The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant (24 page)

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.

T
wo 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 the 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.

A friend printed up some incredibly tasteful birth announcements for us, and my mother sent a list of addresses. When I got to my grandmother Savage's name and address, I hesitated. I hadn't spoken to my father's mother, my only living grandparent, since my grandfather's funeral ten years ago. She was not a pleasant person. When my parents divorced, my grandmother announced to her family that my siblings and I were no longer her grandchildren. We stopped getting cards from her at Christmas and on our birthdays, which was actually something of a relief. Being disowned by Grandma Savage was like losing a job you hated.

When I saw her name on the list, though, I thought,
Why not?
On the back of the card, I wrote, “Hi, Grandma. Just wanted to let you know that you've got another great-grandchild. Hope you're in good health. Love, Dan.”

A week later, an envelope arrived for me with some vaguely familiar handwriting on it, but no return address. I looked at the postmark—Palatine, Illinois—and realized it was my grandmother's handwriting, handwriting I hadn't seen since my father left my mother eighteen years ago.

Inside the envelope was D.J.'s birth announcement. Grandma Savage had opened it, read it, gone to her desk, gotten a new envelope, written my address on it, put D.J.'s birth announcement back in its original envelope, placed it in the envelope she'd addressed to me, sealed it, put a stamp on it, and mailed it back. There was no note.

I called my mother, who loves to hear about what a cunt her former mother-in-law is. Then I called my brother Billy, who begged me not to blame this on Dad. Then I called my dad. My dad didn't want me to call up my ex-grandmother and scream at her, and I promised him I wouldn't.

“She's a sick old lady,” my dad said. “What can I say?”

When I got off the phone, Terry and I sat with the card, wondering what could possess an old woman to be so . . . mean. D.J.'s
other great-grandmother, Terry's grandma Audrey, was so excited to hold her great-grandchild that she looked as if she might explode. But my grandma? I found myself wishing we had given D.J. my middle name, Keenan, as his last name. Keenan is not only my middle name, it was my Grandma Savage's maiden name. That would've given her a stroke.

We saved the birth announcement my grandmother had mailed back, and we keep it in a safe place. Grandma Savage is an old lady, crazy and mean. When she dies, Terry, D.J., and I will attend her open-casket wake. And when no one is looking, I will slip D.J's birth announcement into her casket. She'll spend eternity with that birth announcement.

In the first few months of D.J.'s life, Terry and I deadlocked on just two issues: circumcision and baptism. I got my way on both.

Like most American males, Terry and I were circumcised as infants. And like most American homos, we prefer circumcised men as sex partners. I lived in Europe for a while, and came to appreciate uncut men. But given my druthers, I'd rather put a cut dick in my mouth than an uncut one. Cut cock just tastes better, and in a culture that's embraced oral sex as enthusiastically as ours has, gay and straight, taste counts for something. Discuss circumcision with new parents—hip ones, living in urban areas—and along with the standard pro-circumcision arguments (“We want him to look like his father”; “We don't want him made fun of in the locker room”; “It's easier to keep clean”) you'll hear implicit and occasionally explicit concerns about how he's going to taste. Straight folks won't usually come right out and say, “We worry about his dick tasting awful”; instead, they communicate their concern with cryptic comments about what his sex partners will think, the smegma issue, and whether being uncut might limit his options sexually . . . and they trail off.

Unfortunately for oral sex, logic is on the side of the anticircumcision activists. Family resemblance? Not something we usually judge on the appearance of genitals. Teasing in the locker room? Half of all boys born in America today are not circumcised; if your son gets teased, he and the other uncut kids can form a gang and beat the shit out of the snip-dicks. Ease of cleaning? We don't cut off other body parts that are hard to keep clean.
With that kind of logic, the anticircumcision activists point out, we should have our teeth yanked out to save us the bother of flossing. But even with these arguments refuted, there's still the taste issue to worry about, and anyway, what does logic have to do with kids? Is there anyone less rational than a new parent?

Terry felt very strongly about circumcision: he was for it. I felt strongly about it too: I was opposed. Terry wanted his son's dick to look like his own, while I didn't foresee D.J. and me spending any of our quality time comparing dicks. As for taste, well, the slight possibility that D.J. would get a little less head than his cut friends bothered me less than the idea of taking a knife and lopping off the end of his dick.

