Mommy Man (6 page)

4

Can We Borrow Your Lady Parts for Nine Months?

W
hen it comes to the requisite
baby-making equipment, vaginas are further down the list than you might imagine. As long as Drew and I had clean criminal records and a checkbook, we could start the process of becoming parents. What baffled and terrified us was the process itself. I had no idea what would happen between now and the day an Elmo-loving munchkin started clomping around our house in Crocs. My mind tended to wander toward the darkest possibilities.

I’d read plenty of books and feature articles about gay parenthood, but for the most part, they were propaganda, designed to convince Middle America that gay families were Just Like Everyone Else. “Doug and Waldo remember the day little Leticia Rose came back with them to their Park Slope brownstone. With a pink bow on her nearly hairless head and the tiniest pair of shoes Prada makes, she was doughy, she was perfect, she was
theirs
.” Yes, but was Leticia Rose born addicted to PCP? How many arms did she have, more or less? Was some sixteen-year-old girl from Idaho bawling her eyes out back at the maternity ward of New York Methodist while Doug and Waldo were parading Leticia Rose (nee Beyoncé Miracle) around Brooklyn in a Moses basket?

The stories tended to focus on the happy endings, but I had a feeling that what came before was hardly fairy-tale material. War, poverty, drugs. Adopted babies had some badass backstories. Drew and I assumed foreign adoption would be the quickest and easiest way for us to go, if not the most cheerful. We’d jet off to another continent to score some sad sack kid who’d been orphaned because Ethnicity A was determined to rid the world of Ethnicity B or because a misreading of some well-meaning religious book made a band of heavily armed basket cases think women who bared their elbows were put on Earth for sport hunting. As much as I wanted to be a dad, there was something disconcerting about the prospect of finding ourselves in the “win” column of a genocide. Would we start rooting for international strife? Bloodshed in the Congo? Time to call our travel agent!

It turned out the Third World was more afraid of Drew and me than we were of them. There tends to be an inverse relationship between the size of a country’s orphan pool and their tolerance of gay rights. Even in the most depressed places on Earth, there’s a feeling that unwanted babies are better off languishing in a killing field than thriving in West Hollywood. It was hard to get too upset about it. The less gay-friendly a country is, the more trouble they seem to have providing clean drinking water for their people and staving off diseases that were eradicated decades ago. Go tackle tuberculosis, Cambodia. We’ll work on gay adoption in a few years.

That meant Drew and I could either wait for a new genocide to spring up somewhere more gay-friendly—C’mon, Denmark!—or we could focus instead on domestic adoption. Plenty of gay couples find their offspring in
America’s
Third World, the places in the Midwest and the Deep South where abstinence-only education and ever-tighter restrictions on abortions are producing unwanted babies by the bucket load. You could argue that Rick Santorum had created enough gay families to fill one of Rosie O’Donnell’s cruise ships from stem to stern. Finally, a reason to vote Republican.

Best of all, domestic adoption for gays has its own bible, Dan Savage’s book
The Kid
. It’s a moving, hilarious, and somewhat unsettling account of how Dan and his boyfriend Terry adopted a baby from what he describes as a “gutter punk,” a young homeless drifter and occasional addict who struggled to keep her shit together for nine months for her fetus’s sake. It was exactly the gritty, candid true story I’d been dying to hear. There was no sugarcoating. This is what we had to look forward to—gutter punks, tragedy, late-night phone calls from desperate social workers looking for someone to love a two-pound preemie who’d been dumped at a fire station. If that’s what I was in for, I wanted to prepare myself.

It was in
The Kid
that I first learned of “Dear Birthparent” letters. Prospective parents are required to put together a biographical packet full of pictures, stats, and a letter addressed to the women trying to pick homes for their unwanted fetuses. Instead of some random overseas bureaucrat assigning babies to families the way they assign roommates in freshman dorms, the big decisions with private adoptions are made by the birth moms themselves.

