The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant (18 page)

We were supposed to pick up Melissa in front of Outside In, not at her apartment—her idea. When we pulled up, Melissa walked over to the car, said she'd be a minute, and disappeared into the building. People over twenty-one are not allowed in Outside In except on official business, like our first meeting with Melissa and Laurie. Now that our calls on Melissa were social, we had to wait outside with the rest of the grown-ups. While we stood on the sidewalk, three homeless kids came out of the building and stood on the porch. They were checking us out.

We smiled and nodded like a couple of squares. Two went back into the building, but a large girl with pink hair and a ring through her nose lit a cigarette and came down to get a closer look.

“You're the guys?” she asked. It wasn't a question, but an assessment. Terry confirmed that, yes, we were the guys.

“Melissa likes you. She's cool, totally my favorite person. I think this is great, you know, this whole thing you three are doing. It's really radical.”

We hadn't sought their approval, but it was nice to know Portland's homeless youth approved of gay adoption. What appealed to the girl with the pink hair and the nose ring wasn't Terry and me becoming parents, though, but how “radical” it was for gay men to adopt a homeless girl's baby. She and Melissa were outsiders—literally—and gay people are outsiders too. If Melissa was going to give her kid away, the girl with the nose ring said it was only right the kid should go to other outsiders. That was “radical.”

Melissa came out of the house, tied her dog up on the porch, and walked straight up to us. She didn't look at the girl with the pink hair, who turned and walked back into the house. We exchanged heys.

“Your friend approves,” I said. “She thinks this is radical.”

Melissa shrugged. “She's not my friend.”

We had about an hour to kill before Melissa's appointment, and Terry asked if she wanted to get something to eat.

Melissa looked away, shrugged, and said, “I don't care.”

By now I was beginning to suspect that in Melissa-speak, “I don't care” meant yes, and “I don't know” meant no. So I insisted we go get some food. Ten minutes later we were sitting in Hamburger Mary's, an antiques- and tchotchke-filled burger joint that had definitely seen hipper (and cleaner) days. Melissa, another week bigger, had trouble squeezing into the booth, and while we waited for our food to come, Terry asked her how things were going.

Melissa had been caught sitting in a park the police had banned her from for three months. The same cop had caught her sleeping there a couple of times and warned her that if he found her in the park again, asleep or awake, he'd arrest her, she'd have to spend a night in jail, and she'd be fined.

“They think that's supposed to scare us,” Melissa said. “ ‘You'll have to spend the night in jail.’ You sleep in a bed, they feed you, and you walk out. It's better than sleeping in the rain.”

What worried Melissa was the $200 fine, which she had ninety days to pay.

“I told the judge I couldn't pay it, that it wasn't like I had any money. I mean, that's
why
I was sleeping in the park. But he didn't give a shit.”

If Melissa didn't pay the fine in ninety days, a warrant would be issued for her arrest. If she was stopped for anything by any cop—and gutter punks are always getting stopped by the police— she'd have to spend a couple of months in jail.

“It doesn't really matter for me,” Melissa said, “but who would take care of my animals?”

It occurred to me that we didn't know the names of Melissa's dog and cat.

I wasn't sure Melissa had even told us their names. We'd seen her dog twice, and Melissa didn't introduce us, and we'd never seen her cat, which was always inside Outside In. Melissa took pride in how well she cared for her animals despite living on the street. She didn't like to be separated from them even for the hour or two she had to spend with us or at the doctor's. But when she talked about them it didn't seem as if she enjoyed them much. They were a burden; she had trouble finding people she could trust to watch them when she had to be away, and she had a hard time traveling with them.

“No one will pick up a hitchhiker with two animals,” she explained, “so that rules out cars.” Melissa rode the rails instead, jumping on box cars in train yards and hoping they were going in the direction she wanted to go. Listening to her talk about jumping trains, I asked how she managed when carrying two animals.

“My cat goes in my pack,” she said, looking at me as if I were the dumbest person she'd ever met, “and I don't have to carry my dog. Dogs can jump, you know. Anyway, getting on trains is the easy part,” said Melissa. “It's getting off that can be hard.”

