The Longest Date: Life as a Wife

by Cindy Chupack

  My wife and I started taking some short trips, little adventures to get our lives back in motion. A short time later, her period arrived. It was as if her body was saying, “Hey, let’s move on.”

  And we are. It’s been almost ten months. Time helped. We are working. We’ve lost the weight and are making love.

  In a parallel universe, I’m changing diapers and craving sleep, but in this one, the adoption process is under way, so somewhere there is, or is about to be, a child who will find his or her way to us, and we will all catch and protect each other. In due time, I’ll rock back and forth, holding a swaddled child. In a whirlwind of joy, embarrassment, and hypocrisy, I may even shamelessly think that everything happens for a reason.

  And Baby Makes Four

  For me, as soon as we started the adoption process, it felt as if a weight had been lifted. Yes, there was a short period (Year Five) when I had had a nervous breakdown, but aside from that, I took comfort in the fact that it was no longer my job to produce the baby.

  I felt like that woman in the television ad from the ’70s who wore a cocktail dress and held a glass of champagne and announced, “I’m cleaning my bathroom bowl!”

  I’d be at work, or in a spin class, or at a party drinking alcohol and eating sushi, and I’d think: I’m having a baby.

  It seemed just as revolutionary as a time-release toilet-bowl cleanser that someone, somewhere, at that very moment, might be carrying—or conceiving—our baby.

  I gleefully threw out my pregnancy tests and the syringes we’d collected that made our closet look as if we were running a needle exchange. My period would come and go without fanfare or tears. We could have sex any time of the month, and I didn’t have to prop up my pelvis on a pillow for fifteen minutes afterward. I could actually forget about trying to get pregnant, until someone would say, “That’s when you get pregnant, when you stop trying!”

  There is nothing worse than being told that the one thing you haven’t tried is not trying. We did get pregnant once not trying, on our honeymoon, and it was all downhill from there. Soon we realized we needed assistance to have a baby: drugs, science, maybe someone else’s eggs, maybe someone else’s uterus . . . finally it became clear that what we needed was someone else’s baby.

  And here’s the great thing about adoption: there are babies. There are babies in need of homes, and homes in need of babies. It all makes perfect, wonderful sense, and yet friends and family and even strangers feel compelled to tell you about all of the people they know who got pregnant as soon as they started to pursue adoption. “That’s what always happens,” they say, smiling and nodding encouragingly.

  “Well, that’s not going to happen to me,” I would say with finality, but the conversation invariably continued: “That’s what my sister-in-law’s friend thought, and then she got pregnant with twins!”

  I’m telling you, these people are relentless.

  Here’s one reason why I knew that that was not going to happen to me: I just referenced a commercial from the ’70s. And you can’t find that commercial on YouTube. I have a memory of it. (That’s what people had before YouTube.) And the fact that I remember life before YouTube is another indication that I won’t get pregnant just because I’m not thinking about it.

  And now, thanks to these yea-sayers, I was thinking about it, so I definitely wouldn’t be getting pregnant. And I didn’t want to get pregnant. I wanted to adopt! That’s how this conversation started!

  That’s the other annoying part of the urban myth: that once you try to adopt, you will get pregnant. It implies that by adopting, you are settling.

  Maybe at one time Ian and I thought it was important that a baby be biologically ours, but once we started looking critically at egg donors and birth parents, it became abundantly clear that we would have rejected ourselves. We would have taken one look at our age, weight, alcohol and drug consumption, family relationship, and health histories and agreed that these were not the kind of people we’d choose to create our baby.

  So no, we were not secretly hoping to get pregnant. We’d let go of that hope, and now we had a new hope. Or a new plan, which is better than a hope. Fuck hope.

  Hope was the most complicated relationship I had had during this baby quest. I had tried for so long during the IVF process to hang on to hope, to harness the power of positive thinking. Then I began to wonder if hope had been making the disappointments feel too acute. So I tried lowering my expectations, being less hopeful. And when that didn’t work (it even felt like the reason things weren’t working) I let go of hope altogether (see Year Five), and as it turns out, hope is like oxygen. You need it to stay alive.

  But hope has nothing to do with whether or not you are able to birth a child.

  I have two female friends who demonstrated this (so it must be true). They were both trying to get pregnant when I was trying, going through the same IVF hell. One remained optimistic throughout, the other pessimistic. They both felt equally heartbroken when things went wrong, and equally lucky when things finally went right. So together, we decided hope has no role in the miracle of childbirth.

  In fact, a “miracle” might be exactly what it is, and despite all of the scientific and biological breakthroughs in fertility, we’re not in control of miracles. I don’t know who is (because the Octomom confused the issue for me), but I know I’m not.

  The Octomom will forever be tied to our baby quest in my mind because she was making news when we were unable to make babies. She gave me a whole new appreciation for the movie Raising Arizona, which I loved already, but I could now see how a couple without a child might get annoyed (to the point of criminal activity) with someone who seems to have children to spare. I am not sure what upset me more: the fact that the Octomom had fourteen kids, the fact that she began to do porn to support them, or the fact that, after birthing fourteen children, she still had a body for porn.