This is where Dan and his partner scored big. The birth mother chose them specifically because they were outside the mainstream, like her. If she couldn’t provide her kid the life she felt he deserved, well, she didn’t want him to go to a couple of lame-o’s either.
The Kid
convinced me that domestic adoption might actually work for Drew and me. All we needed was to convince one birth mom, somewhere in the U.S., that we were grade-A daddy material. It sounded doable.

I was feeling more confident than ever. Being a writer, I loved the idea that I got to make my appeal in essay form. I was already composing my profile in my head. In search of inspiration, I typed “Dear Birthparent” into Google. The number of hits was staggering. Some were posted by adoption agencies, others were pasted onto blogs or Facebook profiles. There were YouTube videos and Twitter feeds. I half expected to find an eBay fetus store or an “I Can Haz Baby?!” Tumblr. These were real people, going through the same process we were contemplating. They were our competition.

And they sucked.

The profiles were all the same. They started off by complimenting the birth mom on the difficult choice she was making. Ahem, ass-kissing! Then they’d introduce her to their family and talk about how amazing they were. Bragging. They’d wrap up by musing about the special moments they might share with her child—helping him with math homework, holding her hand on a roller coaster, letting him pick out a rescue puppy to take home. Cloying. Predictable. Alongside the text would be a few pictures of them looking family-like, sitting by a fireplace, having a picnic, dressing up as Santa and an elf for the neighbors’ kids.

What a snooze. Standing out in this crowd would be easier than I thought. Drew and I were fun. We would have no problem putting together a zany letter that would win birth moms over by the hundreds. I imagined us having our pick of fetuses. If we weren’t feeling like a redhead, no biggie. We could custom order whatever kind of kid we wanted. We’ll take the prom queen with early acceptance to Harvard who got knocked up by some slimy politician she was interning for. Ah, a scandal baby! The brass ring!

Instead of composing our letter, though, I kept reading. I couldn’t stop. It was a peek into a side of people’s lives they don’t normally show you. There was an ocean of Joes and Belindas out there baring their souls, turning their tears into words and posting them for strangers to see. It was like the world’s best reality show but with real people! Who to root for?

Mike and Teresa were in their mid-forties and had baby fever for nearly twenty years. They had a big house in the country, a gated swimming pool and a golden retriever named Effie who loved kids. They even had the perfect names picked out—Byron for a boy, like the poet, and Hope for a girl, because hope was what had kept them going through Teresa’s nine miscarriages. Two years ago, her doctor finally forbade her from trying again, for her own safety. That’s when they started saving money so they could adopt. Teresa took on a second job tutoring, and Mike did some carpentry for friends. Once they had a baby, Teresa planned to stay home full-time.

Then there were Monica and Al. Monica wanted to share her love of baking with a child, and Al wanted someone he could pass his autographed Mickey Mantle rookie card down to. Monica was adopted as a child and always knew she wanted to build her own family through adoption. Al was deaf, so he had a soft spot for disabled kids. They had already taken in two other kids, so the new baby would have two sisters, one who was paraplegic and the other who lived in a bubble. This time, they were hoping for a boy, special needs a plus.

Luke and Sylvia married young, eager to start their family. She was a registered nurse, he was an eighth-grade history teacher. But when Sylvia got cervical cancer at twenty-five, their story nearly came to an abrupt end. It was only thanks to a hysterectomy that Sylvia kicked the disease. Now she was healthy but would never know how it felt to have a baby grow inside her. Their faith kept them going, and they were convinced their misfortune was a higher calling. When the right woman read their letter, they would have the family God always intended for them.

It was hard to feel superior to any of these people. We weren’t any more worthy than they, any more capable of loving and providing for a baby. From reading their stories, I could see them as a birth mother might, and they were fantastic. They all deserved babies. I wanted to gather every one of them in a big room and surprise them, like Oprah. “Look under your chairs, everyone! You get a baby! And you get a baby! Everybody gets a baby!”

How many of them would actually be chosen? There was no way to know. The curse of Dear Birthparent letters was that there were no happy endings to be found. If a couple successfully adopted, they simply took their letter down. The only couples you could find online were the ones who were still waiting, still coping with that baby-sized hole in their hearts.