She pointed to the scar above her eye. She was riding the rails with another kid late last summer, pregnant at the time though she didn't know it. The train was pulling through the town they were headed to in Montana, and it started picking up speed.

“Right after this town there's, like, a seven-mile-long tunnel. The tunnel fills up with the engine's exhaust and you can suffocate in it.” They stayed on the train as long as they could, hoping it would slow down. It didn't. The train started into the tunnel.

“We had to get off so we jumped.”

“With the dog and cat?” Terry asked.

“Yep.”

She hit the ground hard, and smashed her head against a rock, ripping open her forehead.

“It was a pretty deep cut,” she said. “But I was just glad my animals didn't get hurt.” Her friend was hurt too, and probably they both should've seen a doctor. “But we didn't have any money and we didn't have anyone to leave the animals with.”

“Are you going to pay the fine?” Terry asked, steering the conversation back to Melissa's run-in with the law.

“No. Anyway, in ninety days, I won't be pregnant anymore and I won't be in Portland anymore. I'm going up to Seattle, and then I'm heading to New York. It's not like they're going to come and get me.”

Paying Melissa's fine occurred to me, but two things worked against the idea. First, birth-mother expenses were handled by the agency—we wrote a check to the agency for Melissa's rent; the agency wrote her landlord a check—to keep any money from changing hands between birth mothers and adoptive couples. Second, getting Melissa out of this jam could establish a very dangerous precedent. While we could afford to buy Melissa a steak when she wanted it, we probably couldn't afford to get her out of every jam the gutter-punk lifestyle can get a girl into.

Instead of offering to pay her fine, I brought up my arrest record. At three different ACT-UP demonstrations in the early nineties, I was hauled away in handcuffs, once from the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Along with two hundred others, I was arrested, held for ten hours in a room with no food, water, or toilets, and ordered to appear in court two weeks later. Two days later, though, I was back at home, with no intention of returning to Washington, D.C., until I'd been elected to Congress.

Melissa listened to my stories of being booked and sitting in holding cells. She nodded at me, and I could feel the beginnings of a bond. Terry liked the same music she did, and I'd been arrested. Melissa and I were fugitives, running from the law. Finally we shared something.

With Melissa in the back of our rental car, Terry drove us up the winding road to OHSU. Why would anyone put a hospital on top of a hill? I wondered. How do ambulances make it up in time to save anyone's life? We turned off the main road and drove past an emergency room I hope I never have to get to in a hurry. OHSU is a collection of buildings from the twenties, fifties, and seventies clumped together over three or four acres; the place feels more like a college campus than a hospital complex.

By the time we found the parking lot and made our way to the prenatal care clinic, we were late for Melissa's appointment. She signed in, and the three of us—two fags and a gutter punk—sat reading
Parenting
magazine while we waited for Melissa's name to
be called. The first part of the appointment included a physical, and we weren't invited. When the nurse called her name, Melissa disappeared down the hall, leaving Terry and me alone in the waiting room.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I'm fine.” Terry shrugged. “I thought I'd be upset, but I'm not. I'm okay.”

I'd seen Terry get upset about his dad. His family learned the day before Thanksgiving that his father's second liver had failed and that the cancer had spread. He died five weeks later, two days after Christmas. A couple of years afterward, we were at my place getting ready to go to a friend's house on Thanksgiving when Terry walked into the bedroom and told me he missed his father. I didn't even look up.

“Really,” I said, “hand me my shoe.”

I didn't understand why he was bringing his father up; we were late for the party. He had told me his father died around the holidays, but he hadn't told me the dates, or if he had I wasn't paying attention. Anyway, we were late for dinner, I thought, what's with this dad stuff ? Terry sat on the bed and started to sob. I dropped my shoe, held Terry, and apologized for being the World's Worst Boyfriend. Having seen what Thanksgiving can do to Terry, I assumed that being back at OHSU would be hard on him. But he seemed fine, and when the nurse told us Melissa's physical would take about twenty minutes, I suggested we go get something to drink in the cafeteria. We walked through a skyramp into another building, made our way to the elevators, and went down to the cafeteria. I got tea, Terry got coffee, we paid, we sat down in the dining room.

