Hormones Rage and Babies Boom, Part 2

You should read “Hormones Rage and Babies Boom, Part 1” before you read this. The post is dated October 12, 2006.

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I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you about Part 2. Do you want to know what happened next to my raging hormones and quest for a child, or do you want to know what happened next to my heart? Maybe you want to know all of it. Or none. Those days are intertwined and some of those stories are hard. They’ll take time to tell. We’ll see.

I’ll tell you a bit more about The Quest. The heart stuff will have to wait.

We became friends while planting garden annuals. We shared a common condo wall, a common postage stamp yard and a common love of children. My realtor was wrong, though. They weren’t really cousins. Oh my heavens … LESBIANS!

We’re about the same age, so all of our time-bomb hormones were raging and crashing around at the same time. There was so much estrogen bouncing off our townhouse walls that it’s amazing male visitors didn’t grow breasts.

The lesbian baby boom was in its early days, and they were just starting the delicate dance, negotiating with adoption agencies and with each other. Their own baby quest was very different from mine. (You now know – or should – that my journey on the motherhood train was more traditional, and derailed.) They hired an international attorney and international adoption liaison, and so, three months later, got a call to go to Brazil to meet their daughter. They rushed around, packing suitcases and money belts, and loading up with Pampers and penicillin, adrenaline and hope.

The flight to Brazil seemed never-ending to the moms-to-be, fraught with “Oh my Gods!” and anxious second thoughts. After arriving and hastily stashing their belongings in a barren rental apartment, they rushed to the adoption liaison’s office. There, the solemn-eyed, curly-haired baby girl erased all second thoughts.

But as so often happens in all good fairy tales, there were dragons to fight along the way. The baby was sick. No pre-natal care and four months of orphanage life took a toll on her tiny body. The lung infections were probably the result of burning tobacco fields, and the scabies and boils a result of … well, you decide. Whatever miseries you imagine are probably right. American money and drugs immediately charged to the rescue. Without them the doctors said the baby would have died that night.

The Brazilian government required a forty-five day stay before the baby could be taken out of the country to her new home. While the new little family walked along Brazilian beaches, 4,153 miles away I was setting up the baby’s new room with rockers and teddies and blankies, oh my. Nesting seems to be my particular skill – a way of controlling something when everything else is spinning out of my control.

As proof of my lack of control over anything real, my baby’s intended father-to-be (loosely defined as my husband) left me for his 19-year-old girlfriend the very week my next-door-friends brought their baby daughter home.

Now, I can’t explain this at all, and I’m not much of a believer in mystical moments or psychic flashes, but as she got out of the car, one of the moms put her beautiful and exhausted crying baby daughter into my arms and The Quest ended. Just like that, my baby burn disappeared. The fire just fizzled out. Poof. She stopped crying and snuggled into my arms and heart, where she’s been all these years since. My God-daughter now, she filled in all the blanks. I suppose it might be possible to love a child more, but I can’t imagine it.

A year or so later, another of my dearest friends decided it was time for him to become a father. As a gay man his daddy options were a bit limited, but his strong mother raised him with the surety that, “Happiness is about raising a family.” He was pretty sure that his own baby quest could be quenched only by a biological child of his own, and so we talked about having a child together. I chickened out. My hormone-driven baby daze had vanished and I quickly reverted to my pre-raging days of baby ambivalence. And of course my God-daughter was already prancing around my living room, playing gleeful tag with my dog and giggling, as she filled the voids in my heart.

After watching me with my God-daughter – birthed 4,200 miles away by a woman of another ethnic background and color, and mothered by middle-class suburban lesbians – he changed his mind. He watched as this girl-baby mimicked me as well as her moms, and it became difficult to see where one influence began and the other ended. And so he and his husband adopted their daughter from New York, where she was put into her dads’ arms at birth by a loving nurse. She’s brilliant – a reflection of them, as well as of the woman who chose them to be the parents of her birthchild. And maybe, just maybe, she reflects a dollop of my love, too. (I suppose it’s possible that she was born instinctively knowing the words to “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair...” but I’m willing to admit that it might have been me who taught her the song.) Another one of the children I can’t imagine loving more.

But even biology doesn’t guarantee a parental mirror. Every now and then, even the well-intentioned can be ignorant and hurtful. A friend of mine from the Midwest married a dark-haired, black-eyed, olive-skinned man from a Mediterranean island. Their children (much as my brother and I do) reflect their parent’s genetic melding and prove (again) that opposites attract and make beautiful babies. Her daughter’s swinging black hair, fiery dark eyes and sun-kissed skin carry the promise of Mediterranean sunlight and laughter. Her appearance is as different as night and day from her auburn-haired, amber-eyed, fair-skinned mom. “Now, I know she’s not your real daughter. What country did you adopt her from…?” It never occurred to the woman (who nonetheless felt it perfectly within the bounds of etiquette to ask such a personal question) that my friend carried her daughter for nine long months and then gave birth to her in the heat of a sultry Midwestern summer.

Who is it who decides when a family becomes “real?” And is it the children or the parents who become Real? Maybe the story of the Velveteen Rabbit is right – "Real isn't how you are made. It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

Pressure to parent is strong, and occasionally that old joke is dead center true – almost any guy can become a father. I think it’s often just a matter of aim. But the decision to adopt a child is just that. A decision – a process. Intimate interviews replace intimate caresses. No one can accidentally adopt a child in a drunken moment of careless passion. Now, I’m not suggesting that biological parents be interviewed for parental fitness, their finances and backgrounds scrutinized. Smacks too much of a brave new world to be comfortable. But how different life would be if all children were deeply and truly wanted.

Somewhere in here there’s an unspoken essay about gay rights, international and domestic adoption, nature versus nurture and the definition of family. Will they look like me? Will they act like me? Will they BE like me? … Will we love each other? … Maybe it’s all just the luck of the draw, and both biology and adoption are a crapshoot. Perhaps with luck and love everything really does turn out ok. I know that these adopted children – and their more recently added siblings! – are bonded to their parents and to me. (Although I must tell you that I’m deeply grateful I get the love and not the tuition bills.) My life is filled with many prancing children who exuberantly love me back. I have crayon drawings on my refrigerator door to prove it. And I know that my hormone-driven baby quest blazed hot and then burned out, leaving in its place the special love an armful of children.

And then I did a really stupid thing. I let my absent husband move back home. He said he didn’t really love her after all and that I was The One. Of course there’s more to this story, too. Maybe later.