Listen to Your Mother by Ann Imig

Author:Ann Imig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

NICK’S STORY

NADINE C. WARNER

Everyone thinks their firstborn is special.

But Nick really is.

We got him when he was a week old after a year and a half of bureaucratic bullshit. When we started the process, we’re like, no-brainer:

Find an agency.

Pay your money.

Get your kid.

Done.

International was out, ’cause, you know, a lesbian couple adopting from China? Yeah, like that’ll happen. So we go domestic.

Our agency is all sunshine and light and pro-black with the kente cloth everywhere and our social worker, Julie, is a walking stereotype—white liberal Mama Cass lesbian with three black special needs kids. She assures us that they do “a lot of same-sex placement.”

But what she should really say is this: “Here’s the deal. No one’s going to pick you. Birth moms are all like, ‘I ain’t want my chile wid one of dem gays.’ So, you’re getting the leftovers—the ones that people have returned or simply left at the hospital.”

Julie has us put together “The Book,” which is this weird five-page marketing piece that says, “Hey, Birth Mom, we’ve got money, a lot of it, and live in a really nice but unidentified part of the city. We’re an interracial couple, surrounded by black people, so your kid will feel right at home. Pick us. Oh and yeah, we’re gay but we’re friendly gays; we’re chicks who look like chicks.”

We do all of this work on the book and Nick’s birth mother never read it. But this other birth mother did.

Let’s call her Makeda. Eighteen years old, one kid already, second kid on the way. She’s two hours late to our first meeting and our enthusiasm has waned by the time she shows, but she hooks us with “I really want you to have this baby.”

And it’s all smiles after that . . .

Till Julie calls us the next week to tell us that Makeda’s in a bit of a financial bind right now, and so often in cases like this, the birth mothers simply disappear.

We shell out three grand, find her a place to live because, according to Julie, her home life is very stressful, and it’s not good for the baby. Then a month later we’re taking her to her doctor’s appointments, because now public transportation is not good for the baby.

In the end, she decides to keep the baby.

And Lori and I are, like, “God, this is never going to happen.” In the room we thought would be a nursery by now, we spend the whole night praying—that intense, head’s gonna explode, body-rocking praying. “Just please, please, just give us a baby.”

A few days pass before Julie calls us at work to tell us they have a baby boy, born with the cord around his neck and six fingers on each hand.

The cord around his neck could mean anything from a temporary air restriction to serious brain damage. I tell Julie we want a pre-placement screening, but she snaps that there are plenty of families who will take him without one.

So I snap right back that I don’t care.

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