Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?: Confessions of a Gay Dad (9 page)

This was when we began our spirited little debate over circumcision. I thought it was a foregone conclusion. Who doesn’t circumcise? Other cultures. People in countries far, far away. Members of the animal kingdom. No offense. Of course, we all know anytime someone says “no offense,” it’s probably too late. But honestly, I’m a big fan of the animal kingdom. Except snakes, most birds, and raccoons. They’re mean.

I’m Jewish. Don is Catholic. We’re both circumcised and so I never gave it a second thought. But Don, a recent born-again atheist, admitted he’d always thought the practice to be barbaric and pleaded with me to leave our son’s body alone. To be honest, I had, or I should say I
have
, never seen a real live uncircumcised penis. Except maybe in a porno. Not that I watch them. But I may have seen one playing in the background somewhere at someone else’s house. Maybe. A very long, long time ago. And who knows, really, ’cause when they’re erect they all look the same. Give or take five inches.

“It’s a cultural thing. It’s a Jewish tradition,” I’d say.

Don argued back, “The only thing Jewish about you is you hate mayonnaise.”

“What?” I asked. “What does that even mean? I
do
hate mayonnaise, but I know plenty of Jews who love it. And I’m sure plenty of non-Jews hate it.” Although growing up, I did
envy those kids at my school with bologna sandwiches on Wonder Bread with tons of mayonnaise, wrapped in waxed paper. We never had any of that stuff. I mean, we had turkey and ham but always on rye bread. And once in a while there’d be pastrami or tongue. Tongue! Who the hell ever thought that would make a good sandwich?

I tried to find my way back to a point: “But lots of the blond-haired
non
-Jews had white bread sandwiches that
weren’t
slathered in mayo in their lunch bags. And I’d be willing to bet some of them were circumcised.” Huh? I was lost. So I
know
Don was too. I brought it back: “I want our son to look like both of us.”

Don wouldn’t have it. “How often are we going to be comparing penises with our son? We’re gay men. You want to ask the guys at Social Services who are gonna take our kids from us if
they’re
circumcised? Are you looking for jail time with supervised visitation?”

“It’s a health issue!” I brought out the big guns, pelting him with statistics: “Penile cancer occurs in one in six hundred men in this country but neonatal circumcision abolishes the risk. Uncircumcised boys are ten times more likely to get urinary tract infections.”

He cuts me off with “Super! I bet you men with no fingers get fewer hangnails too. Let’s lop those off. Or we can suck his brains out to prevent headaches.”

I’d grown accustomed to our having different points of view. Believe me. Over the years we haven’t always seen eye to eye. And certainly after Eliza was born. Wow. How on earth had we neglected to discuss our parenting philosophies
before
we had a child? I’m a stickler for minimal TV, healthy
diet, no grazing. I’m for more government intervention and Don much less. I never thought it would come down to Democrat versus Republican in my own house. We both always voted the same. And with the bigger issues, we tend to find our way to the same page. But now the Circumcision Caucus was upon us and the differing points of view so clearly defined. We just didn’t agree on them. Even though one party was so obviously right. I knew how Don felt. He knew how I felt. We were going to have to compromise. But you can hardly meet halfway with something like this. You either cut or you don’t cut.

In the end, we agreed Jonah would be circumcised by the doctor in the hospital. There’d be no ceremony (no slicing open a smoked salmon after slicing our baby’s foreskin). And Don, who gets queasy at the sight of a paper cut, would not be in the room with me when it happened. I’d have to be there alone. I was disappointed we wouldn’t have a traditional bris. But we had found a compromise and I appreciated that.

We didn’t speak of it again. I hoped it wouldn’t create too much of a rift between us during this tense and uncertain time. Adoption’s not without its stresses, especially during the seventy-two hours in which the birth mom still has the chance to change her mind.

As we had done with Eliza, the day after Jonah’s birth Don and I took turns taking care of Monica. Each night of her hospital stay, one of us would sleep in her room. We brought her tabloids with photos of celebrities who were “just like us” and had more cellulite than she did. That always seemed to put her in a good mood. We’d also bring her favorite refreshments and movies, and we snuck her
cigarettes. Making matters worse, she had always suffered a great deal of postpartum depression after having her kids. I imagine that’s particularly difficult for a mom involved in an adoption plan.