At the hospital, Terry had asked Melissa how she felt, and Melissa shrugged. Interpreting this as a yes, Terry claimed it was two against one in favor of cutting D.J. I gave in. Terry could have D.J. circumcised, but I wasn't going to lift a finger to help. Terry made an appointment with a urologist, and then, having lifted a finger—literally, pushing the buttons on the phone all by himself—he decided it was my job to find us a ride to the hospital. I told him no, I meant it when I said I wasn't going to help. If he wanted D.J.'s foreskin cut off, he would have to do it all by himself.

Terry called my friend Dave and asked if he would drive him and the baby to a doctor's appointment. Dave and his boyfriend, Eric, are huge foreskin fans, so when Terry told me Dave would be taking D.J. in to the urologist, I couldn't believe it.

“Did you tell Dave what kind of appointment this is?”

“No. It's none of his business,” said Terry, knowing full well that if he told Dave, Dave wouldn't be driving him to the doctor.

I lifted a finger and called Dave, filling him in on the nature and purpose of this doctor's appointment. Dave called Terry and told him he wouldn't be giving him a lift after all. Terry, furious, called the doctor and canceled D.J.'s appointment, then harrumphed around the house about how disrespectful I was being of
Melissa's
wishes.

“If D.J. grows up with a complex about not looking like us, or gets beat up in locker rooms, or can't find anyone who'll give him a blowjob,” Terry warned me, “I'm going to tell him it's all your fault.”

I assumed these risks, and D.J. remained intact. Barring infections, complications, or a conversion to Judaism, he'll remain uncut for life.

On the other contentious issue, baptism, I was pro and Terry was con.

My grandfather was baptized, wearing a white linen gown. My mother was baptized wearing the same gown. My brothers and sisters and I were all baptized wearing my grandfather's gown, as were all of my aunts, uncles, and cousins. Hundreds of members of my family have been baptized wearing my grandfather's gown, and I wanted to see D.J. baptized in that white linen gown too. I didn't want to raise D.J. Catholic, as I'm not a practicing Catholic myself. I waver between a cop-out agnosticism and principled atheism, and nothing about becoming a parent made me want to return to the Church, or any other church. But still, when anyone asks about my heritage, I describe myself as Irish Catholic. It's a cultural thing.

From the look on Terry's face when I told him about wanting to have D.J. baptized, you would have thought I wanted to take D.J. home and throw him in a wood chipper.

“You don't go to church,” Terry said when I asked him to go to Chicago with me and have D.J. baptized. “You don't believe in anything.”

But do you have to believe? Almost all of my Jewish friends are bright, atheistic pork eaters, and none would find anything objectionable about bacon bagels besides aesthetics. They don't believe in anything either, but they get together and celebrate Jewish holidays because doing so matters to them culturally. They're not wasting time waiting for the Messiah to come, but they do get together every once in a while and act like great big Jews. Why can't I do the same? Why can't I get together with my family and act like a great big Catholic?

“And it would be a nice thing to do for my mother and my great-aunts,” I told Terry. “They go out of their way to be nice to us; why can't we go out of our way and do this small thing for them?” My family was great on the gay issue all year long; couldn't we be great on the Catholic issue just once? And if we wanted them to take our relationship seriously, and recognize D.J. as a
member of the family, would it be too much for us to take him to Chicago, put him in the white linen gown, and let a priest sprinkle some water on his head?

“I'll get on a plane and go to Chicago,” Terry said, “but I'm not going to lift a finger to help with the baptism.”

My mother stepped in and saved me from having to lift any of my own fingers. She found us a church and a priest, ordered a cake, and had the linen gown cleaned and restored. Despite her numerous Catholic connections, though—the woman knows more priests than a Roman male prostitute—the arrangements were more difficult to make than we'd expected. In its tireless efforts to drive American Catholics into the arms of the Lutherans and Unitarians, the Catholic Church has become stingy with the sacraments over the last ten years. They don't want cultural Catholics showing up for the occasional baptisms, weddings, and funerals. The pastor at the church where I was baptized, my mother was baptized, my parents were married, and my grandparents were married, and which my great-grandparents helped build (there are stained-glass windows with our family names on them) refused to baptize D.J. He also refused to let another priest baptize D.J. in “his” church. My mother was told it had nothing to do with her grandson's parents being homos, and my mother almost believed that.