The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant (21 page)

Today our lives would change forever, and all I could think while Terry sped down I-5 in the van was . . .
I look like shit.
Terry was presentable; he'd cleaned himself up for work this morning, but even if he hadn't, Terry's one of those people who could look good falling down stairs. I, on the other hand, looked like a mob hit. I'd been up late the night before, I hadn't shaved or showered, and in the rush to get our stuff together and get down to Portland, I forgot to brush my teeth or pack any toiletries. We
had nothing to fight over on the drive down, as there was no CD or tape player in our maxivan, only an AM radio, so we fought over stopping in Olympia to buy toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, razors, and shaving cream. Terry wanted to get to Portland, but I didn't think the voice in my head—“Look at you! You're filthy!”—would allow me to walk into the maternity ward at OHSU without at least stopping to shave and brush my teeth.

On our way up the hill to OHSU, we got lost and had to double back. Finally we found the entrance and parked. The building with the maternity ward was built into the side of the hill, and the ground-level entrance from the parking lot side was on the ninth floor. Melissa was on the fourteenth. Still worried that no hospital would let someone as grubby as me near a newborn, I insisted we stop in a bathroom so I could clean up. While Terry waited beside me and Melissa pushed five floors up—I washed my face, shaved, flossed, and brushed my teeth. Terry looked at his watch: twenty-five after two. Almost four hours had passed between Laurie's phone call and our walking through the hospital door.

On the fourteenth floor, we weren't sure where to go. When we finally found the doors to the maternity wing, we stopped. What should we do? Knock? Just stroll in? Were boys even allowed? There was a small window in each of the swinging doors, but we couldn't see anyone through them. Nor could we see a nurses' station, and we hadn't passed an information desk since the ninth-floor entrance.

“What do we do?” I asked Terry. “Go back downstairs?”

“We don't have time.” Terry pushed open the door. “If we're not supposed to be in here, someone will tell us.”

The hallway was long, dark, and deserted. We walked past four empty birthing suites, rounded a corner, and found ourselves standing in front of a nurses' station.

“Can we help you?”

We hadn't braced ourselves for this moment, or this question. Laurie wasn't here to “facilitate our initial contact” with the maternity ward nurses; I guess we'd assumed someone from the agency would be here holding our hands, walking us through this step just as we'd been walked through every other. Apparently, this time we were on our own.

Terry looked at me. I looked at the nurses. They looked at me. Terry nudged me.

“Um, we're the guys adopting Melissa Pierce's baby,” I said. “We just got here.”

The nurses all smiled as if they'd been expecting us—Nancy, Melissa's social worker,
did
make a note on her chart. One picked up a clipboard.

“Melissa had her baby a few minutes ago,” she said, “at two-twenty-six
P.M.
Melissa and the baby are doing fine.” She showed us to a waiting area; we'd be able to see Melissa in a few minutes. The waiting area was by the elevators; I wasn't sure how we'd managed to miss it. It had an information desk, several couches, and a couple of television sets tuned to the Saturday afternoon sports programs. Golf. The nurse told us the doctor would be out in a few minutes, pointed to a pot of coffee and told us to make ourselves comfortable. We plopped down on a couch. It was now 2:36. At the moment the baby was born, Terry and I were in a bathroom, Terry watching me shave. Not that it made any difference where we were, since Melissa hadn't wanted us in the birthing room. We had to be somewhere, so why not a bathroom? We'd spent our first moments alone together in the bathroom of a gay bar.

We were sitting close together on our couch. Terry started to say something about the hospital, the baby, his father—then he stopped. I looked around. There were some thugs on the other side of the room, all from one family if I could judge by their shared fashion sense. I risked it: I put my arm around Terry and kissed him on the forehead. He leaned into me. The thugs didn't rush us; they didn't seem to notice or care that homos were cuddling in the maternity ward's waiting room. Wives and girlfriends were pushing out pups down the hall; thugs or not, these guys had more important things to worry about.

