Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other

by Scott Simon

  He pauses in telling the story. “I don’t want any of this to hurt him,” he says. “I don’t want any of this to hurt him or reflect badly on him in any way. I love him. I can’t hurt him. How many guys do exactly what he did and walk away and we never know? He’s not the same man that he was forty years ago.

  “I thought it was better to call him than it even would have been to go up to him on the floor,” says Chris. “I didn’t know if Meg knew.” She didn’t; but she knew the man she had married. “I said … I don’t remember. Something like, ‘You knew a girl named Diane. Well, she’s my mother, and you’re my father. I don’t want anything from you. I just happened to be in Las Vegas and saw you. I’m married and have three kids and I’m doing just fine. I don’t need anything. I’d just like to meet you sometime. How would you feel about that?’ And Alex said, ‘I got tears streaming down my face. Does that tell you anything?’”

  Chris says that Alex told him he needed a few moments to absorb the new fact of a birth son that he’d never met, and three grandchildren he hadn’t known he had. Chris offered to email a picture of himself to Alex. He had seen exquisite photographs of Alex’s family on various websites and told him, “I think you’ll see something.”

  Chris sent off the picture of himself: sandy-red beard, grayish sandy-red hair. Alex phoned two minutes later.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess we don’t need a paternity test.”

  “I AM ONE LUCKY, in fact the luckiest son of a bitch in the world,” says Chris Leonard. He and Karen and their children met Alex, Meagan, and their children. Civility quickly melted into real warmth. The Leonards are genuine, interesting people who have their own busy lives in North Carolina, but they come to Connecticut every few months. Alex and Meg, who maintain family and business links in North Carolina, are there for long weekends, outings, and the birthday parties and grade school graduations of Chris and Karen’s three children: Alex and Meg’s grandchildren. The Julians have a large, loving, and complicated family that cannot be described with the usual designations, lineage trees, flow, and genealogy. Meg’s graciousness and Alex’s kindness are the source of warmth at the center of it.

  “Things couldn’t have gone better,” says Chris, which is what Karen, Alex, Meg, Diane, and everyone else says, too.

  In fact, the situation has turned out so happily that Alex and Meagan felt that they had to caution their teenage sons. They were delighted that Chris, Karen, and their children had become a part of their lives. But they have told their boys not to imitate their father’s approach for starting families.

  “I’m sure there are things he doesn’t like about who he used to be,” Chris says of Alex (and he is “Alex” when Chris speaks of him to me, and not “my father”). “What he was doesn’t matter to me. I have two great, wonderful parents. And now, a great relationship with two other birth parents. My life would have been great, just great, if I’d never found out and none of it had happened. But now that it has, how much richer is my life to know two more people who love and look out for me?”

  HE IS GLAD that he was almost forty, and a husband and father, by the time Diane decided to find him. “I was stable and secure and could deal with it,” Chris says. “Versus me when I was eighteen, twenty, or twenty-five.”

  Chris was not only stable and secure, but reacted with instinctive kindness when he read a letter from a woman who had put the deepest hope of her life into an envelope and held her breath to hear back. That kind of consideration is instilled by growing up with loving, generous parents who put their children at the center of their lives: Briggs and Glenda Leonard.

  Chris remembers his parents reading Diane’s letter and pushing back from their table in silence. He says that Briggs looked across at his wife and said, “Well, dear, we’ve had him for more than thirty-five years, haven’t we? I guess we’re willing to share.”

  Chris Leonard has to halt for a moment before going on.

  “That’s pretty big, isn’t it?”

  Karen Leonard threw a surprise party for Chris’s fortieth birthday. What surprise could possibly be left—that Alex had been a baby left in the wreckage of the UFO in Roswell? That might explain the sandy-red beard …

  Chris walked in, and of course everyone was there. His mother and father. Karen. Justin, Sam, and Kate, his children. Diane. Alex and Meg.

  “Everywhere I turned, there were people looking out for me,” Chris says.

  “MY MOM AND DAD are the most amazing people,” he says. “They just want good stuff for me. That’s what real parents are, aren’t they? I think I can see and appreciate all of the good things that have happened to me because I am adopted. It makes me think about some of the things that could have happened, but didn’t. If I’d just been born to my mom and dad, they still would have been great parents. But I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. I would have thought, ‘Well of course, that’s just how it happened. No big thing.’ But I’m adopted. I know otherwise.”

  ADOPTIVE PARENTS come to terms early with something every parent has to confront at some turn: our love is not exclusive. Two other people gave our child life, and perhaps a love as powerful as our own. They couldn’t keep them. And in the end, no parent can.

  All parents have to cheerfully and tearfully accept that their children belong to the world. If we nourish, cherish, and protect them, they will grow up strong enough to mock, challenge, and finally leave us. If we want to keep them in our lives, we’ve got to have love and memories: nights we hold their heads through fevers and bad dreams, days that we find a beloved fish floating in a bowl and bury him in the park, the long afternoon we spend looking for a lost stuffed toy in the rain. Crying, snarling, protecting, exasperating, hysterics, theatrics, apologies, and laughter make families. Not just blood—mere blood—and genes.

