Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?: Confessions of a Gay Dad (24 page)

“Okay, Daddy!” he said happily. He squeezed me tightly, sensing my rattled nerves. “I’m okay,” he said sweetly. “Can I go on the slide?”

I took his hand as we made our way to the giant inflated tiger, assuring Eliza we’d be right back and she was not to move a muscle until we were.

Having been raised by my mother—who was raised, in turn, by the ultimate worrier,
her
mother—I have no doubt from which family line this particular “panic blood” originates.

My mother and her mother, whom we all called Babe (
Ba-beh
), were both émigrés. My mom came to the United States from Argentina in the early sixties. Her mother had left Poland in the thirties and gone first to Uruguay, then Buenos Aires. It wasn’t exactly a cozy time in European history. And Argentina was—well, whatever words best describe the
opposite
of political and economic stability. Every day was a coup d’état-a-palooza. It’s no wonder, then, that both these women went through their lives with what I call a
gasp reflex
, normally reserved for seeing a person fall through a sheet of ice or collide with a tree or trip over a pant leg and land headfirst in a wedding cake. With these women, the gasp
reflex was activated when a dollop of cream cheese dripped off a piece of toast or when a plate of food arriving in a restaurant was much larger than they’d imagined. (
Gasp!
“That can’t all be for me! What? It’s too much!
Tell them too much!
”) There was never a dearth of drama in my mother’s house when I was growing up. I’d like to think there’s a little less in mine, thirty years later.

Connecting to the mother in me goes far deeper than my tendency to picture the abduction of my children or gasping at a puddle of spilled maple syrup. I discovered something all parents must feel deep within themselves: a boundless desire and responsibility to nurture and protect. I imagine it’s what people call the “maternal instinct.” I’m sure countless other men have shared the feeling, which makes me want to lobby to change the term to “parental instinct.” What’s so female about this feeling anyway? If a sense of
mommyness
is tied to having breasts filled with milk and kids latched onto them for mealtimes, then yes, I’m out. But there’s more to it.

In a home where no conventional mommy exists, Don and I, by definition both dads, are freed from the shackles of traditional gender roles and allowed to explore the gamut of parental emotions and impulses. And as gay fathers we have a different challenge, one less obvious. No, I’m not talking about hiding porn. (Though watch out for particularly adventurous and agile little shelf climbers.) More challenging still is finding the balance between the parts of us that are distinctly
dad
and those qualities that are, in a sense, maternal.

I love to roughhouse and play games, carry the kids on my shoulders, put on magic shows for them, and have them
watch me while I shave, as I did with my own dad. Put me at a soccer practice or in front of a stack of blocks, a train set, or a Matchbox racetrack, and I’m in heaven. But the feeling of nursing a scrape or holding the kids when they’re sick, having them curled up in my lap during story time, or carrying their sleeping bodies into bed, their heads nuzzling the crook of my neck—how do I describe that? Does it need a label? Is that mommyness? Or isn’t it all just “parentness”? And can both of us dads play all these roles in turn?

Sometimes Don takes on a more nurturing role, sometimes I do. Sometimes he’s the disciplinarian, sometimes I am. I assume this volley of roles occurs in all families—with gay parents and straight ones. But in a traditional male/female relationship, society neatly organizes activities and responsibilities by gender. So no one expects they should be performing a task in the other gender’s To Do list.

I walked into the home of our dear friends Michael and Mary, the beloved godparents of Eliza and Jonah. He had his iPad open on his lap while watching a baseball game on the TV, while Mary was running a bath for the kids and had just put a pizza in the oven. There was a comforting predictability to it. It felt appropriate and natural. Despite the fact that both are breadwinners and each has sometimes had to work while the other watched the kids, each tends to gravitate to their more natural, evolutionary role: mom in the hut with the kids while dad is out hunting. Granted, in this case, he was hunting on eBay for a new computer charger. But it was a charger he needed for his work. There is still that very natural, clean division of roles. When Don and I arrived, our kids joined theirs in the tub. I joined Mary in bath-time
prep. Don joined Michael in a debate over an external wireless speaker for the TV. But within a few minutes Don and I traded places. Don and Mary dried and dressed the kids, after which Michael and I brought the kids outside for a pre-dinner soccer game.

