The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant (19 page)

A priest rushed to the hospital to baptize premature Billy; this was before Vatican II, and if little Billy died unbaptized, he wouldn't have gone to heaven. But God, all merciful, took pity on my shower-havin' mother and let Billy live, much to my grandmother's dismay.

This story makes my grandmother sound like an ogre. While she was a suicidal alcoholic who took out her anger at the world on her oldest child, my mother,
my
memories of Grandmother Hollahan are sweet. But I didn't spend my high school years pulling her head out of the oven, and she didn't wear black to my wedding. Until I was ten years old, my family lived in the same two-flat apartment building my mother had grown up in. My grandparents and a couple of my mother's siblings lived downstairs; we lived upstairs. We were multigenerational in a way that seemed perfectly natural then—we weren't the only family on the block sharing a two-flat. All I remember is a sweet old lady with syrupy breath who used to pop her dentures out of her mouth to
scare us, and handed candy out the back door to the kids in the neighborhood after school. When I was in the first grade, my grandmother died in her sleep.

“You're resurrecting a fine old tradition, Danny, not having a baby shower. Your grandmother would be proud.”

The same day I told my mother, Terry told his.

Terry gets annoyed when I describe his mother as cold. She isn't cold, he insists, just a little standoffish, and not so gabby as certain members of my family. While Terry's mom doesn't believe in asking intrusive questions, like “How are you?” she's still a warm and loving mom; just quiet and undemonstrative.

But she isn't cold. Nonetheless, when he picked up the phone he feared a cold reaction most. He told Claudia we'd been picked, told her the due date, told her the baby was a boy, and told her we were naming him after Terry's father and Claudia's late husband, Daryl. Terry's mother said, “Wow, that was really fast. You didn't have to wait long, did you?”

And that was all she said. She changed the subject, she and Terry talked for a few more minutes about other things: a trip she and Dennis, Terry's stepfather, would be taking to Alaska; her garden; Terry's absolutely fascinating older brother. Then they hung up.

A minute passed, and the phone rang.

“Do you want us to bring the crib over?”

The crib is a family heirloom: Terry's grandmother bought it in a Montana junk store in the forties, and no one knows for sure how old it is. It was Terry's mother's when she was a baby, then his older brother Tom's, then Terry's. It hadn't been used in twenty-five years, and was sitting in his grandmother's basement.

“When you went into the pool, I went over to Grandma's to see if it was still there, and to see what kind of shape it was in,” Claudia said. “It looks good. And the mattress you used is still in there, and smells fine. No mold or anything. I thought it might be nice for your son to have your, and my, crib. You want us to bring it over?”

Terry said yes, he'd like that very much.

“Dennis has a meeting in Seattle in two weeks”—the day before
the baby was due—“and we'll bring over the crib then. Okay?”

Okay.

Before she hung up, Claudia asked Terry what my mother wanted to be called: Grandma Judy? Grandmother? Gramma Judy?

My mother had been signing letters to us “Grandma” since we went to the seminar six months ago.

“We're pretty sure she want to be Grandma Judy,” Terry said.

“Good. I want to be Grammy. Grammy Claudia, okay?”

Okay.

She asked if she could relay the news to Tom, and Terry told her that would be fine.

When he was about to hang up, Terry said, “Bye, Mom.”

“Oh, no. Call me Grammy. I have to get used to it.”

Apparently, Claudia was warming up to the idea.

When we let our families know, I forgot to tell my father. Not only didn't he know we'd been picked, he didn't even know we were adopting. He called me the day after I told my mother; he and his wife JoEllyn were coming up for a couple of days. Could we get together for dinner?

My parents divorced when I was seventeen years old, more than half my life ago. When my father moved out, in the summer of '82; he left my mother with four teenagers, no money, and no property. But the spookiest thing about his leaving was what little impact it seemed to have on our physical home. His desk disappeared, my mother was destroyed, and were it not for the generosity of our next-door neighbors and landlords, Kathy and Denis Paluch, who never raised our rent again, we would've been homeless. But everything else was right where it had been the day before. It was as if my father had never been there at all.

I'd been planning to come out to my mother that summer, but I couldn't bring myself to tell the weeping divorced lady that— surprise!—one of her kids was gay, too. I put off coming out to her for two more years.

