How We Came To Be: A Short Story of Our Family

Photo credit: Mark Lee GreatExposure@aol.com

Once upon a time, a little over twelve years ago, I met Robbie and had no idea that my life was about to take another sharp turn from the direction I thought I was headed.  Funny thing about life, you make plans and get an idea of where you're headed in life. Then you get sideswiped by a Mac truck and suddenly you're facing a new direction. Most of the time you come out of it intact, but completely shaken up. As I've said before, being in a relationship was not what I wanted when I met Robbie, but there I was a few months in and was hooked.

An earlier "Mac truck" completely altered the course of my life when I came out. I always wanted to be a father but gave up on that idea once I accepted that I was gay. When I came out (the first time was in the early eighties) and there just some things gay men didn't do. In fact were expected not to do.  No white picket fence - okay. Small house in the 'burbs - gone.  No wife - whew! No kids. Sigh.

No kids. That was the hardest part about the coming out process. In fact it was probably the biggest reason I broke up with my first serious boyfriend. It was all too much, too fast and I was just not ready to wrap my head around everything that I was giving up. It was too big of a sacrifice leaving behind all the things I was raised to want and strive for. Looking back now it seems rather silly, especially from this side of "The Big Life Changing Event." Funny thing is, the big changes are usually brought about by small things. In this case it was a newspaper article about a man named Craig Peterson.

Craig Peterson, one man who made a big impact in my life - our lives - without ever meeting him.  In the paper one day was an article about how he adopted his boys. Originally he was going to adopt them with his partner but in the middle of the process the partner bravely decided that he really didn't want to be a father and bailed. I'm not sure how Mr. Peterson felt about that, but to me it probably worked out for the best since they hadn't completed the adoption and the boys hadn't had a chance to bond with the ex. I would go into more detail about the Peterson family but I personally don't know them and I couldn't possibly tell their story properly. Plus I would have to get out my soapbox about what he and his family where subjected to during the process of making the family whole again and I just don't have the energy right now.

All the old "wants" starting coming back after reading the article . I had watched as my brothers started their families and I became the uncle who had moved away from home to make a different life. Up until the point I finished reading the article everything was going okay with my life. I had my own house, I was dating a good guy, and I had a good group of friends. Now I was facing a new direction again. Did I tell Robbie about what I wanted? Of course. Our relationship was still relatively new so I figured if it wasn't something he was interested in it wouldn't hurt so bad to end things right there. So I gave him the article to read and held my breath. I think his reaction was something along the lines of "I think I want to be a dad too, but let me think about it for a while" or something to that effect. Then he left for the night saying we'd talk about it later.

Later came the next day when he sat down with me on the second-hand sofa in my urban bungalow he said the he had grown up expecting to be a father one day but had given up the possibility once he had came out. The article had changed what was impossible to him to a possibility again. Robbie said that if I wanted to look into adoption he was willing to also. I think we had been together over a year at that point spending just about everyday with each other at that point and we started our journey to make our family complete by looking first at international adoption.

One of the things that made international adoption appealing to us was that the agency we had met with said we would be guaranteed to get a baby with them whereas with domestic we would probably be eligible for older or special needs children. We were really looking to adopt a baby - a child around 2 or younger for a couple of reasons. Bonding with a younger child is supposed to be much easier was the biggest. Our next step was in trying to figure out which country to adopt from. Depending on the country there were several hurdles to overcome the biggest being sexuality. We discovered pretty early on that only one of us would be doing the adopting and that we would have to lie about our relationship - not ideal for us but a condition we could work with.

The second hurdle was cost. Again, depending on the country costs can differ dramatically. It may seem like an inconsequential thing to consider, but if we were going to have to go broke in order to bring a baby home it didn't make sense. Nothing like bringing a third person into your life and not being able to afford the roof over our heads because we had spent the next twelve years worth of mortgage payments on the legal costs of bringing home an international baby.

We also had to pick the country based on how long we were expected to stay in the country - which could be from a few days to a few months. Brazil requires that you speak Portuguese which is it's own challenge seeing as how I have difficulty with my native one. Also with international adoptions we could have picked the sex of the child we were getting. (Keep in mind this was eleven to twelve years ago and a lot of things have changed on international adoption laws and treaties.) And then the next "Mac truck" came along.