The night after the birth it was my turn to sleep overnight on the pullout in Monica’s room. Well, I don’t know if “sleep” is an accurate term. It was more like sporadic, hour-long naps in between wheeling Monica down to the plaza for cigarette breaks.

At seven in the morning, Don showed up at the hospital. Jonah’s circumcision had been scheduled for seven thirty. I looked like shit. If shit had bad hair and bags under its eyes. Don gave me a hug and walked with me to the nursery to admire our new son. Don then pulled out a cloth bag containing my father’s yarmulke and a picture of both my parents.

“I thought you might want them with you while the doctor performed the bris,” he said.

He called it a bris. He then handed me the prayers he had Googled and printed out. He’d also invited two of my close friends, Michael and Sylvie, both Jewish, to hold my hand through the process. And as if the universe were conspiring with all of us, the doctor and nurses agreed to break their biggest rule and allowed us all into the back of the nursery, with my camera and the picture of my parents. We made a ceremony of it after all—a ceremony that took on meaning far greater than the tip of my son’s penis. Maybe the best parenting in the world, the most respected philosophies on sleep training, food schedules, TV watching, and discipline, can’t beat raising a child in a home where his two parents actually love each other. And show it. At least once in a while . . .

W
e are all at a beach house in Cape Cod with my sister and her family. But the kids are nowhere to be found. Jonah and Eliza went off to play with their cousin about half an hour ago.

I’ve just loaded the car with the cooler and towels and chairs and sand shoes and floaties and goggles and pails for the day at the beach. Now I just need to add two kids to the recipe. “Guys? Where are you? Come on . . . time to go to the beach!” My calls go completely unanswered. I start looking for them in the house, upstairs, every bathroom . . . then downstairs . . . and finally I enter one of the bedrooms. There, on the bed, are my two kids, their legs over their heads, each one taking turns sniffing each other’s asses. Thank
God
they were all clothed. Among all the things I imagined they could be doing, I wasn’t expecting this one.

“Um . . . what are you guys doing?” I am so afraid to hear the answer.

“We’re playing kitties, Daddy!” Eliza flips back up and skips over to me. “Cats sniff each other’s tails as a way of saying hello.” She seems so chipper.

Clearly this is a moment for some kind of parental intervention, right? But what? It’s not like I’ve ever heard any opinions on what to do when your kids are sniffing ass. I mean, I must have missed the chapter on that one.

“All right, well . . . hurry up and get your flip-flops ‘cause we’re leaving for the beach.” I decided to pretend I thought it was cute. Or that it didn’t actually happen. That particular technique has served me well when I find myself in a parental quandary for which I’m completely unprepared.

On the subject of parental things I never thought I’d have to think about and sure as hell aren’t in any parenting books, how about trying to collect a urine sample from a four-year-old girl? Eliza was complaining of pain when she pees, so the doctors asked for a urine sample. For my entire life, a urine sample has been among the easiest things for a guy to provide. But here I was, on my knees, holding a cup between my daughter’s legs as she sat on the toilet. Where the hell do I hold the cup? It’s a wild guess, really. I try to center my hand in the general vicinity but I have no real idea where the stream will come from. Ope! There it is, all over my hand . . . and not in the cup. Now what? She’s going to have to drink six cups of water and we’ll have to try this all again. Are you kidding me? Has nobody come up with a contraption to get a girl’s pee into that tiny cup with more precision and ease? Sure, when she’s a little older, she can do it herself. But she’s four. She doesn’t want to hold the cup.

Oh. And how about the six weeks after a circumcision? Does anyone actually prep you for the fact that you have to pull your poor son’s foreskin back every time you change him, and slather the area with Vaseline to avoid a hideous
phenomenon known as “reattachment”? That’s right. If you don’t lube it up three or four times a day, the foreskin can
reattach
and you have to bring the poor baby back to
detach
it again. I may be a little paranoid and somewhat defensive, but there’s no contest for the mortification the first time our nanny walked over to me, a gay man, while I was changing Jonah. She looked at me like I had lost my mind and managed to croak out, “Danny? What are you doing?”

