The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant

by Dan Savage

  All three of us looked at Melissa, and said, “A space bag?”

  She pushed her hair behind her ears and clued the squares in: “The bag inside a box of wine is silver and shiny. It's, like, Mylar or something from outer space. You take it out of the box and pass it around. It's a space bag. We didn't drink until we passed out, just enough to stay warm and get a buzz.”

  She'd also taken acid twice, and smoked some pot. She'd stopped drinking when she found out she was pregnant, and had smoked some pot maybe once since. She rattled this information off, seeming upset at having to talk about it at all. Her drinking was what made the last couple she met pass on her baby.

  “Why did you stop drinking?” I asked.

  “Some kids with dogs on the street think it's funny to give their dogs beer and get them drunk,” Melissa said. “I don't do that; it's not good for dogs, they shouldn't drink. Neither should babies. So I stopped.”

  “Drinking is not always good for adults, either,” said Laurie.

  Melissa looked at Laurie as if she just didn't get it.

  “Yes, but adults get to choose, and that's different. Dogs don't choose, and babies can't.”

  Melissa didn't want to talk about drinking or Bacchus anymore. Laurie steered the conversation to Melissa's recent stay in the hospital and her reasons for leaving emergency housing.

  “It wasn't just that they wouldn't let me have my animals there,” Melissa said. “It was filthy, and there were bugs, and the place was dangerous and full of crazy people. It's safer on the street than in a place like that.”

  Laurie had another birth mom to meet at the office. She got up to leave. “Why don't you all go out for a walk or get something to eat?” she said. “Get to know each other better.”

  Standing outside after Laurie left, Terry asked Melissa if she was hungry.

  “Not really.”

  Did she want to get something to eat?

  “I don't care.”

  I said that I was hungry, and I cared very much about getting something to eat.

  “What's good around here?” I asked.

  Melissa looked at me as if I were crazy. “I don't eat in restaurants,” she said.

  “Well,” Terry said, making a beautiful recovery, “if you did eat in restaurants, what restaurants would you eat in?”

  Melissa suggested Rocco's, a pizza place across the street from Powell's, Portland's huge independent bookstore, in the middle of Portland's hopelessly depressing strip of gay bars.

  “I don't have money,” Melissa said when we got up to the counter. This wasn't a spare-change request, and there was no self-pity in her voice. It was just a fact, like “dogs shouldn't drink.” If we wanted to eat with her, we'd have to buy.

  We got some slices, sat in a booth next to a pinball machine, and, over the racket, talked about the agency and Laurie.

  Melissa didn't like Laurie. Laurie was nice, and all, but Melissa thought she was square. It didn't help that it was Laurie's job to ask Melissa a lot of questions about her feelings and the future at their weekly counseling sessions. “Everytime I go, it's like, question after question.”

  When we asked her what she wanted to know about us, she said she'd read our home study and knew everything she needed to know.

  Terry made a comment about the music at Rocco's, and he and Melissa started talking about bands they liked. Melissa was opinionated about music, and soon she and Terry were chattering away like . . . not quite old friends. The music conversation led to talk about Seattle.

  Melissa didn't know where we lived, and didn't know our last names. The agency doesn't give any “identifying information” to birthparents until the adoptive couple decides to go ahead with the placement. Talking about Seattle bands, Terry looked at me and asked if we could tell Melissa where we were from. I nodded and said of course.

  “We live in Seattle,” said Terry.

  “I was in Seattle all last summer,” Melissa said. “With Bacchus. That's where I got pregnant.”

  FAS

  Two hours later we were back in front of Outside In.

  We were even less prepared to say good-bye to Melissa than we'd been to meet her. We had anticipated the meeting, imagining what we would say, what Melissa might say, and how she would smell. But this moment sneaked up on us. Melissa looked at me and then at Terry. She looked us in the eyes, which was unsettling. Except during the music conversation with Terry, she hadn't made eye contact with either of us. In our meeting with Laurie, she looked at the floor; eating, she looked at her pizza; walking around, she looked at the ground. As one hour stretched into two, Melissa had become chattier. She told us about growing up in a small town, which didn't sound like much fun, and she shared what she considered the worst part of living on the streets: you never got to have steak, only hamburger. But even when she got chattier, she wouldn't look at us.