There were so many would-be families out there, so many people at the same place as us. I couldn’t help feeling that, by entering this pool, we would also disrupt it. What if we took Mike and Teresa’s kid? Would they get Luke and Sylvia’s—or none at all? Or maybe we’d be the ones who never got chosen.

The other thing that surprised me about all these letters is that there was a shitload of gays. It seemed like every male couple in the country had read
The Kid
and wanted in on the action. There was no way we would stand out in this crowd the way Dan Savage and his partner had years earlier. We were as ordinary as anyone, as likely to make a birth mom yawn and click “Next” without a second glance.

If we couldn’t adopt internationally or domestically, where would our baby come from? Mars? The black market? Kidnapping?

It was Drew’s therapist who came up with the answer: Mindy Stanhope, M.A. Mindy was a colleague of his—a specialist in family planning. If anyone could help us sort through our options, it was she. When we met Mindy, she seemed incredibly childlike herself—young, outgoing, chirpy-voiced. She was small, too. The top of her head was roughly level with my Adam’s apple. I wanted to shout, “We’ll take her!” and sign the adoption papers right there. There was something overly mature about Mindy, though. She was alert and interested, smart and inquisitive. She asked probing questions like, “How did you two meet?” “Tell me about your families.” “Where do you see this relationship in five years?” Within a few minutes, I realized this meeting wasn’t quite what it was presented to be. I’d been tricked into couples counseling.

Thankfully, we aced Mindy’s pop quiz. Most people she met probably came to her out of frustration because something in their relationship was horribly broken. They were glum and desperate, on the brink of splitting up. Drew and I were beaming with optimism, eager to move our couplehood to a deeper level, envisioning a future together that lasted well into a shared room at a nursing home.

Without even trying, we won Mindy over to Team Us. “You guys are awesome!” she raved. Drew and I were feeling great. We had the official Mental Health Seal of Approval.

Mindy agreed that foreign adoption was unlikely in our case. She also acknowledged the perils of domestic adoption. But she saw another, more promising route. “Have you considered gestational surrogacy?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “We couldn’t.”

We knew plenty about surrogacy. That’s when you hand some strange lady a turkey baster and a contract and hope that when the kid comes out, she sticks to your deal. We’d seen enough soap operas and daytime talk shows to know how that can end up. No thanks.

Mindy explained that gestational surrogacy was different. Embryos were created in vitro, using another woman’s eggs, so the surrogate bore no genetic link to the baby she carried. This weakened any emotional tie she might feel to the newborn, as well as any legal claim she might have should she decide she wanted to keep the kid after all. That, combined with intensive psychological screening, had pretty much wiped out the surrogacy horror stories that kept the Lifetime Movie Network in business. The ideal candidate had already given birth to her own children; thus, her uterus had a proven track record. But more importantly, she had completed her family. She had enough kids of her own, so she had no interest in keeping yours for herself.

Not only was surrogacy unlikely to end as tabloid fodder, but there were plenty of advantages to making a baby that way. In an adoption, a birth mother can’t sign over custody of her child until after it’s born, usually following a forty-eight-hour waiting period. So even if she picks you, you have no say in how she cares for the fetus. She might chain smoke in her SUV all the way to her ob-gyn appointments, and you can’t even ask her to roll down the window. Plus, there’s always the chance that once she holds her offspring in her arms, she’ll have a change of heart and decide to keep the baby for herself. Of course, every woman should be afforded that opportunity, but it takes a major emotional toll on the intended parents, who play a tense, high-stakes waiting game until they can finally take a baby home.

A surrogate baby, on the other hand, would be legally ours from conception. We could attend all of the surrogate’s prenatal appointments, watch our baby grow on the ultrasounds, even cut the umbilical cord in the delivery room. And there would be no fears about how the surrogate would take care of her fetus. Surrogates were professionals who took pride in their work. Before they were approved for the task, they were screened for drugs, alcohol, and nicotine. They had to pass mental and gynecological exams. It was the perfect route for control freaks like us.