Last year, my husband, Brian, and I went to an informational seminar at a respected adoption agency in Los Angeles. We’d gotten the name of the agency through friends of friends, and as we walked down the long hallway to the conference room where roughly a half dozen other couples had also assembled to learn about adoption, Brian whispered to me, “Do you think we’ll be the only gay couple there?”
It turns out, we were. And, at least superficially, it was totally fine: If anyone in the room had any problem with a gay male married couple adopting a child, Brian and I never felt it.
But the experience still forced me to confront two uncomfortable truths: One, I know next to nothing about adoption, and two, it is genuinely upsetting to me that I, in fact, cannot get pregnant.
I want to be clear: I am not holding out hope for a miracle of science or nature, and I do not spend my days looking at mpreg images on the internet (although, I mean, they are fascinating). My desire to get pregnant is figurative, not literal, and yet it is not in my experience something cis men — straight or gay — talk about, so I’m not really sure how alone I am in wrestling with this quixotic frustration. Regardless, as I’ve watched so many straight couples I know go through the familiar stages of pregnancy, I’ve been hit with an ugly pang of bitterness and envy. It seems so damn easy, I catch myself thinking, even as I know better about how harrowing getting pregnant can be. It must be nice just to be able to grow a baby and not have to jump through red tape and drain away your savings so you can become a parent.
These are not the feelings I expected to have as my husband and I started investigating how we will become fathers. Brian and I starting talking about being parents within weeks of our first date, when we casually established that we both wanted kids, and then we both realized privately what it meant for our budding relationship that talking about wanting kids hadn't freaked us out. As things progressed from dating to boyfriends to fiancés to husbands, we've subsequently talked through just about every facet of what becoming fathers would look like — from the floor plan for the nursery to our philosophies about establishing boundaries for our children to “jokes” about naming our daughter Lorelai. And at the end of 2014, after six and a half years together, we resolved that in 2015 we would officially start the adoption process and become fathers for real. In January, we did. And now, six months later, we're no farther along in the process than we were then. And it’s taken me just about that long to comprehend why.
Ever since I had the capacity to understand that one day I could be a father, I’ve always known that one day I would be. But it's only been in the last few years that I've really come to terms with the fact that becoming a father isn’t a given for many gay men. I’ve seen from afar other gay men who are fathers; I’ve read Dan Savage’s gay adoption memoir The Kid; and, like the rest of the world, I’ve delighted at Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka’s picture-perfect twins. But in my personal life, I don’t know any other gay fathers. Brian and I know several sets of lesbian parents, but we have no model for what the day-to-day experience of being gay dads looks like.
Of course, Brian and I have plenty of models for what being a new straight parent looks like. Our Facebook and Instagram feeds are swathed with photos of adorable babies staring up in wonder at the fuzzy world they can barely see, let alone comprehend, and my sister texts photos and videos of her unspeakably darling son at such a regular clip that I get anxious if a few days have passed and I don’t have a new shot of my nephew’s face.
We’ve watched our friends wrestle with poopy diapers, struggle with epic sleep deprivation, and fret over why their kid isn’t walking yet. We’ve seen firsthand that sleep training can be excruciating, and the impotent terror when your infant is really sick and you cannot make it better. And, of course, we’ve also experienced the transformative joy of a baby’s simple smile, and witnessed the look of exhausted satisfaction and profound love that smile can spark in the faces of new parents. At this point, Brian and I feel like we know as well as any couple who don’t yet have a baby, straight or gay, can know about what it means to be a parent.
But here’s what we don’t know, what we haven’t seen firsthand, what has paralyzed me from moving forward, and what — checking my privilege here — has for the first time in my life made me feel actively disadvantaged as a gay man: What it means to become a parent.
I hate feeling this way. And the thing is, it’s not like I somehow desperately yearn for a biological child — even if I did, surrogacy remains prohibitively expensive for me and Brian — and I definitely do not think my as-yet entirely hypothetical adopted child would be some kind of compromise. Your kid is your kid is your kid, and I’ve known that just about as long as I’ve know I’ve wanted to be a father. It’s just that the more I learn about the adoption process, the more I find myself wishing for that miracle of science or nature so I can enjoy the heteronormative privilege of wanting to be a parent and then simply making it happen, without a social worker visiting my apartment, an adoption lawyer taking my money, and the constant worry about whether Brian and I are doing all the right things to convince an expectant mother that we’re the best couple to adopt her child.
These are things, by the way, that I’ve learned only in the last year, and I recognize that I still have so much more I’ve need to learn. It’s been embarrassing to discover just how little I know about what it means to adopt. It is a process that remains distressingly opaque to anyone who isn’t pursuing it, especially considering how much biological childbirth is suffused into our everyday understanding of how the world operates. Before Brian and I walked into that seminar, I knew vaguely that it would take a long time, require a lot of paperwork, and cost a fair amount of money — and that Brian and I were lucky to live in a state where same-sex adoption is legal. (We’ve ruled out international adoption for that very reason.)
Learning the actual details of adoption — from the home visits to make sure it’s a viable place for a child to how domestic private adoption almost always means adopting an infant from birth — has been a great and profound education. But it’s also filled me with an almost crippling anxiety that I will never know enough to make the “right” decision: Which adoption agency would be best for us? Which adoption lawyer? Should we even spend money on an adoption lawyer? Should we focus on an agency and/or lawyer who specializes in same-sex adoption? Does that even matter? Should we focus on just California? How much can we afford to travel outside the state? Will we have enough money for health care for the mother? Are we equipped, financially and emotionally, to pursue adoption within the foster care system? And if we don’t, does that make us terrible people?
All of these questions plunge me back into that bracing pool of exasperation at the multitudes of straight couples blessed with good fertility who have to know only how to have sex in order to become parents. But in my worst moments of panic and frustration, I’ve tried to remind myself of the third discovery Brian and I made in that adoption seminar. Because we were the only gay couple in the room, we were walloped by how being prospective parents who are both men radically changes the emotional calculus of adopting. Like Dan Savage and his boyfriend Terry experienced in The Kid, Brian and I were surrounded by straight couples who were coming to the adoption process because that thing they had taken as a given all their life — their ability to grow a child themselves — was suddenly, perhaps painfully, no longer an option for them. Brian and I always knew the only option for us was to adopt (even if we didn’t really know what that meant), so we were able to show up at that seminar free of the emotional baggage that our bodies had somehow failed us as parents.
It turns out, though, that I walked out of that seminar saddled with the baggage that my and my husband’s bodies would never allow us to become a parents. It is a firm, hard reality, born not of institutional prejudice but of, you know, biology — and yet I now realize I’ve had to mourn it all the same. Facing that has been more challenging than I could have imagined. But here is what has kept me pushing forward, what has never once allowed me to even consider giving up: I know it will be infinitely harder actually being a parent. And I cannot wait for that to happen.