  At the pizza place, Melissa dropped another bomb, just as startling as the fact that the baby boy she was carrying had been conceived steps from where we live and work. The hospital where Melissa spent a week after she went into early labor, the hospital where her baby would be born, was OHSU. If we adopted this child, our son would be born not only in the city that Terry hates, but in the same hospital where Terry's father died.

  When Melissa mentioned OHSU, I stopped chewing my pizza and looked at Terry. He had stopped chewing his pizza, too, and was looking at me. I raised my eyebrows to say, “Will you be okay with that?” and he shook his head and shrugged as if to say, “Not really, but whatever.” We resumed chewing. Melissa had finished picking all the pepperoni off her slice and eating the pieces one at a time, and was starting to pick off the cheese. When there was nothing but sauce and crust left, she ate her slice proper.

  “I hate that place,” Melissa said, of OHSU. “They wouldn't let me keep my dog in my room. I didn't see what the problem was. My dog is clean.”

  Standing in front of Outside In, Melissa suddenly became very quiet. She was waiting for Terry or me to say something, and we knew what she wanted to hear. Did we want this baby or not?

  When someone offers you her baby, it seems only polite to say, “Thank you,” smile, and take the baby. But even if we wanted to say yes, Laurie had recommended that all three of us refrain from making any commitments today. She wanted Terry and me to be absolutely sure before we said yes to Melissa; she would be crushed if we said yes right away and changed our minds after we gave it some thought. It would be better to wait two days and give Melissa a firm yes, Laurie advised us, than to put her through that.

  Anyway, I couldn't have told Melissa we would take her baby, because I wasn't sure how Terry felt about Melissa, or even how I felt.

  “It was nice to meet you,” Terry said.

  “We'll call soon,” I said. “We'll be in touch through Laurie, I guess.”

  “Okay,” Melissa said, shrugging. She looked up at her dog, chained to the railing on Outside In's porch. Melissa pulled her lips between her teeth and bit down on them, and slowly nodded her head. She turned and walked up to the porch, and sat down with her dog. She didn't look at us as we got back in our car. Clearly she was certain she'd never see these two fags ever again.

  Driving back to our hotel, which was a few blocks from Outside In, I asked Terry what he thought.

  Terry didn't respond. He swung the car into the Mallory Hotel's parking lot, pulled into an open space, shut off the car, and turned to face me. He looked somber, and I thought he might be worried about having to drive up that hill and return to the place where his father died.

  “Here's what I think,” he said, looking very serious, placing his hand on my shoulder. “After talking to Melissa I'm convinced of one thing: she has much better taste in music than my boyfriend.”

  I punched him on the shoulder—a little-brother punch, not an abusive-spouse punch—and held up my fist.

  “She's nice, a little weird, like a gutter punk, but nice. She doesn't seem crazy or anything. But I don't know what to think,�
� Terry conceded. Then he hit me back a little harder than I'd hit him, just like a little brother, and jumped out of the car.

  I didn't know what to think, either. The gutter-punk thing wasn't the problem for us that it might be for a suburban couple. We were familiar enough with street kids not to fear them. The drinking was a problem, though. The number of beers Melissa had told us she had every week during the first four and half months of her pregnancy was considerably more than the number of beers Laurie had told us about. Laurie'd said two or three beers, three or four days a week; Melissa'd told us four or five beers, four or five days a week. We didn't know what to think about Melissa's drug use, but we'd never heard of babies being born addicted to acid or pot, only to crack or heroin, and we both assumed the drugs weren't much of a problem. But we needed to check.

  And when it came to drinking, how much buzz was too much buzz? Was there a significant difference between nine to twelve beers a week and twenty to twenty-five? Was twenty-five beers too much? Or nine? Was one beer too much? And while we knew FAS was a Very Bad Thing, we only had vague ideas about what FAS did to kids exactly. Did it make a kid temporarily stupid but fixable? Or was he stupid forever? If we said yes to Melissa what were we risking?