  The Pain of What-Ifs, and the Folly of “Don’t You Know What?”

  PONDERING WHAT-IFS is part of growing up, and it affords mental exercise and refreshment at all ages. I still imagine what it might be like to throw a curveball to pitch the Chicago Cubs into the World Series. I wonder what if I had been born a Dalit (untouchable) in India. Would I have been as wise as a man I once interviewed who collected night soil outside the Calcutta Zoo to make candles? If I had been born a son of King Hussein, would I have worked out peace in the region and snagged Queen Rania besides? If I had been an Illinoisan alive in 1860, would I have voted for Lincoln or Douglas?

  But children who are adopted have more palpable alternatives to ponder. Pain may be on some of those paths. At the moment, our daughters don’t know a world without a Starbucks nearby, TiVo to stop the action so they can go to the bathroom, and rocky road ice cream in the freezer. I like it that way. A father wants to make his daughters smile and laugh. He wants to keep his children from want, hunger, and hurt. Of course I want them to learn about the world. But I am not eager—in fact, I could wait a zillion years—for them to contemplate how girls who may have been in the cribs next to them will be forced into factories or be exploited by men, while they play soccer and sip hot cocoa with extra sprinkles.

  A father whose family had adopted a daughter from Bangladesh once told me, “No matter how hurt or angry your children ever make you—and they will—you must never, never, never say, ‘Don’t you know what we saved you from?’” That’s a true obscenity. It is a curse that could discourage the pushing back and outright rebellion that’s necessary for children to grow. And while, like most children, ours could stand to treat their mother with more conspicuous gratitude for all she does to dress, bathe, and feed them, and to fill their lives so brilliantly, we don’t want a feeling of indebtedness to steer their lives.

  Besides: it was they who saved us.

  PARENTHOOD IS NUTS and bolts. No, that’s carpentry. Parenthood is shit, snot, slime, fear, tears, spit, and spills. It’s as intense as combat, which is to say hours of tedium relieved by moments of alarm and flashes of joy to remind you that you’re alive. It is intensely practical and prof
oundly square, even if you’re not. It’s feeding, wiping, and picking up. Good intentions aren’t worthless. But they can’t even buy jelly beans for children.

  Taber MacCallum grew up in Albuquerque in what he calls a “typically sixties unconventional dysfunctional household,” which was not as much fun as it sounds. He says that his mother and father had children, but didn’t quite accept that they had become parents, the kind of people who had to feed, diaper, and pick up. They wanted their old lives back, and eventually they divorced. His father philandered, often disappearing to pursue girlfriends at night. Taber thought that his father almost seemed to resent that his son had become the teenager that he could no longer be. Taber was living by his wits, rough and wild, feeling forgotten and forlorn at the age of fourteen.

  “I don’t think that my mother and father didn’t love me,” he says. “I’m sure they did. But they weren’t bringing groceries into the house. In fact, I was getting the money to buy groceries.” Presumably not by selling lemonade.

  Taber was an intelligent kid who was doing badly in school and life when a professor named Robert Wall rented a room from his parents for the summer. He and Taber became friendly. Bob recognized qualities in Taber that are manifestly visible now but might have been effectively concealed in a boy edging close to delinquency: intelligence, humor, and, to be sure, loneliness.

  At the end of the summer, he asked if Taber would like to come and stay with him and his wife, Vivian Mahlab, in Austin. Taber went for a visit, and essentially came back only to pack. Taber’s parents were persuaded, his father rather easily, to let him live with Bob and Vivian. Rather than resent them for their nonchalance, Taber prefers to think that they recognized that their consent was the best thing they could do for their son.

  Bob and Vivian became his legal guardians. He stayed with them until college, when they took him on a trip through Europe, then gave him a ticket back to Austin and some traveler’s checks. “You’re a fine young man,” they told him. “Take a month. See the sights. We’ll be waiting back home.”

  “They were parents,” Taber stresses. “Someone to give you not only unconditional love, but regular meals. Someone to take you to the doctor and dentist. A reason to come home. They were a miracle,” he says simply. “Two people who told a wild, rambunctious teenager, ‘Come live with us, we’ll take care of you.’ How miraculous an offer is that? Out of the blue, they saved my life.”

  Taber and his wife, Jane Poynter, are in the life support system business. They are adventurers and explorers who have climbed mountains, sailed oceans, trekked through the outback, and now develop life support systems for space, land, and water research, including the American and Russian space programs (they were married a year after living for two years under the closed dome of Biosphere II, an experience that would lead a lot of people not to speak to each other ever again).

  Taber and his birth parents have restored relations. “Why not?” he says. “They’re much happier people now. So am I.” But before he could explore the heavens and the depths, even Taber MacCallum needed diapers and the practical, hands-on touch of the love of parents.

  ADOPTION IS now everywhere. The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute estimates that there are about 1.5 million adopted children in the United States, and that about 60 percent of all Americans know someone who is adopted—next door, down the hall, a cubicle over, a couple of seats away. They are our cousins, sisters, and uncles as well as our children. In some zip codes, adoption has become as common as $3.75 lattes. (A man in the 10023 zip code told me about a playground conversation in which playmates who were born in Korea, Russia, and Kazakhstan and then adopted by New Yorkers asked his son where he was from. “I don’t know,” said the boy. “Guess I’m from here.”)