And it hit.

The ward where Terry's father had died was in another building. But this cafeteria was where bad news was passed from mother to sons, as they sat staring at food they couldn't make themselves eat. Terry didn't break down; he just needed to get the hell out of there. We took our drinks and headed back for the elevators.

“This is just so weird, being back here,” he said. “God, I hate Portland.”

* * *

When we returned to the prenatal care clinic, Melissa was looking for us. Her checkup had gone well. If we wanted to meet her hospital social worker, Melissa said, rolling her eyes, we'd need to go and sit in a counseling room with her and wait.

The room was small, windowless, and stuffy, and the three of us waited in silence for the social worker to show up. Despite having access to a shower and laundry room, Melissa still smelled like a homeless person. So far as we could tell, she hadn't bathed since we met her, or washed her clothes. On the street or in restaurants we didn't notice, but in a tiny room or a car, we could tell Melissa didn't do soap. She didn't smell filthy—she didn't reek—but her scent was strong and, in enclosed spaces, not very pleasant. I could only imagine what the doctor who did her physical thought.

The door opened and a less glamorous version of Laurie walked into the room, carrying a clipboard. Nancy was bright and cheerful, delighted to meet Terry and me, and she chirped “Hello” at Melissa, who faked a half-smile. She led us through a conversation about the birth; what Melissa needed to do when labor started, what floor she'd be on, how long Melissa could stay at the hospital after the birth. Nancy asked if she could make a note in Melissa's chart about a gay couple adopting her baby.

“That way, no confusion or misunderstanding, 'kay?” Nancy said.

“ 'Kay.”

As long as she was making notes, Melissa asked Nancy to make a note about drugs. When she went into labor, Melissa wanted drugs and lots of them. She didn't want to be in pain at all during this birth, and she wanted the drugs to come early and often. Nancy explained that there were only certain times during labor when drugs could be administered; Melissa needed to come to the hospital as soon as she went into labor to ensure that she got all the drugs she had coming. She made a note in Melissa's chart about her concerns.

Nancy asked us if there were any other issues, and I said yes. I explained to Nancy that we'd been playing it cool with our friends about Melissa picking us, in case she changed her mind about us or about adoption.

“We realized that we've been playing it cool with Melissa too,” I said, “and we probably shouldn't. We want her to know that
we're excited about being dads and we're happy she picked us,” I continued, looking at Nancy and talking about Melissa as if she weren't sitting in the room with us. “But we want to respect Melissa's right to change her mind, and keep the baby if that's what she wants to do. I think we maybe were worried that acting too excited would make Melissa feel like she had to give the baby up. I think not letting ourselves get carried away was a way to respect her rights.”

Melissa and Terry were looking at me as if I were insane.

“I mean, do you feel pressure not to change your mind?” I asked.

“I don't feel any pressure,” Melissa said, shrugging. “If I change my mind, someone else will pick you.”

She said it matter-of-factly, and she meant to be comforting, but Melissa really spooked us. After we dropped her off at Outside In, Terry and I talked about what had seemed a hypothetical—Melissa changing her mind—now seeming like a very real possibility. What if Melissa was the only birth mother on earth who would see our picture and think, “That's them”? There might not be another “Susan” out there, we worried, and if we went back into the pool, there might not be someone else that would pick us.

I
couldn't keep the news from my mother any longer; I was chokingon guilt. Telling Mom would invite some jinx-y energy into our lives, but not telling her was becoming more difficult. Whenever we talked on the phone, she asked if we'd heard anything from the agency. Before we went into the pool, I'd explained that the average wait was a year. Whenever she asked what was up, I reminded her that we'd only just jumped into the pool.

“Well, I've got my fingers crossed. I'm rooting for you.”

“It's not a race, Mom. And, anyway, no one gets picked in the first month. It's going to be a while.”

“Well, I'll keep you guys in my thoughts.”

That's code: when my mother says she'll keep us “in her thoughts” what she means is “in her prayers,” but she defers to my delicate atheistic sensibilities and doesn't mention prayer.