  When we got up to our room, the message light on the phone was blinking. Laurie wanted to know if we could make up our minds by Wednesday. It was Sunday, and she hated to rush us, but Melissa needed to get off the streets.

  Sitting in our room later that night, we decided we couldn't decide. We needed to learn more about FAS before we could give Melissa an answer. Laurie had already given Terry the numbers of an FAS specialist in Seattle, and had faxed us a copy of Melissa's ultrasound, which she told us showed that everything was normal. Judging by the ultrasound, Laurie thought the risk of FAS (or anything else) was very low.

  “But you're the guys who would be adopting the baby, not me,” Laurie had told Terry in that first phone conversation. “Call these doctors; ask them what they think.”

  We were quiet for a while; then Terry finally said, “If we took the beer out of the picture, if Melissa hadn't drunk during the first part of her pregnancy, we would say yes to her, right?”

  “I would, yeah. But you're the one who wanted to have all the street kids gassed a few months ago. And is having to go to OHSU a problem for you?”

  “The street-punk thing is not a problem. The dog is not a problem, the smell is not a problem, and OHSU isn't really a problem, either. Only the booze is a problem.”

  We had dinner in the Mallory's dining room, a restaurant with no name, where we had to remove our baseball hats. We didn't know what to do with ourselves after we ate, so we drove to Lloyd Center and saw a movie. On our way back to the hotel, we passed the pizza place Melissa had taken us to, parked the car, and walked around. In Powell's, we found some books on FAS, but we couldn't process any more information. We put the books back on the shelf.

  We wandered up the street and into one of the gay bars. At the PDX Eagle, we each ordered a Coke; we got some quarters and played some pinball. The Eagle is a leather bar, painted black on the inside with chain-link-fence accents. There's a sling hanging from the ceiling, and gay pornography of the soft-core SM and hard-core sex variety was playing on television sets set all around the bar. A couple of older men, guys in their sixties, sat at the bar drinking beer and watching the videos. As we played pinball, I wondered if Terry and I would be sitting in leather bars when we're sixty, watching porn, sipping beer and laughing with the bartender.

  I hoped so.

  Before we left Portland Monday afternoon, we called the FAS specialist Laurie had recommended, leaving a message asking her to call us at home. We drove straight to Bob and Kate's. Bob and Kate were having fun playing adoption experts to our adoption neophytes, and over wine and pizza we told them about Melissa. Lucy, Gus, and Isobel were upstairs in the attic, watching a Disney video.

  “Before we had kids we swore we wouldn't park 'em in front of the TV,” Bob said. “But, oh, you start to feel different about the TV when you've got 'em. Then there's McDonald's.”

  We told Bob and Kate about Melissa's drinking, the absent birth father, the Seattle connection, and the weird way she ate her pizza.

  “We're under all this pressure to make a quick decision,” I said. “Melissa is living on the street right now, and will be until someone agrees to take her baby and pay her rent.”

  “And if it wasn't for the drinking,” Terry added, “we would say yes right now. But we aren't sure we're up for an FAS baby, and that makes us feel awful.”

  “Everyone wants a healthy baby,” said Bob, “there's nothing wrong with wanting a healthy baby, so you have nothing to feel awful about.”

  “If we were pregnant, we could eliminate the risk of FAS by not drinking, right?” I said. “But under these circumstances, to eliminate the risk of FAS, we have to eliminate Melissa. We'd be the third couple to reject her.”

  “And she's on the street right now, waiting for us to make up our minds,” said Terry.

  “You can't think about that,” Kate said. “You have to make up your minds based on what's best for you. It sounds nasty but you can't adopt a kid for life because you feel sorry for that birth mom this week.”

  We pulled out Melissa's ultrasound and passed it around.

  “One of our birth moms had a lot to drink when she was pregnant,” Bob said, “and we were very worried, but we went ahead with it, and we're all fine. Sometimes you have to take chances and keep your fingers crossed. Every kid—bio or adopted—comes with issues and uncertanties.”

