed up on a platform for farmers to look over. Children who looked like they'd make good farmhands were “adopted,” and the rest got back on the train and headed for the next station.

“Culturally, there's a great deal of prejudice against women who place their children for adoption,” Jill continued. “Anyone who's doing an adoption should rid themselves of these prejudices, but it's especially important for people doing open adoptions to root them out, since you will be in contact with your birth mothers.”

The couples in the room asked the same questions of Jill that Terry and I asked of Bob and Kate months ago. What if the birth mom is a drug addict? What if she wants her kid back? Won't the children be confused?