Robbie was offered a position at a university in Chicago - and after some discussion he accepted it. We put the adoption plans on hold for a bit, figuring that with housing being part of his compensation package we would be able to easily save money for the adoption process. Chicago was a city we had talked about living in because we had always had a good time when ever we went there for a weekend trip.

The first year saw Robbie settling into his new role and I was busy turning a university apartment (read institutional) into something more to our tastes. Every room of the apartment was furnished with the exception of the master bedroom. We had just bought a new bedroom suite the year before moving and didn't want to get rid of it. Also gone were the pieces of "artwork" the university had paid someone a large amount of money to hang really high up on the walls. They would have looked better in a Motel 6.

One day Robbie came home with some exciting news. He had met a woman... Wait, that's not quite right. Robbie came home to tell me that he had been working that day with a woman who had adopted two little girls along with her partner through an agency in Oak Park called Adoption Link of Illinois. Adoption Link is an agency working in domestic adoptions of African American and multi-racial children. They were having a family picnic that weekend and Robbie's coworker thought it might be a good way for us to learn more about the agency and what they did. We met up with them and had a great time meeting other families of all walks of life with the same thing in common. Everyone had the same warm glow on their faces when talking about their families, how they came to be, and especially when they talked about their children. We were hooked.

I'd like to say that we were so excited that we started the paperwork right away. What is closer to the truth is that we were scared. Were we making the right decision? What was it going to be like raising a child of a different race? How were people going to react? Luckily Adoption Link has all those questions and many more covered as it wasn't simply a matter of filling out some paperwork and signing some checks every so often. There were criminal background checks, fingerprinting, home visits, psychological evaluations, a portfolio of what we could offer the child to be shown to the birth parent(s), and classes to take. The reality is that anyone who goes through the adoption process is probably more prepared and grilled about why they want to have children than the average person. Sometimes I think there would be a lot less child abuse if every person of child bearing age had to go through the same process as prospective adoptive parents.

Robbie and I took the process slow as we had met a guy who right after starting the adoption process was picked by a birth mother. That would be similar to finding out you were pregnant and the baby arriving the next week which is how we didn't want to do things. So we took our time filling out the necessary paperwork, getting fingerprinted, and having the home studies completed in order to become licensed foster parents. And Adoption Link did warn us that it would be a long process since we were a gay couple as it was still a huge taboo in the African American community to give a child up for adoption let alone to a gay household. But they did tell us if we were patient that in about two and a half years we would become parents. They were right on the money with the timeline.

After one set back - we were chosen by a birth mother to adopt her son who was due in January of '07 - we stopped talking about the process. Robbie would still hound the agency to get updates every few weeks, but we didn't discuss it. Even knowing for a few months and then having the link fall through was enough that I couldn't hope any longer that getting a baby was going to happen. We quietly and literally shut the door on the room that was to become a nursery and went on with our lives planning to take a vacation to Florida at the end of May that following year.

One afternoon, the second week of May, I was walking back from Little Italy after a tanning session (Midwest skin tends to burn easily in the sub-tropical Florida sun) when I got a call from Robbie. He said something about Margaret (she founded and ran the agency), little girl born the week before, and that's when things started getting a little blurry around the edges and I had to sit down on the curb along Taylor Street. Once I was able to see again I had him start over to make sure that I heard him correctly. There was a baby girl born the previous week, she was still in the hospital, the agency was giving us the first option because we had been on the list so long, and they needed to know our answer in 24 hours. What happened the rest of the day is gone. I somehow found my way back home - six long city blocks away - where I had to wait for Robbie to finish working out the rest of his day.

There really wasn't much of a discussion once he got home. There were a few complications with the birth and she would have to stay in the hospital a few more weeks - which was fine with us as it gave us a little more time to prepare mentally - and we said "of course we'll take her." One of the stipulations which still saddens me is that the agency didn't want us to go to the hospital to see our girl. The hospital was close to where we lived and was in the middle of an African American community. Adoption Link was afraid that if the hospital thought they only dealt with gay and lesbian couples the hospital would stop contacting them when they had a birth mother who wasn't already working with an agency.

So after three of the longest weeks of my life, we got the call from the social worker that she was on her way to the agency with Riley and to meet her there to sign some paper work and get our daughter. Oh, and to make sure we had the car seat or we couldn't leave with her. One day before she turned a month old and two days before I turned 46 we finally brought Riley home. She will always be the best birthday present I will ever receive. Oh yeah, the Florida Vacation was cancelled which with the start of our new family was so worth it.

First day as a new dad.