  “Is that your legal opinion?” asked Terry.

  “I advise all my clients to cross their fingers,” Bob said, opening another bottle of wine. “And I'd advise us to have some more wine.”

  “Terry, if you had to decide right now, what would you do?” Kate asked. When Terry looked at me, Kate said, “No, don't look at Dan, look at me. What would you do?”

  Bob is a real estate lawyer; Kate's a county prosecutor; and here you see the difference.

  “I don't know—it depends on what the risk is,” Terry said. Kate rolled her eyes, and turned to me.

  “Dan, if you had to decide right now?”

  “We might not get picked again ever, and maybe a baby with half a brain is better than none,” I said, “so maybe we should say yes.”

  Terry put his head down on the table and said he didn't want to think about it anymore. Bob filled Terry's wineglass back up.

  “We could offer to pay for her apartment,” I said, “whether or not we take the baby. That way she'd be off the streets, and we wouldn't be worrying that by saying no we were abandoning Melissa to the streets, and we could take more time to make our decision. It's not that much money.”

  “No,” Kate said. “First, it would be unfair of the agency to put you in that position, and second, the fact is that girl had a place to stay and walked away from it over a dog—”

  “And a cat,” Terry said. “She has a cat, too.”

  Kate looked at Bob, and threw her hands up.

  “If she can't be separated from her dog and cat,” said Kate, “what do you think is going to happen when she lays eyes on her baby? Forget about the FAS stuff. Think about that dog! Once she sees her baby, she's not going to want to be separated from him, either. You feel guilty now, but how will you feel when you're sitting in a hospital and she decides to keep that baby? That will feel a lot worse. I'd say no, don't go with Melissa.”

  It was Bob's turn to throw up his hands.

  “Don't tell them what to do—they have to make their own decision!”

  “I didn't tell them what decision to make,” said Kate. “I just said, ‘I'd say no.’ They can say yes if they want to, but if it were me, I'd say no.”

  Bob and Kate gave us the number of the doctor they'd talked to about FAS before they adopted. We called and left a messages for Bob and Kate's doc, and then made the biggest mistake we would make in the entire adoption
process.

  We got online.

  There must be information on the Internet about FAS, we figured, so we typed “Fetal Alcohol Syndrome” into a search engine. Fifteen million sites popped up.

  “Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is a pattern of mental and physical defects which develops in some unborn babies when the mother drinks too much alcohol during pregnancy,” read one site. “A baby born with FAS may be seriously handicapped and require a lifetime of special care. . . . Alcohol in a pregnant woman's blood-stream circulates to the fetus by crossing the placenta. There, alcohol interferes with the ability of the fetus to receive sufficient oxygen and nourishment for normal cell development in the brain and other body organs. . . .”

  On another site, this:

  “The fetus is most vulnerable to various types of injuries depending on the stage of development in which alcohol is encountered. A safe amount of drinking during pregnancy has not been determined, and all major authorities believe women should not drink AT ALL during a pregnancy.” Several sites quoted God as an authority on the subject. When someone got knocked up in the Old Testament, an angel of God instructed her to avoid “strong drink.” One site had this flashing warning on every page: “EVEN ONE DRINK PUTS YOUR UNBORN BABY'S HEALTH AT RISK.”

  All the sites were scary; most featured a lot of medical jargon and a few featured New Age bullshit: “The alcohol affected child is like a garden. Some seeds need to be planted year after year, like the carrots and radishes. The seeds the birds carry away have to be replaced almost immediately. But there are bulbs that grow in the garden and every year they come up almost without tending. It can be too easy to see what failed to come up this year and step on crocuses close to the ground. The important thing is to be thankful there is a garden.”

  An FAS web site brought to you by Martha Stewart Drinking. In addition to fetal alcohol syndrome, we also had to worry about fetal alcohol effect. While FAE is milder than FAS, the lists of FAE symptoms were just as long and just as terrifying as the nearly identical lists of FAS symptoms.