  Adoption is transforming millions of people, not just—or maybe least of all—children. Families are broadening their embrace to include the world. One recent morning after a girls’ sleepover, my niece, Juliette, put her arms around Elise and Lina and asked, “We’ll be cousins till we die, right?” Right. Our little California blond niece, cousins forever with our Jiangxi Province daughters. Who can say how thousands of those interrelationships may rearrange the way we see the world?

  Yet formal, legal adoptions in the United States have been in decline since 1970. Birth control and the legalization of abortion surely have something to do with it. So does our changed morality. Unmarried women who have babies feel less disapproval, and now have more resources, including public encouragement, to hold on to their children and try to be good mothers.

  The number one reason most people cite today for exploring adoption is infertility. And it is just another fact of life, if you please, that the assisted fertility industry offers ways to have children that are easier, quicker, and even less expensive than adoption.

  Adoptions can now cost more than $25,000 and take years. This rules out more than a few good people, even with the small tax credit provided by the federal government. Some medical plans will reimburse the charges for in vitro fertilization; I know of none that cover the costs of adoption. A few companies will contribute a modest amount toward an adoption by an employee. It’s a gracious gesture to say that family is valued. But these contributions are an easy benefit to cut when business is bad.

  Age limits in adoption programs rule out other potential parents, even as fertility specialists make childbearing years seem illimitable. We live in a time when couples in their late forties, single women, committed gay couples, or, for that matter, a single woman in her sixties can walk into a fertility clinic and have a child in their arms nine and a half months from the time they pay a fee. They don’t have to hurtle and humble themselves through rounds of interviews, fingerprints, spurious assessments, and background checks or years of uncertainty, anxiety, and delay.

  Having children has become a business. Formal, legal adoption is still considered a good thing to do. It thus suffers a competitive disadvantage, and I mean to put this in commercial terms. Fertility centers, if not the adoption programs, know they’re in competition. Many of them advertise the practical medical advantages of childbirth, such as being able to trace your child’s genetic history. This particular claim may be true. But it also dramatically exaggerates how genetic history can predict even eye color, much less a predisposition for cancers, respiratory disorders, or heart disease (which in any case may be closer to being treated by the time a child grows into middle age).

  The picture of people paging through donor profiles, almost like paint or fabric swatches in a book, to select a sperm or egg donor by physical features, education, and artistic or mathematical abilities makes me queasy. I am not entitled to any moral disapproval. But it seems to me that discovery is part of the joy of having and loving children. Seeing them develop traits, interests, and talents that we never had, or at least never discovered, is one of the ways in which sons and daughters make us continue to grow after we make the mistake of thinking that we are all grown up. We want our children to be free and strong enough to grow up differently. Maybe those of us who adopt might be in a better position to appreciate this.

  I also know that there are deep intangible factors at work. The drive to bear children—to feel a child grow inside and give birth—is profound for many women (I won’t attempt any New Age contortions to convince anyone that such an instinct also beats strongly in sensitive men). Medical technologies can assist couples in bringing about this happy result. My wife and I tried. I would never suggest that adoption improves on such a marvel. But bringing children into your life, loving them completely, and committing yourself to their happiness and future is a miracle, too.

  I also know that there is exaltation in seeing yourself, and your loved one, in your child’s face. There is an instinct to see your children as inheritors and carriers of your family’s lineage, history, and traits. Of course it would be wonderful to have children who directly reflect my wife’s great wit, graciousness, and beauty. And so we do: our daughters. My
wife is revealed in their expressions, their humor, and their laughter. She is visible in all the critical and distinctive little characteristics that we cherish as we fall in love.

  I don’t recall being presented with a single test to adopt our daughters that was silly, insensitive, excessive, or unwise. But the whole panoply of regulations, examinations, and redundant charges can discourage good prospective parents and drive them to fertility clinics while millions of children who literally hunger for families and are starved for love grow up in institutions or a succession of foster homes.

  Adopting a child to prove something is not a healthy motivation. I would seriously consider alerting the authorities if I heard a prospective parent say, “We want to adopt because it’s the most environmentally responsible thing to do. Don’t want to increase our carbon footprint, after all!”

  But I sometimes wonder about people who scold about global warming and the perils of overpopulation and then go through multiple rounds of fertility treatments when there are already millions of children without families. Putting children who need love and care into families who crave the love of a child is one of the great unfinished endeavors of the world. Nothing would do more to increase the amount of love on this planet, which is a kind of global warming that we could all use. I wish that people who want to become parents would consider adoption as a great way to have a family from the start, and not just a last resort.

  We Fit

  AS I SAID, we know the really hard part is ahead. We look forward to all of the usual challenges of growing up that friends are so eager to warn us about (the extraterrestrial body snatchers who will take the souls of our two winsome girls and insert teenage demons into their flesh) and perhaps a few more.