The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant (11 page)

“No, it would be awful,” Terry said. “Every other couple in the group will get picked before us. There'll be new couples every week, and couples leaving the group because they get picked, and we'll be there forever. It'll make waiting much worse.”

Terry had a point. We were going to be in the pool a long, long time.

T
wo days after Carol and Jack called to invite us to the pool parents' support-group meeting, we were picked.

Not only wasn't our wait as long as we had anticipated; frankly, it wasn't as long as we would've liked. Expecting a long wait, we'd behaved as if our wait would be long. We hadn't drawn up plans, laid in provisions, or made lifestyle changes. The night before we got the “You're pregnant” call, we'd gone out drinking. Terry and I had pretty much stopped going to gay bars soon after we met, but with diapers and day care looming, we suddenly wanted to spend more time where the boys were, wanted to take one last lap around that dog track while we still could.

It was a Saturday morning in January when the call came. I was at home in bed, reading
The New York Times
and waiting for my hangover remedy to kick in. Aspirin with codeine can be purchased over the counter in Canada, and every once in a while we head to Vancouver to stock up. When the phone rang, I ignored it, letting voice mail pick up. Ten minutes later, it rang again. I ignored it again. It's bad luck to get out of bed before the codeine does its job. Then the phone rang once and stopped. That was Terry's pick-up-the-goddamn-phone-you-lazy-asshole signal, so I slumped out of bed and sat by the phone.

It was about ten-fifteen, and Terry was at work. Seven years younger than I, he could still go out drinking all night, get completely smashed, and jump out of bed the next morning and go to work. I could drink only when I had nothing to do the next day. I'm three-quarters Irish, which should have blessed me with a high tolerance, but the infrequency of my drinking has lowered
my defenses. As my eldest brother remarks whenever we go out for a drink, I am a
lightweight
. The word sits in his mouth like a spoonful of spoiled mayonnaise. The fact that I can drink only one beer to his three is pitiable. How I struggle through life with this infirmity, he can't fathom.

Terry, on the other hand, is made of more absorbent stuff. I was in bed with a hangover, and I'd had three beers; Terry'd had eight beers and he was at work, listening to Madonna's new CD.

When the phone rang, I picked it up and said, “What is it, honey?” In our relationship, “honey” is code for “You're annoying me, but I love you; what is it already?” I have pet names for Terry, but if I revealed them he'd kill me, or reveal his pet names for me, and we can't have that. The tone of my voice made it clear that I was not thrilled about being dragged out of bed before the codeine I'd had for breakfast undid last night's damage. If this was something that could wait, I was gonna be pissed.

“Terry's on the phone with the agency.” It wasn't my honey, it was Dave. He's one of Terry's coworkers, and a friend of mine, and he's no man's honey. “You've got a kid! Terry will call you as soon as he gets off the phone. Don't go anywhere.”

Then Dave hung up.

I sat there by the phone, thinking,
Got a kid?
Dave didn't say we'd been picked, or we had a birth mother. He said we got a kid.

“Oh, my God,” I said out loud. “It's a hospital birth.”

That would mean the kid had already been born. A birth mom called the agency from the hospital, they rushed over a “Dear Birthparent . . .” book, and she picked us. We were going to be dads.

We were going to be dads
today
. Right away, no mediation, no three months to get used to the idea, no time to go shopping. As I sat by the phone waiting for Terry to call, I imagined myself having to change diapers with this hangover. All we had in the house was that flannel shirt from Baby Gap. We had more women's underwear in the house from when I used to do drag than we had baby clothes.

I tried to stay calm waiting for Terry to call back. I drank some tea. I took some codeine. I ate some cereal. I about had a stroke. When was he going to call?

After twenty minutes, I called the bookstore.

“He's still on the phone with the agency,” said Dave, and I hung up.

And I waited.

We didn't have a crib, we didn't have a single diaper, and the only bottle in the house was the nearly empty bottle of codeine in my hand. It was too soon. We weren't ready, we didn't have anything we needed. I had a hangover.