The lines are blurred in a same-sex marriage. We have the added challenge, or privilege, to expand who we are with our kids. Whether you call it “maternal” or “paternal” care, the kids are getting both. And sometimes there’s a bit of a negotiation that has to happen for us to figure out who needs to do what and when. And sure, sometimes that brings up feelings of competition. But usually we know how to defer to each other’s particular parental strengths and inclinations.

Don’s got a natural “daddyness” gene. He loves bouncing babies on his knees. He loves the sound of children playing while he reads the paper. He throws them in the car to run errands with them or lets them help him wash his car. He’s also great when it’s time to put a bicycle rack on the back of the car or fix a broken toy. The man was born to use a toolbox and a glue gun.

If it’s not obvious already, I do tend to gravitate to a kind of mommyness that Don doesn’t spark to. I like getting the kids dressed, cutting their fingernails, laying out paper and paint, and making puppets out of old socks. But most of all, I love cooking with them. And for them. And yet again, this inevitably and predictably links me to my own mother and hers and generations of Jewish mothers before them.

Last weekend, the kids and I donned our aprons and rolled up our sleeves, as we’ve done countless times before, to make our “famous” banana pancakes. Jonah held the eggs,
Eliza a cupful of batter mix, and I orchestrated the timing of each ingredient. The kids turned away as I mashed the banana with my fingers, as they find it “too grossy.” But once the pancakes hit the griddle, the kids ran to their seats and waited for me to serve. There’s something that feels so purely uncomplicated and satisfying about feeding my kids—and about the joy it brings them and me.

After breakfast, I opened the kitchen doors to run outside with the kids. In a pocket between a wooden beam and the eave of the roof, we noticed a tiny bird’s nest. The kids were freaking out with excitement. I looked over at Don, who smiled, stood up with a sigh, and headed for the garage to get the ladder.

“The nest may be an old one, okay guys?” I felt the need to manage expectations. “The eggs may be gone. Or maybe it’s not finished being built. There may be nothing to see. Let Daddy look first, okay? And if there are any eggs, I’ll let you guys climb up and look.”

Don brought me the ladder and I propped it against the house and started climbing. I feared the worst—that whatever was in that nest had gone the way of the angry tit’s chick. I imagined the bird version of a tragic Lifetime TV movie—
If These Twigs Could Talk
—as I walked up each rung. When I reached the top, I looked inside and there, to my delight, were two tiny just-hatched birds.

I brought the kids up to look and they gasped and smiled, whispering “so cute” over and over again. I smiled, thinking
pot calling the kettle . .
. We stepped down and moved the ladder back to the garage. When we came back, we noticed a bird had flown to the nest to tend to its young. The bird was
pecking food into the open beaks of the chicks. The three of us just stood there, staring at it—at
Nature
. I was amazed that within just a few days, I had been confronted with the best and worst of it: its arbitrary ruthlessness and cruelty on the one hand, and the beautiful efficiency of it on the other.

Finally, Eliza proclaimed, “That’s the mama.” She spoke with such certainty, it surprised me.

“How do you know, sweetie? Could be the daddy,” I proposed.

“No.” Jonah sided with his sister. “The mama feeds the babies.”

Eliza nodded. And there it was. I smiled. She wasn’t wrong. I looked up at the bird but thought about the sadness of the one outside my office. It’s a lot, what life puts us through—us mama birds. It’s a lot. But worth it.

W
e had taken a wrong turn at the park one day and wandered smack into a “Pet Adoption Day.” It was cleverly decorated with balloons so we joined the other parents cursing under their breath and stopped to look. The kids were jumping up and down to see a lab puppy named Buster, but right away a volunteer was making a hard sell for the “tripod” dog, a terrier mix with only three legs.

“Bugsy got hit by a car and then left on the side of the road like trash. These dogs aren’t wanted and then they’re abused and discarded until we can get them adopted. That’s why Bugsy needs to be adopted. Please adopt her. Adoption is her only chance!”