  Despite the seemingly unfair nature of nature, Ian and I were excited about our decision to adopt, and eager to focus on the business at hand, which was like a business, because apparently we had to market ourselves as parents.

  Even though there are babies in need of homes and homes in need of babies, it felt as if we were the sellers and the birth mothers were the buyers, as evidenced by the fact that we needed several homemade Books of Us with photos and handwritten captions explaining how lovely and child-friendly we were, a stash of “thank you for possibly giving us your baby” notes, a lengthy home study that involved four visits from a social worker, the addresses of everywhere we’d ever lived, Red Cross certification, baby proofing, and fingerprinting.

  I think the most humiliating part of the process was when I went to a liquor store that offered fingerprinting services, and the middle-aged Asian man inking my thumb asked if I was ready to be a parent. “It’s a big job,” he said.

  Really? Did I need his approval, too? The guy at the liquor store?

  There were so many gatekeepers on our adoption journey—social workers, lawyers, and now this guy? And then, of course, there were the birth mothers.

  Our lawyer would call with basic information about prospective candidates (“She lives in Texas, she’s due in two months, the birth father and sex of the baby are unknown”), and then I would drop whatever I was doing and call right away. It was like calling a radio station for concert tickets—usually the line was busy—which is why you have to call right away, especially in Los Angeles, because the gays are very on top of this stuff.

  Our lawyer told us some birth mothers prefer a gay male couple, because then they won’t feel replaced as the mother. Still, there are plenty of birth mothers who will accept only a “traditional” (read: heterosexual) home for their baby. That might have been good news if it weren’t offensive. Ian didn’t think we should take a child from a birth mother who had negative feelings about gay couples, but we had to remind ourselves that the baby would be born wit
h no prejudice, and we would try to raise the child to love everyone equally, and, PS, a lot of these birth mothers were antiabortion, something we also had an issue with since we were pro-choice, but their position might be the reason we were getting a child, so we decided to put our politics aside.

  Of course, our friends’ and families’ politics seemed to bubble up all around us. People felt very comfortable sharing their thoughts about what ethnicity our baby should be, open adoption versus closed, from the United States or abroad . . . it was like we were buying a car; everybody had an opinion.

  And some opinions were persuasive. There had been a terrible earthquake in Haiti—maybe you should adopt from Haiti. There were foster children who had been in the system for years; weren’t they more deserving?

  It was hard enough completing our family, and now we had to decide who was most deserving? Maybe we were most deserving. We’d waited five fucking years.

  Ian and I finally realized/admitted/confessed/apologized that we wanted to adopt domestically so that we could have a newborn. I was waiting for my father’s politically incorrect sigh of relief that we weren’t adopting from Africa as Ian had originally wanted to do, but he surprised me by bringing up an entirely new issue—he wanted us to look into Jewish adoption agencies.

  Really?

  The religion of our unborn child was something I hadn’t even considered worrying about. I found myself wanting to adopt whatever child would be most upsetting to my father, but again, there is no place for politics, even if they are only family politics, in adoption.

  The important thing, I thought, was that Ian and I had finally made a decision that would allow us to move forward. Until we realized it wasn’t our decision. It was the birth mother’s. She had to choose us. Which meant she had to be open to two forty-something Jews with a dog who looked as if he could eat a baby for breakfast.

  And that is how I came to be pitching myself to pregnant young women in the Midwest. Our lawyer said that I should make the initial call, because a lot of these women have trust issues with men. Understandable, since it’s a safe bet a man got them into this predicament.

  I would have to phone a complete stranger (who was just as nervous about the call as I was) and try to strike up a natural-sounding conversation that would ideally end with me saying, “Can I send you some pictures?” And then I would send one of our handmade scrapbooks and a cover letter and a personalized note in the hopes that she might decide to give us a child, and then invariably we would not hear back.

  One situation seemed promising. The birth mother was having twins (something Ian and I discussed and actually got enthusiastic about), but it turned out she was going to jail (something we were less enthusiastic about), and then she rejected us.

  And we had great letters of recommendation.

  That was one of the more gratifying parts of the adoption process. We got to read letters our friends wrote about why we would make great parents. It was nice to be reminded by our true friends why we were doing this. Of course, most people don’t need a letter of recommendation to become parents. The Octomom, for example.

  Eventually we talked to a birth mother who was having one child (not two, or eight), and we liked her enough to want to meet her, and miraculously she wanted to meet us, too.

  She was seven months pregnant when I first spoke to her. I liked that she seemed not just intelligent, but emotionally intelligent. If we were going to have an open adoption (which we wanted), that seemed important, now and in the future.

  When we met her in person in Los Angeles, one month before the baby was due, our nursery was only partially finished.

  She confessed later that this worried her. She thought we weren’t ready.