A short woman who couldn't have been more than fourteen walked into the waiting area and called our names—an aide or a hospital volunteer coming to take us to Melissa, I assumed, expecting her to turn and walk us back into the maternity ward. She didn't budge, and only then do I take her in. She was wearing scrubs, with little paper booties on her feet. She introduced herself as Melissa's
doctor, and told us the baby was healthy, and that we could see him and Melissa just as soon as Melissa “passes the afterbirth.”

“And if she flunks it?” I asked.

Not funny, but I was delirious. The polite little doctor laughed a polite little laugh, gave me the fish-eye—clearly she'd heard that one before—and said we should be able to see Melissa in about ten minutes.

Melissa was sitting up in bed with the kid in her arms. He was wrapped up like a burrito, with a tiny knit hat on his cone-shaped head. Melissa was wearing a hospital gown, her long hair was pulled back into a knot, and she looked . . . clean. She smiled at us and nodded toward the baby, as if to say, “Look what I did.” She wasn't glowing or beaming or gushing or crying. Melissa was as composed as she always was—and her baby was pretty composed, too. He was awake, but not crying. He was looking up at Melissa, blinking and looking bewildered, as if he were trying to figure out what the hell happened. No one said anything. The nurse who showed us in left, closing the door, and the four of us were alone. We said hey; Melissa said hey. Terry and I crossed to one side of the bed, stepping over a small puddle of something or other. Terry sat on a chair; I leaned against the windowsill.

“You okay?” Terry asked.

“I'm fine,” said Melissa. “It wasn't like a surprise.”

She looked down at the baby.

“He's healthy,” she said. It wasn't clear who she was talking to—the baby, us, or herself. That her baby was healthy must have felt like a victory for Melissa. Two couples had rejected her for fear that he had been damaged by her drinking and drug use. They were wrong. He was healthy.

“They give you your drugs?” I asked.

She nodded. “It still hurt like hell, though.”

The baby yawned, blinked his huge blue eyes, and stared up at Melissa.

From everything we'd heard and read, these first moments— the adoptive couple and the birth mother checking out the baby together—were supposed to be profoundly moving, full of pathos, cementing the bond between birth mothers and adoptive families. Not today. We took our cues from Melissa, and Melissa was underplaying
this moment. Subtle. No weeping, no hugs. Just the facts: Here's the baby. He's healthy. It hurt.

Terry and I made no sudden moves. We didn't ask to hold the baby, and we didn't approach the bed. Neither of us wanted to appear too anxious to snatch the kid away from Melissa. If she didn't change her mind, Melissa would be signing away her rights to the baby tomorrow. We'd have plenty of time to hold him; legally, we were going to be dads forever, but Melissa was only going to be a mom for the next twenty-four hours. In olde-tyme closed adoptions, birth mothers weren't allowed to hold their babies, and often weren't told the baby's sex or whether the baby was healthy. They were supposed to pretend nothing had happened, to make believe they didn't give birth. Keeping the baby away from the birth mom helped prevent her from bonding, and was supposed to make the “Baby? What baby?” pretense easier. We didn't want to prevent Melissa from bonding, or from basking. She'd given up booze and drugs, found an agency, found us, gotten off the streets, and taken care of herself. A healthy infant was her goal, and she'd pulled it off. She had a right to be proud of what she'd done, and she had a right to bond, so we hung back. Way back.

I told Melissa that at the moment the kid was born, we were in a bathroom on the ninth floor. When I told her why—I thought I was too dirty to be allowed in the maternity ward—she laughed.

“They let
me
in,” she said. “You had nothing to worry about.”

Melissa named the baby David Kevin Pierce; David for her current roommate, Kevin for his biological father (a.k.a. Bacchus), and Pierce, Melissa's family name. Melissa asked if we'd like to hold the baby. We nodded. She passed him to me—I was closer, and the moment he was in my arms I felt . . . nothing. Terry gave me his chair; I sat down and he knelt next to me. The baby was all of twenty minutes old, and weighed all of seven pounds. I slipped one finger into his hand, and as he gripped, I felt . . . nothing.

What the hell is wrong with me?
The kid was doing his part: his huge blue eyes were open and he was looking up at me, blinking. His little hand was strong and warm, his fingernails were large and surprisingly sharp, and he kept gripping my little finger. He had a pushed-up nose, and some blondish hair poked out from
under his blue hat. The baby yawned, let go of my finger, and closed his eyes. Terry put his arm around my waist, and sighed. Clearly, Terry was feeling something; I could practically see him bonding. What was wrong with me?

