From The Beginning
(The Adoption Story)
When
I was five to about the age of nine, I would crawl into my Mom's bed
for nap. Often times she would join me – after all, I was an
exhausting child to raise. Before I would let sleep overtake me, we
would have our ritual "argument." "I love you, Mommy," I would
proclaim. "Yes, dear, and I love you," she would say in a clear voice,
though her eyes were closed. "I love you more, Mommy," I would
counter. "No, dear, I love you more." This argument would last about
10 minutes until I invariably fell asleep.
As I got older, into my teen years, I found my gayness
and my parental desires growing. In high school I eagerly signed up
for the parenting elective in my junior year. You might remember the
course, the kind which included topics like "where babies come from"
and where the highlight was the Baby Egg Project. The basic idea was
that you had to carry around an egg (your baby) everywhere you went.
You had to chart the egg's feedings, protect it, and return it intact
after 10 days. If you wanted a break you had to find an egg-sitter.
The purpose of this exercise was to teach us that having children was
a huge responsibility, and one that was best handled when we were
older. I took my "baby" and cared for him (his name was "Tim") with
earnest. I built Tim his own "one-egg-carton" that was safely
cushioned. I not only charted the 3 basics of food, poop, and sleep,
but play time, bath time, and cuddle time. Some of my classmates,
however, were showing signs of strain by midway. Always thinking, I
offered a solution: I adopted their eggs. By the end of the 10 days I
had 11 "children" out of a possible 19. As the teacher queried each
student on the progress of their parenting, she was thrilled to hear
the response, "I couldn't handle it, I adopted my egg out." After all,
this was the lesson she had been hoping to teach: "Don't have children
now, you can't handle it yet." Then she came to my desk and saw where
all the children had gone, and all the work I did to keep my children
happy and safe. Subsequently my guidance counselor was called and then
my parents -- I had apparently learned the wrong lesson.
I knew I needed to be a parent like some people know
they want to be doctors: an intense desire to nurture, to care for,
and to love a child unconditionally. I knew I had a couple of strikes
against me in being gay and being a man, but I knew nonetheless that
by 25 I would be a parent. In the meantime though, I sabotaged so many
relationships by asking on the second date (sometimes the first),
"Would you like to have children with me?" I call this technique "HOW
TO SEND A GAY MAN RUNNING." Society denies gay men, and they
internally deny themselves, even the mere idea of being parents.
Lesbians had long since paved the way for themselves, but they had the
biological advantage of being able to give birth to their child. In my
25th year I realized that if I was going to be a parent it was going
to be as a single parent. I was ready.
Here I was a 25 year old, single, Jewish, white man
looking to adopt a healthy infant. I realized that "infant" was the
key word, because I wanted to start parenting a child from the very
beginning of his or her life. I quickly learned a basic reality of
private adoption, that African-American infants are easier to adopt
than white ones. No matter where you look in this world, there is
racism, even when it comes to adopting children. And so I decided to
adopt transracially.
After contacting several social workers, I finally
found one I felt comfortable with ( a delightful social worker with my
local Jewish federation). My home study was done in a very unintrusive
way. She gave me a guide in which to write a single-spaced, 13-page
autobiography. After submitting it to her, she changed all my "I"
statements to "he" ones, and made only one addition, that I would be a
single parent. When I questioned her about this at our meeting to
review the final version she said that “(her) job was to help adoptive
parents who had big hearts but small voices in which to express that
unconditional love that awaited their future child.” My voice
apparently was strong enough on it’s own because she slashed her
normal fee in half so long as I promised not to infringe on her job by
writing homestudy’s professionally. After that, everything happened so
fast, as if G-d was saying "this was meant to be." How long did the
whole process take? An awe-inspiring 4 months, and at 25 I had my son.
When I went to get him, he was placed in my arms, and
I looked down at him – my tears already hitting the soft blue blanket
he was wrapped in. I whispered to him: "I've been waiting for you my
whole
life." At that moment his hand reached up toward me as if to say, "I'm
here now, and I'm not going anywhere." Realize that up to that point I
had a very stereotypical male view of emotions. I didn't understand
the concept of crying, let alone crying tears of joy. What I found out
on that day, as well as on numerous days to come, was that this bundle
in my arms inspired such a vast array of emotions in me, all at the
same time, that the only way they could come out together was in
tears. He was a blessing, he was hope, he scared the hell out of me,
he inspired me to change the world and myself, he made me want to live
up to my potential, and he needed me. That was April 15, 1994, two
days after he was born.
I have learned many things about gay life and myself
since we have been together. I learned that many gay men have a lot of
internalized homophobia when it comes to children, that even the ones
who think about having kids usually believe that being gay prevents
that possibility. Straight society never wanted gay men to be parents,
so before society could say "no you can't," most gay men cut it off by
saying, "we don't want to!" (It's much the same argument as the
classic one between boss and employee: "You're fired!" "You can't fire
me! I quit!") I lost many gay friends who had no tolerance for
children, much as many straight parents lose friends when they have
children and change their social patterns.
But an amazing, unexpected thing did happen: I became
close to a group I had only witnessed from a distance, heterosexual
parents and their children. Like a beanie baby my son throws at the
back of my head while I'm driving, it hit me with full force: their
issues and problems were the same as mine. We were all concerned about
our kids teething, pooping, binky or thumb sucking, bottle or sippy
cup drinking, not to mention the crucial topics of childproofing,
pre-school options, playgroups, and language. Personally we wanted to
know when we would have sex again, go out after eight at night, stop
humming Barney tunes, and move beyond the endless diapers.
Last month my son turned four, and he is a master in
the verbal art of manipulating his old man. Not that he didn't possess
this skill on a non-verbal level the day he was placed in my arms, but
now he's craftier – and it works.
As I lay him down in his bed for sleep, he looks at
me, his bright eyes wide and the Barney lamp glistening on his brown
skin, and
he
says, "Daddy, I need a huggy." The last hug before sleep, I think. He
wraps his arms around my neck, and then does a quick "butt-jump" off
the bed and proceeds to wrap his legs around my waist, insisting,
"Daddy bed. . . . .PLEASE!" Sucker punched again. I know the only way
he will go to sleep is if I pretend I am sleeping. So I take him into
bed and close my eyes. He snuggles his head under my chin and sighs,
"Daddy, I love you." "Sweetie," I say, "I love you too."
"But Daddy, I love you more," he says, now propping
himself up on his elbow. With the all too familiar sensation of tears
in my eyes, I realize my mother was right all those years ago, and I
find myself echoing her words: "No honey, I love YOU more."
~Winner of the 1999 Vice Versa Award in the Gay and
Lesbian Press, Division C for Best First-Person Column
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Re-printed by permission from Joel Greenberg. If
you would like to contact Joel, please
e-mail him. He'd love to hear
from you!