My mother tells me that early in our lives my father was very involved, much more than other fathers were at the time, and that he was a great dad. My early memories of him are colored by the
strain my sexuality put on our relationship and by the pain of the divorce. Quack therapists who claim they can “repair” gay men believe poor relationships between father and son are the root cause of homosexuality. If only I'd bonded properly with my father in childhood, they argue, I wouldn't spend so much time fantasizing about bondage with Matt Damon today.

These quacks fail to take the obvious into consideration: gay boys sometimes have strained relationships with their fathers
because
they're gay. My homosexuality damaged my relationship with my father; my damaged relationship with my father did not create my homosexuality. Of his three sons, I was the only one who hated sports, baked cakes, and listened to musical comedy. Something about me just wasn't right in his eyes, and while I know in my heart he loved me, I was painfully aware that he didn't understand me and that I embarrassed him. By the time I was old enough to realize what my thing for musical comedy meant, my dad had figured it out a long time ago.

And, of course, by that time much of the damage was already done. One of my most painful childhood memories is of my father explaining to my mother why Anita Bryant was right about “the gays.” I was in the backseat of our green Chevy Nova, wedged among my three oblivious siblings. “The gays are a threat to society economically because they don't fall in love, get married, settle down, and have kids. They don't buy cars or washing machines or lawn mowers. So gay rights will mean fewer jobs for people who make cars, washing machines, and lawn mowers. Gays should be tolerated, but they couldn't be trusted with kids.”

He spoke out of ignorance, not malice. But I didn't know that at the time, and his comments hurt me. The irony is that of my father's four children, only the homo has fallen in love and settled down. I'm the only one who can afford to buy a washing machine right now.

It didn't help that my dad was a Chicago homicide detective whose beat included Chicago's gay neighborhood. In the seventies, gay neighborhoods were not filled with trendy restaurants, pricey condos, and rainbow geegaws. They were filled with sleazy bars, male hustlers, and violent predators. Before I came out to my father, most of the gay men he'd met were murderers.

When my parents' marriage began to fall apart, I was fourteen
years old. I knew I was queer and no longer felt welcome at the neighbor boys' reindeer games. So, I spent a lot of time hiding in the attic, up a tree in the backyard, or lying under the dining room table listening to musical comedy on eight-track tape. I was home a lot during the two years when my father was pulling away from my mother. My siblings were not around, so they missed out on most of the fights. My dad would storm out, and I would find my mother sobbing in her bedroom. There were fights where things were thrown and broken, usually by my father, and the things broken were usually very important to my mother, tchotchkes that had belonged to her grandmother. Once, after they had separated, my dad came over. He and my mother went for a walk while I lay under the dining room table listening to
Camelot
. They walked back in the front door just as Robert Goulet started singing, “If ever I would leave you . . .” My mother burst into tears; my father looked at me and sighed, and then walked back out of the house.

As things fell apart with his wife, my dad made a lot of promises to his four kids, all of which he seemed to break. He promised he wouldn't move out. He did. He promised he wouldn't divorce my mother. He did. He promised there was no one else. There was. He promised he wouldn't marry JoEllyn. He did. He promised he wouldn't move away. He moved to California.

On a visit home years later, my father took my brothers and me out for drinks. Out of nowhere, he announced that he and JoEllyn weren't going to have any children. He wanted us to know that. It was a promise. When he got up and went to the bathroom, my brothers and I looked at one another in stunned silence.

Finally, I said, “JoEllyn must be in labor.”

“With twins,” said Eddie.

“Conjoined, I hope,” said Billy.

As a result of the lies and the pain I believed he'd caused, for years I refused to speak to my father. I wouldn't see him at Christmas, or talk with him on the phone. If he walked in the front door, I walked out the back. By the time I was willing to talk to him again, I was almost twenty. By that point, I'd pretty much forgotten how to talk to him.

That was when he married JoEllyn.

JoEllyn is a very nice person, she's good for my father, and the
time I've spent with her over the last decade has been very pleasant. She knows, I think, that the divorce was very hard on me and all these years later she still tiptoes around me. But the day my father married her was among the most painful of my life. It ripped open and rubbed salt into every one of my mother's wounds, and put my relationship with my father back on ice for five years.

My dad married JoEllyn on Mother's Day, 1985.