“Oh, well, there’s something called reattachment and it’s, um—there’s really only one way to avoid—well . . .” You know how much
not
fun it is to explain to the nannies and babysitters how you want them to give your kid a handie every time they change him? How come nobody told me about that?

Or how about the time Eliza was only a year old and I brought her to someone’s holiday open house. The place was packed. And so was my daughter. The poor thing hadn’t pooped in three days. I had her in the Bjorn as I waited in the eggnog line when she started contorting her little face. Her cheeks got so red, it made the suit on the Santa-for-hire look washed out.

I took Eliza upstairs and laid her on the bed after clearing an area on the mountain of coats. I prepared to change her diaper, only the diaper was clean! My poor kid was screaming as I saw a shiny head of poop at a complete standstill at the opening of her tush. She was crowning! But that baby wasn’t coming out. No traffic moving in either direction. I had no idea what my next move was supposed to be. Forgive me for not adding that to the list of things I Googled when I knew we were expecting a baby: “removing a zeppelin-sized turd out an infant’s ass.”
Search!

I left Eliza on the bed surrounded by coats and sneaked into the bathroom, where I combed the medicine chests for some Vaseline. Finally, I found some Preparation H. I squinted at the label to see if it would kill a kid to have a dab. After all, the stuff was supposed to “shrink swelling” and that seemed appropriate in this situation. I slathered it on my finger and went carefully into the cave to ease out the boulder. First one side. Then the other. And then
pow
. That thing flew out and onto someone’s Patagonia down jacket. I managed to clean it and the baby and replace her diaper with a clean one. At long last, it looked like the weight of the world was off her—okay, well, out of her. But really? I could’ve done without adding that whole experience to my life wallet.

I received no fewer than six copies of
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
in baby gift baskets when the kids were born. The book is great but, as it turns out, somewhat limited. It was certainly of no use one bath time when Jonah was only one. Where’s the book
What to Expect Will Float to the Surface When Your Kid Sneezes During Bath Time
?

S
eeing Jonah, all three feet, forty-five pounds of him, with his little tough guy swagger, I am often transported back to the terror and panic of junior high school. The strident squeaks of kids’ sneakers running toward class, and the slamming of lockers. And the slamming of
me
inside those lockers. I still carry a lot of anxiety and insecurity from those days. For some reason, I’m fixated on the weeklong wrestling unit we had in gym class.

The sight of those smelly blue wrestling mats lined up on the floor would put me in a state of “teacher, I want to go home.” We’d be paired up in size order. I was a shrimp and would always be thrown onto the mat with skinny, cross-eyed Warren Fink. He always seemed particularly bored by my tactic of dancing around the mat, avoiding contact. Eventually I would tire and Warren would come at me with a surge of focus and intensity, his crossed eye drifting even farther toward the bridge of his nose. He’d bite his lip and dive toward me. All the other guys would surround the mat screaming, “Kill him!” I’d look up at them and explain, “I’m trying!” But inevitably they’d scream back, “Not you! Warren! Kill
him
!” Meaning
me
. Those guys, for some reason, wanted him to kill me. “Those” guys.

They all had a particular strut I was never able to perfect. A little bowlegged, carrying their books as though they could take them or leave them. Like they were doing the books a favor by letting them rest against their thighs.
Just walk
, I’d tell myself. But then my books would get knocked out of my arms. “Faggot!”

I’d pretend it was what I had
intended
to do. “Oh good. Thank you, actually, I was literally about to lay my biology textbook in the mud. So you saved me the trouble!”

How did these kids know? Like police helicopters with their giant follow spotlights, they were precocious in their ability to sniff out a homo and at such a young age.

Jonah has that same familiar bowlegged swagger, the confidence and the mischievous grin.
Just walk
, I want to tell myself each time he comes bounding toward me down the hall. But luckily, he’s still small enough for me to just scoop him up, kiss his neck, and deflate my junior high school nightmares.