Pretty soon we wouldn't even have a place to live. Earlier in the week, we'd sold our condo. We had to be out in two months, and were just starting to look at houses. We wanted to escape the courtyard, buy a house somewhere else in town, and be moved in and settled before the baby came. We'd have time, we'd thought, to find a new place, sober up, and get rid of my old drag. Now I found myself wondering if we would able to get everything we needed on the way home from the hospital, the way they told us at the seminar.

Finally, the phone rang. It was my mother.

“Can't talk, Ma. I'm waiting for Terry to call about—”

Do I tell her? No. Don't want to jinx things, and what did I know anyway? If I told her what I knew—“We got a baby”— she'd have a million questions. I had no answers.

“—something important. I gotta get off the phone.”

“Is it a baby?” Mom asked.

“No, it's a—job,” I lied.

“What job? Whose job?” Mom asked.

“Um a different one, for Terry. Mom, I gotta get off the phone.”

“Terry doesn't want to work at the bookstore anymore?”

“Mom, I gotta go.”

“All right, but call me later.”

“I will,” I lied.

The phone rings.

“Her name is Melissa.” Terry sounds as freaked out as I am. “She lives in Portland, and we need to get down there as soon as possible.”

“Did they call from the hospital? Did she give birth already?”

“No,” Terry said, to my relief and disappointment. In the half-hour I'd spent in a panic about a baby coming right way, I'd started to like the idea. Maybe being spared the three-month build-up was a blessing.

“She's a little over seven months pregnant, and it's a boy,” Terry said.

“It would be Daryl Jude, then” I said.

He'd been talking with Laurie, Melissa's counselor and the agency counselor who would take over from Ann if we decided to adopt Melissa's baby. They'd been on the phone a long time because there were, as they say in the adoption biz,
issues
. Terry told me to get some paper and a pen, sit down, and take notes.

Melissa was homeless. She was “homeless by choice,” Laurie had explained. She wasn't a bag lady, she wasn't crazy, she wasn't a prostitute or a drug addict. She wasn't what we've been trained to think of when the media talk about “the homeless,” even if she was technically homeless. She was a smart, resourceful, intelligent kid who, for reasons of her own, chose to live on the streets in the company of other smart, resourceful, intelligent kids. She could find a job and a place to live if she wanted to, but she didn't want to.

“She's a gutter punk,” Terry said.

The gutter-punk stuff wasn't the only issue, though.

Laurie explained that we were not Melissa's first choice; she had picked two other couples before us. Her first-choice family was nabbed by another birth mom before Melissa was six months pregnant. Her second choice turned her down because she drank for the first four and half months of her pregnancy. And she'd taken LSD a couple of times while she was pregnant. And she smoked some pot. As soon as she'd found out she was pregnant, she'd stopped drinking and using drugs, but her second-choice couple didn't want to risk adopting a baby that might have fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS).

Melissa was pretty upset about the rejection, Laurie told Terry. Finally, Melissa came in for a counseling session with Laurie, and she spotted our home study sitting on top of a stack of files in a corner of the office, and we were her third choice.

“She told Laurie she would have picked us first, if she had seen our birthparent letter, but we weren't in the pool when she started looking at them,” Terry said.

Since Melissa was seven months pregnant, Laurie was anxious for us to come down and meet her. If we didn't want her baby, then she'd have to pick another couple, and she'd have to do it soon.

The drinking was a problem. We didn't know much about FAS, but we knew enough to know it wasn't something you put in the plus column. But what if we said no to Melissa and then never got picked again by another birth mom? Buggers can't be choosers. . . .

I took some more codeine.

Things were even more complicated than simple drinking. Melissa had started having contractions earlier that week; she went to the hospital, where she almost gave birth prematurely. Tests all indicated that the baby was healthy. The ultrasound showed that he was a boy, and that his head and limbs were all normal. When Melissa was released a week later, her doctors ordered her to get bed rest. Melissa didn't have a bed to rest in, though, so the agency got her into emergency housing. But emergency housing didn't allow animals, and Melissa wouldn't be separated from her cat and dog. Melissa needed to get into an apartment, and if we went ahead with this adoption we would be expected to pay her rent as a “reasonable birth mother expense.”