She said “adopt” or “adoption” no fewer than twenty times. I counted. Don and I looked at each other, praying she’d stop talking. We also were praying this wasn’t the one time our kids were actually paying attention to this grownup continuously linking “adoption” to “trash.” That certainly wasn’t what our kids’ adoption was about. But neither of us is too sure our kids have a full understanding of the word “adoption” in the first place. We both have managed to avoid the word for, oh, six years now.

“These dogs and cats are so lucky! They’re in the park today so that they can meet the true parents, er, I mean,
owners
that they were always destined to have!” I say, and make myself a little sick with my over-the-top smileyness.

Don wants to make sure they get the message: “Do you know what ‘destined’ means, kids? It’s when something is meant to be. You see?” The kids are trying to get the puppies to lick their hands. As usual, we were sweating and they couldn’t care less. There were puppies!

The story of how Eliza and Jonah came to be our kids is a story we’ve told them again and again since they were born. But it didn’t involve the word “adoption.” When Eliza was six months old, we started telling her “the story of Eliza Rose.” Every night we’d take her through the little fairy tale and she’d look at us with deep focus and curiosity. We knew she didn’t really understand but she loved it nonetheless. It was always the same:

“Once upon a time there were two guys named Papi and Daddy and they were very, very, very happy together. There was only one thing they wanted but didn’t have: a baby girl they could call their own. Then one day a girl named Monica called us and said, ‘I have just the baby for you and she’s growing inside my tummy. And you will be her parents!’ So Papi and Daddy went to the hospital and held Monica’s hand as Eliza Rose came out of her tummy and into our arms, and we were so happy. But we weren’t the only ones who were happy. No. Our dog, Basia, was happy. And your abuela and grandma and grandpa were happy. And your aunts Amy and Lolo and Ruthy and Ellen were happy . . . And Aunt Mary and Uncle Michael were happy . . .” And we’d
run down the names of all the important people in her life. (This was our resident atheist Don’s attempt to reframe the usual nighttime litany of loved ones that begins “And God bless . . .”) When Jonah was born, we told him the story too, with all the necessary amendments. This became our way of sharing with them the wonderfully special way in which we became a family. But we always knew that the story would have to change shape and evolve as the kids did.

We’ve read and been told how adoption is a complicated issue for kids and you can’t predict how they will react as they get older. So we just agreed we’d answer any questions they had honestly. We acted on the belief that if the kids didn’t ask, they weren’t wondering. Of course that might not have been true. But it was so much easier than trying to guess where they were on the topic and then figuring out how to explain it. It wasn’t tricky to explain how they grew out of the love we
and
our birth mom all had for them before they were even born. It will be significantly more complicated when it’s time to explain why our two kids are full siblings and have four siblings or half siblings who don’t live with us. I can barely wrap my brain around it. I can’t imagine how a kid processes that kind of information. It’s much easier to say nothing. Or wait for them to ask. Or lie. Or pretend they came out of me.

Standing at the park with all these puppies barking for the chance to live somewhere warm and cozy, it occurred to me that the cute little story we told our kids was no longer enough. I don’t remember ever making a decision with Don
not
to mention the word “adoption.” We just don’t remember ever choosing to mention it. Around the time Eliza was
two and Jonah a newborn, a touchy-feely therapist friend bought us this creepy doll named Midge, one of Barbie’s BFs, who came dressed in a maternity shirt and a nine-month pregnant belly that attached to her body with magnets. It came with a tiny doll of a baby that fit snugly inside. Riding my newfound determination to explain things to the kids, I decided to get two male dolls to round out the “family.” One was Ken, always a classic, and the other was some dude I call Biff. Biff had blond hair, wore two earrings, and couldn’t look gayer if he came out of the box with a poodle, a rainbow Speedo, and a real estate license. I sat the kids in front of the dolls and explained how Papi and Daddy were lucky that Eliza and Jonah grew inside Midge’s tummy even though they were going to be
our
children. “It’s called being adopted. And it’s a wonder—”

Eliza cut me off. “Not Midge. Monica!” she said, correcting me.