By this point, of course, we had been picked. Most of our friends and coworkers knew about Melissa, and we'd told them that barring “BBD/BCM,” Terry and I would be dads in a few weeks. But our parents didn't have a clue. Since my mother and her husband live outside Chicago, and Terry's mom and stepdad live at the other end of Washington state, keeping the news from them was easier than keeping it from our friends and coworkers. We had to get time off work to go to Portland, and when friends were over we were constantly on the phone with the agency and generally acting like dorks. Our friends demanded answers. But our parents? All they knew was that lately we were a little harder to get hold of.

Even if our parents had been in town we wouldn't have told
them about Melissa right away. Our friends could keep calm, and they understood why we weren't letting ourselves get excited. We could say “BBD/BCM” to our friends. When we begged off the baby shower, Terry's coworkers understood. But our parents? By which I mean, But my mother? My mother treats every occasion—every trip to the corner store, every birthday, every holiday—like the invasion of Normandy. Every contingency must be planned for, every worst possible outcome must be imagined and prepared for, and everything and anything that might be needed must be packed in.

For example, when I was suddenly making grown-up money for the first time in my life, I made good on a promise I'd given my mother when I was a child: I took her to Europe for New Year's Eve. When we were getting ready to leave for the airport, I took a long look at my mother's suitcase. I was the sherpa who'd be lugging her bag from Zurich to Vienna to Munich and back to Chicago, and I had a stake in just how heavy it was. The bag she'd packed was a little bigger than, oh, the state of Vermont, though it weighed more. I opened it up to see what was in there, and what did I find among the ten pairs of shoes, the rolls of toilet paper, and the case of Tic Tacs? Chocolate. My mother was taking a two-pound bag of crappy American chocolate on a trip to
Switzerland
. I pulled the chocolate out and begged my mother to leave it behind, assuring her that, yes, we could get all the chocolate we might need on our trip to Switzerland
in
Switzerland.

“But we might need some on the plane or at night in the hotel,” Mom insisted, shoving the bag of M&Ms back into her bag. “And it's not that heavy.”

Okay. Why three pairs of boots? Why toilet paper? Why Tic Tacs?

“My feet hurt if I don't wear different shoes every day, and we're going to be doing a lot of walking. Phyllis from work went to Europe once and there wasn't any toilet paper in her hotel room. And I like Tic Tacs.”

I was willing to concede (and carry) everything else, but I insisted she leave the chocolate behind. My mother responded that she needed everything she'd packed, and that if the chocolate wasn't coming, she wasn't coming. She was a grown woman, and who was I to tell her what she couldn't bring on this trip?

We fought long and loud, as is our family custom, before I finally
gave up. And I carried that two-pound bag of Peanut M&Ms from Chicago to Zurich to Vienna to Munich and back to Chicago. We never opened it, never touched the stuff, and what chocolate we ate on our trip was purchased en route. When I pointed this out to my mother once we'd arrived safely back in Chicago, she said she “felt better” knowing she had chocolate in her bag, “just in case.”

Just in case of what?

“Just in case we wanted chocolate.”

My mother being the kind of woman who carries chocolate to Switzerland “just in case,” we had a good idea what to expect once we told her we'd been picked: baby stuff, tons of it, in the mail, every day, and three or four of everything “just in case.” I imagined a typical conversation:

“Mom, why did you send us three car seats?”

“A woman from work, her daughter had an ultrasound, and the doctor said she was having one baby, just one. She goes into the hospital and comes home with three. Triplets, Danny! If Melissa has just one baby, you can return the other two car seats, but I thought, you know, just in case.”

“But we already bought a car seat, Mom.”

“Well, then pick the one you like the best and get rid of the other three. I won't be hurt if you don't use any of the car seats I sent.”

Also, we were making a conscious effort not to fill our house with baby stuff for fear of, well, of our apartment filling up with baby stuff. If anything went wrong, we didn't want to wind up sitting in a house full of baby stuff with no baby. Since the call came, we'd allowed ourselves to buy exactly one thing for the baby: that flannel shirt from Baby Gap. That was it. Three weeks to go, and we had no crib, no diapers, no bottles, no car seats, no bibs, no rattles, no onesies—no nothing. In case this adoption fell through—BBD/BCM—we weren't going to be tormented by empty car seats and unused diapers. We weren't going make the same mistake that other gay couple made—no, we were going to make new mistakes.

