Modern Love by Modern Love (retail) (epub)

Author:Modern Love (retail) (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2019-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

DJ’S HOMELESS MOMMY

DAN SAVAGE

THERE WAS NO GUARANTEE THAT doing an open adoption would get us a baby any faster than doing a closed or foreign adoption. In fact, our agency warned us that, as a gay male couple, we might be in for a long wait. This point was driven home when both birth mothers who spoke at the two-day open adoption seminar we were required to attend said that finding “good, Christian homes” for their babies was their first concern. But we decided to go ahead and try to do an open adoption anyway. If we became parents, we wanted our child’s biological parents to be a part of his life.

As it turns out, we didn’t have to wait long. A few weeks after our paperwork was done, we got a call from the agency. A nineteen-year-old homeless street kid—homeless by choice and seven months pregnant by accident—had selected us from the agency’s pool of prescreened parent wannabes. The day we met her, the agency suggested that all three of us go out for lunch—well, four of us if you count Wish, her German shepherd; five if you count the baby she was carrying. We were bursting with touchy-feely questions, but she was wary, only interested in the facts: She didn’t want to have an abortion and couldn’t bring up her baby on the streets. That left adoption. And she was willing to jump through the agency’s hoops—which included weekly counseling sessions and a few meetings with us—because she wanted to do an open adoption, too.

We were with her when DJ was born. And we were in her hospital room two days later when it was time for her to give him up. Before we could take DJ home, we literally had to take him from his mother’s arms as she sat sobbing in her bed.

I was thirty-three years old when we adopted DJ, and I thought I knew what a broken heart looked like, how it felt, but I didn’t know anything. You know what a broken heart looks like? Like a sobbing teenager handing over a two-day-old infant she can’t take care of to a couple who she hopes can.

Ask a couple hoping to adopt what they want most in the world and they’ll tell you there’s only one thing on earth they want: a healthy baby. But many couples want something more: They want their child’s biological parents to disappear permanently so there will never be any question about who their child’s “real” parents are. The biological parents showing up on their doorstep, lawyers in tow, demanding their kid back is the collective nightmare of all adoptive parents, endlessly discussed in adoption chat rooms and during adoption seminars.

But it seemed to us that all adopted kids eventually want to know why they were adopted, and sooner or later they start asking questions. “Didn’t they love me?” “Why did they throw me away?” In cases of closed adoptions there’s not a lot the adoptive parents can say.

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