  If only she knew how ready we were, but Ian had been nervous about another plan collapsing, leaving us with the reminder of an empty nursery. I, on the other hand, wanted to allow myself a little joy; I wanted to behave like a woman who was expecting a baby, thus the compromise of the half-finished nursery. I remember Tink watching, concerned, as the stuff of my home/office went to storage unit R3176, and the paint went up, and the rug went down, and the crib and changing table arrived.

  • • •

  Then the baby arrived.

  We even got to be in the delivery room.

  I always envisioned being in the delivery room as the person delivering, but instead I was standing by, like the father at a birth, with the father at the birth, Ian.

  And as we held hands, and witnessed the miracle of our baby being born, we fell in love all over again. Not just with the baby—a perfect baby girl—but with each other.

  And maybe even with the universe.

  I have never felt so grateful, so aware of what a gift I was getting, than when this veritable stranger gave us the gift of a baby.

  And when we got home with this long-awaited little one, even Tink fell in love.

  So now it’s the four of us against the world.

  But Tink still secretly thinks of the baby as a houseguest.

  Welcome to the World

  I can’t believe it’s already been seven years since the FBI knocked on my neighbors’ doors to see if anyone knew anything about the man I had just married, Ian Wallach.

  That’s how I met my next-door neighbor, Karla, the first in a long line of L.A. neighbors I would meet thanks to Ian.

  In all of my years living at the beach pre-Ian, I’d never so much as introduced myself to Karla. And still, she was kind enough to stop by and let me know that an FBI agent had been at her house, and at a number of houses on the block, asking questions about Ian, and the agent would not, or could not, disclose why he was asking.

  She smiled gingerly, as if this might be the first I was hearing that I had married a fugitive. For all she knew, Ian was a drug lord, or serial killer, or both. She and the other neighbors were concerned for me. And, I imagine, for the neighborhood.

  I was concerned, too. I had a lot of unanswered questions, such as:

  Where had the FBI been for my previous relationships? Why had I had to figure out on my own if those were good guys or bad guys? Why now, when the wedding had already happened, when the photo album had been finalized, when the gift receipts had been tossed, were my tax dollars finally at work helping me figure out what sort of person I was sleeping with?

  Here’s why:

  Ian, after leaving his job at a big law firm in New York, was doing pro bono work through the Center for Constitutional Rights representing Guantanamo Bay detainees, and his access to classified documents necessitated FBI clearance.

  Neither Ian nor I had realized that clearance would include door-to-door questioning, but that’s how my neighbors, who barely knew me, found out that I had gotten married. Not by invitation—by interrogation.

  In the years to come, Ian—and then Ian and Tink—would meet almost all of my neighbors, and definitely all of their dogs. Ian would tell me who we should invite to our house for a four-ingredient meal (everyone), who was moving, who was pregnant, who was dying, who needed cheering up, and who needed avoiding.

  Upon hearing his news, I would always say, “Who are you talking about? A dog or a person?” (Tinkerbell might be a dumb name for a dog, but at least it’s clear she’s a pet. Shaun, Jessie, Oscar, Leyla—I wasn’t sure if they were puppies or children, afflicted with fleas or the flu.)

  But one thing was clear. I would never be anonymous again. I was now “the other person who owns Tinkerbell,” or less generously, “the unfriendly wife of Ian Wallach.”

  At least, I felt like that’s how I was known. Ian would always encourage me to come with him on his dog-walking rounds, but I wasn’t ready to let the world in. I was still getting used to letting Ian in, not to mention Tink. Who needed neighbors?

  And then came our daughter.

  Olivia.

  She was the tipping point.


  Once you have a baby, you become a citizen of the world whether you like it or not, and nobody was more surprised than I was to realize I liked my new status. I liked being part of a community. And I really liked being a mother.

  It probably sounds crazy and ungrateful, after so many years of trying, to be surprised that I liked being a mother, but I think that it was precisely because we’d been trying for so long that I had simply stopped imagining life with a child. I had stopped imagining a future in general after so many disappointments, so now that we had finally adopted a baby, I was learning to allow myself to enjoy her.

  Even the sleepless nights everybody warned us about weren’t so bad. Maybe because my body didn’t go through the trauma of childbirth, maybe because we’d waited so long to hear a baby cry—when Olivia would wake crying for a bottle, Ian and I were both kind of excited to be the one to give it to her.

  Ian doesn’t remember it that way. He says I would invent “ghost feedings” by telling him I was up at three and that it was his turn now . . . when actually it was the night before that I had been up at three. It all became a blur, but we both remember being awake in those late hours, and being tired but happy.

  Karla (after I found out she was my next-door neighbor) sold her house to a couple who was expecting a baby girl two weeks after we adopted Olivia, and they have become the kind of neighbors I never dreamed existed—the kind you are hoping will stop by, the kind who bring leftover brownies, the kind who are great friends to you and your daughter. Olivia and their daughter Eva are like sisters. They have literally been best friends their whole lives. And Olivia always says, “Night night, Eva” to their house as we walk upstairs to her bedroom.