To keep the news from my mother, we had to keep it from Terry's mother too. Our mothers had joined the information age. They were e-mailing each other daily, and anything we told
Claudia would be shared with Judy in five minutes flat. On the other hand, while we feared an overexcited shop-happy grandma reaction from my mother, we dreaded the opposite from Terry's mom.

Not that Claudia had a problem with Terry being a homo; she didn't. She had a picture of us hanging on a wall in her living room. But the Christmas letter that covered every aspect of her straight son's life while neglecting to mention that her gay son was, for all intents and purposes, pregnant had given us some indication of his mother's feelings. Terry dreaded telling her about Melissa—and her first grandchild!—because he expected an underwhelmed response. Terry's mother wasn't the most expressive person to begin with, and it was sometimes hard to tell when she was excited or pleased. We might not be able to tell the difference between her usual unflappable demeanor and disapproval, and we might overscrutinize her reaction to the news and misread it. Maybe she thought what we were doing was great. Or maybe she didn't mind having a gay son but gay adoption crossed the line for her. We were about to find out.

My stepfather, Jerry, answered the phone when I called to lay the news on them. We spoke for a few minutes, discussing the things men and their stepfathers discuss, and said good-bye when my mother clicked on the line. I let her have it:

“Mom, we got picked. Her name is Melissa, the baby is due March twenty-second, and it looks like it's going to happen.”

“Oh, my God! That's wonderful! When did you get the call?”

I was afraid she'd ask me that. Telling my mom that she was among the last to hear the news was something I dreaded. My mom and I are close, and she likes to be the first to know when anything important happens in my life.

“Three weeks ago.”

“Ahhhhhhh! Jerry! They got the call three weeks ago! What day? What day?”

“On a Saturday.”

“I KNEW IT!”

I could hear my mother jumping up and down.

On the day the call came, she and Jerry were eating at the Chinese restaurant they went to on their first date: “We've been eating in Chinese restaurants for ten years, Danny, and this has never
happened before. We never got the same fortune in our cookies before, not once. And what was our fortune three weeks ago? ‘Good news will come by phone.’ In both our cookies! I looked at Jerry and said, ‘Dan and Terry got picked.’ I knew it! Aha! I KNEW IT!”

Mom saved the fortunes, “for the baby book,” and would bring them out when she came to see the baby. We talked about Melissa for a long time, and just when I thought I was in the clear my mother asked why on earth we'd waited three weeks to tell her.

“Because babies are born dead, and birth mothers change their minds.”

“Danny!”

“This could still fall through, Mom. They call it a disruption. And we didn't want to do anything that might jinx things, like blabbing about the baby or Melissa to our friends and family. Acting like the baby is ours before he really is would jinx things.”

I told her about the other gay couple and their house full of baby stuff, and told her we weren't buying anything.

“And we don't want you sending crates of stuff either,” I explained. “Are you listening to me? No shopping. Don't buy things for a baby that isn't really ours yet, okay?”

There was a short, stunned silence. And then, the deluge.

We had to shop! We had to prepare! With a tone in her voice I'd never heard her use before, she warned me that if we didn't start shopping we would be bad parents. There was another person in the picture—her second grandson—and he had to be provided for. There was a life at stake.

“There's going to be this little person in your life who's dependent on you guys for everything,” Mom said, “and when you get him home and he needs a blanket or he has a fever and you need a thermometer, you can't say, ‘Sorry, little person, we'd have everything we need to take care of you in our house but we didn't want to jinx things!’ You're going to be parents in a few weeks! You have to get ready!”

Mom had a point.

She wanted to start shopping that afternoon, but she didn't want to feel guilty about it. She wanted my blessing, but I wasn't budging. I explained again about the other gay couple: they had
showers, they sent out announcements, their house was full of baby stuff, and then . . . no baby.

“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.