A birth mother is expected to pay back these costs if she decides to keep her baby. To protect her from feeling obligated to give her baby up, and to avoid running afoul of anti-baby-selling statutes, the agency tries to keep the expenses as low as possible. If a birth mom wants to change her mind and keep the baby, she should be able to make that choice without having to worry about paying thousands of dollars back to the couple she jilted.

Laurie told Terry that if after meeting Melissa we decided to go ahead with the adoption, we would be expected to pay for an apartment. Melissa didn't want anything fancy, just a studio apartment somewhere downtown, close to where her gutter-punk friends hung out. The agency had already helped Melissa get Oregon's health care plan and her food stamps. Melissa told Laurie she'd die before she put on maternity clothes, so besides the apartment there would be no expenses.

Since Melissa was going to be on the streets until we made our decision, Laurie wanted us to come down to Portland as soon as possible and meet her. First we'd see Laurie, who would help facilitate that conversation. She'd been working with Melissa for about a month, and knew her pretty well, and when she read our
home study she thought we'd be a good match for Melissa. Birth moms and adoptive couples will sometimes meet two or three times before the adoptive couple makes a decision about going ahead, but we had time for just one meeting. Melissa was seven months pregnant and living on the street. If we weren't going to adopt her baby and pay her rent, Laurie needed to find a couple who would.

We rented a car and drove to Portland the next day.

Driving down to our first “mediation,” a meeting that could potentially alter the course of both our lives forever, what did Terry and I do? Read up on fetal alcohol syndrome? Flip through Dr. Spock? Talk about the future? Of course not. We fought about music. We may have been on our way to meet the woman carrying the baby we might adopt and raise as our own, but that didn't mean we had to act like grown-ups. When Terry was packing the rental car, he grabbed fifteen of his CDs, none of which I would ever want to listen to unless I were listening to them being snapped in half. When we were too far from home to turn back and get any of mine, he popped in a CD and told me that it was my fault for not grabbing a few of my own.

By the time we got to Portland, we weren't speaking to each other.

Our first stop was the Mallory Hotel, our base camp in Portland. We checked in, dropped stuff off, and headed over to the agency. We'd never been to the agency's offices before; the seminars, meetings, and interviews we'd been to were all held elsewhere. We felt as if we'd been called to the principal's office. We would only be there for a few minutes, time enough to meet Laurie, go over what she'd told Terry on the phone, and then drive to Outside In, a drop-in center for street kids and gutter punks. And there we'd meet Melissa.

We got to the agency early, so we walked around the neighborhood. We found a Starbuck's and got some coffee for Terry and some tea for me, then spent half an hour picking over used Christian records in a church thrift shop. I once heard a recording of Anita Bryant singing “Over the Rainbow,” and I am determined to find that album one day. It is my quest. Terry and I both
love resale shops and junk stores, we find them soothing. But this resale shop didn't have the usual calming effect. Not today, at least. We were so nervous we even started speaking to each other again.

Anita Bryant's “Over the Rainbow” was nowhere to be found, and it was time to head over to agency HQ. I'd spoken on the phone with people from the agency so many times that I'd developed a detailed mental picture of the place; a homey little office in a funky old building, with wainscoting, rag rugs, gingham curtains, and a room full of kids waiting to be picked up by adoptive couples.

The agency shared the second floor of a creepy, two-story glazed brown brick office building with a travel agency. On the wall opposite the single elevator in the lobby was an enormous oil painting of a fishing village at sunset, rendered in inch-thick blobs of orange and brown and dark red paint. The painting was easily three feet high and fourteen feet long. It was absolutely hideous, and if it had been for sale I would have bought it. A chrome light fixture hung in the lobby, with two dozen clearglass lightbulbs on chrome spikes radiating from a large center ball. The building was about as welcoming as the Nixon-vintage county courthouse.