Now that the baby was in my arms, I didn't have to hang back anymore. I told Melissa he was beautiful, that she'd bred well, and I smiled down at the squishy little face looking back up at me. But no rush of feeling swamped me. I ordered myself to bond, dammit, but no “This is my son” epiphany took place. Terry took my picture with the baby; as I smiled for the camera, I wondered why I was having to will myself to feel something.

I passed the baby to Terry; he walked over to Melissa's bed and sat down on the corner. I took a picture of Terry and Melissa with the baby, and then sat down on the other corner of the bed.

“He's so beautiful, Melissa,” Terry repeated over and over, “so beautiful.” Terry looked as if he might burst, he was so happy. Even Melissa was smiling.

And I felt nothing.

We'd been working toward this moment for years. We'd been to seminars, read baby books, written stacks of progressively larger checks, and opened our bank accounts, police records, and skulls for inspection. We'd been talking about this moment—the moment we would become dads—for so long that maybe it had come to seem like so much talk. One big abstraction. Maybe I was numb. Maybe I had a spinning ball of rock and ice where my heart was supposed to be.

Terry was about to pass the baby back to Melissa when a nurse came in to take some tubes out of her back, from the epidural anesthetic. The nurse asked us to step into the hallway, and told us to take the baby with us. We both looked at Melissa, and she shrugged. It was okay with her.

In the hallway with the baby, the first time the three of us were alone, I looked at Terry, he looked at me. We looked at the baby. We looked at each other again.

“What have we done?” I said, half joking.

“He's so beautiful!” Terry said.

The hallway was dark, and the place was deserted. Only two of OHSU's twenty birthing suites seemed to be occupied. Terry
leaned against the wall, the baby in his arms, and I slid an arm around him, afraid he might sink to the floor.

The door to Melissa's room opened, the nurse came out, and we walked back in. We hung out, taking pictures and passing the baby around. Melissa told us that she'd gone into labor early in the morning, and taken a cab to the hospital a couple of hours later. We told her the story of our drive down. The nurse who'd removed the tubes from Melissa's back returned, weighed the baby, put him in a diaper and a tiny cotton shirt, and wrapped him back up. She then shook and opened a two-ounce bottle of baby formula, and asked which one of us wanted to do the first feeding.

“I've done enough work today,” Melissa said, leaning back in bed. “You guys do it.”

Terry took the bottle from the nurse, and Melissa handed him the baby. The formula was in a tiny glass bottle, with a yellow label and a little brown nipple. Terry gently touched the nipple to the baby's upper lip, and his tiny lips parted. He sucked in the nipple, and as he pulled on the bottle he gripped Terry's little finger. Terry looked up at me, and then at Melissa.

“He's so beautiful,” Terry said again. “He's so beautiful.”

“We know, we know,” said Melissa, rolling her eyes. “You told us that already.”

The nice nurse left the room, and a different nurse came in. She wanted to know long Melissa was thinking about staying.

“By law, you're entitled to stay forty-eight hours,” the nurse explained. “But if you're feeling all right, you can be discharged sooner.” She then pursed her lips and asked Melissa, a little too brightly, how she was feeling. There was a smile on her face, but there was also a tone in her voice. She didn't say so, but she was letting us all know that Melissa, uninsured and having had a relatively easy birth, shouldn't take advantage of Oregon's taxpayers by lying around for two days.

Melissa stared at the nurse, and said nothing.

“You can check out tonight, if you're feeling up to it. Or tomorrow morning.”

“Forty-eight hours is two days, right?” Melissa asked, turning to me. I nodded. Melissa stared straight ahead, the way she did in Laurie's office when we were trying to decide on the number of
visits per year. Melissa, the girl who jumped off trains, was probably well enough to leave tonight or tomorrow, but if she went through with the adoption, the time she spent in the hospital with the baby would be her only time as a full-time mom. I wanted to explain that to the nurse, standing by the door with her clipboard, but this decision was Melissa's to make.