Billy and I often argue about that. I don't know if the choice of Mother's Day was intentional, but it was a terrible thing to do. If my father or JoEllyn picked the date on purpose, it's unforgivable. If they picked it by accident, they should have changed it the minute they realized. They didn't, and early in the morning on Mother's Day, 1985, my mother helped dress her four children in formal wear and waved good-bye as we headed out to her husband's second wedding. On Mother's Day.

Why did I go? Why didn't I stay home? The divorce left my mother with fears of abandonment that will last the rest of her life. And we abandoned her on Mother's Day, left her alone in an empty house. My father asked Billy and Eddie and me to usher, and at least I refused to do that. But I wish I'd stayed home. My father had the bad taste to select that love-never-dies, love-never-alters passage from Psalms or Corinthians or somewhere, and as it was read, I started sobbing. The video camera recording the service was set up right behind the pew I was in, and all you can hear on the video is me crying.

My father and I have a perfectly cordial relationship these days. He's come to Seattle to visit, and he's met Terry. A hesitation and tentativeness linger over our relationship, though. Sometimes I get the sense that my father still worries that I'm angry. I'm not, not really. The wedding was a long time ago. But we were alienated from each other for so long, from the time I was about nine years old, that I'm not sure we'll ever have the kind of relationship that he has with his other children.

When I have news to share with my family, it never occurs to me to call my father in California. So Terry and I were two weeks away from getting a baby when I told him we were adopting, and even then it was only because he came to town. It wasn't even until we were standing on a sidewalk outside a restaurant in Seattle,
waiting for a table, that I realized I hadn't told my father we were going to be dads.

My father was also the last to know I was gay. I waited until I was twenty-one and away at college to tell him, afraid he would react badly. He drove down with my sibs and my mom to see me in a play, and while the rest of the family waited inside the Courier Café, my father and I stood on the sidewalk out front and I told him what he already knew. He was upset, but not about me being gay.

He was upset that I didn't tell him sooner.

F
or the first time since we met Melissa at Outside In six weeks ago, the three of us were going to get together with Laurie. Melissa was hugely pregnant now. When we picked her up in front of her apartment, she had trouble getting in the car. The last time we saw her, Melissa had a kid-induced barrel chest, but now the baby had “dropped,” and she was carrying him lower to the ground. She was having trouble sleeping, sitting, standing, and walking.

She told us she was anxious to get this whole thing over with. She was sick and tired of being pregnant, being counseled, and being housed. I got the feeling that Melissa was sick and tired of our weekly getting-to-know-you meetings, too, but she was too polite to say so. She was looking forward to not having to talk with Laurie about her feelings anymore, and she was happy she wouldn't be living in an apartment for much longer. She wanted to get back out on the streets with her friends, and she wanted to travel with her animals. But while Melissa was looking forward to not being pregnant, she dreaded giving birth.

“I hate pain,” she said flatly. She was worried the doctors wouldn't give her pain meds in the hospital because she was a street punk. “They might think I don't need the drugs, that I just, you know, want to get high or something.”

We'd come to Portland to hammer out our Open Adoption Agreement. This was the last piece of paper we had to sign before the birth, spelling out Melissa's rights: how many visits per year, how many phone calls, how many times per year we'd send photos. The numbers are floors, not ceilings. If we wanted to get together
more, we could. If there was any conflict down the road, the agency would mediate, using the Open Adoption Agreement as a guide. The birth mother's visits could be terminated only if she was abusive, or became a danger to the child.

When we arrived at the office, Laurie was in the waiting room. She wanted to speak privately with Melissa for a few minutes. We plopped down on the couch; Terry picked up a
People
magazine and I flipped through the world's most depressing publication: a newsletter published by the state of Oregon profiling adorable-looking but hard-to-place children. DG kids. Three years' worth of newsletters were in a binder, and I flipped through them as we waited. Under each photo of a smiling child, three paragraphs detailed the “tremendous progress” little Susie/Mikey/Jenny/ Andy had made since being placed in foster care. Next, the horrendous abuse that got little Susie/Mikey/Jenny/Andy taken away from his or her biological parents and placed in foster care was detailed. Reading about these DG kids sandpapered every guilt nerve in my body, which is to say
every
nerve in my body. That we were adopting—or hoping to adopt—a healthy baby boy when there were abused children out there who needed homes made me feel . . . rotten.

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 school 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.