Ham

by Sam Harris

  The place is Eden with a nose ring.

  My recurring Saturday-morning fantasy was that Danny and I would take our brand-new baby to that market in a Bugaboo stroller and parade down the single aisle as a part of our family weekend ritual. I would be wearing checkered Bermuda shorts, leather sandals, and aviator sunglasses, and a porkpie hat would conceal my morning bed-head hair, adding to my funky-hipster-tattooed-dad look. We would attempt to shop, but it would be difficult because everyone we encountered would interrupt us to ogle our darling child and remark on the momentous occasion of our exceptional family. We would nod in gratitude, radiating pride, and manage, somehow, to settle on pluots and Casablanca lilies before onlookers began to tread too heavily on our privacy.

  Like many couples, straight or gay, Danny and I didn’t arrive at the idea of expanding our family at the same time. My desire for a child had grown into a tender ache, to the degree that being around our friends’ children became punishing. Danny was concerned about what we would have to give up—our time, our travels, our privilege to spend money on what we wanted, when we wanted. Basically, our free, spontaneous, and fabulous life. Fancy dinner parties and junkets to St. Barts might be replaced by Chuck E. Cheese’s and Disney cruises.

  “We’re happy now,” he argued. “It’s all so perfect, why would we want to change it up?” But that was exactly the reason I wanted a child, not because a baby would fill a void or save our marriage or make our lives whole. If our life together was already so big, why not make it bigger? It was like God was knocking on my heart and saying, “You think you know love? You think you know happiness? I am going to give you love and happiness beyond your imagination. Beyond your wildest dreams. Beyond what you know as possible.”

  So, what, am I gonna say to God, “Hmm, I’m not sure . . . let me think”?

  Danny pointed out that we were in our forties and twenty years older than our parents had been when they started families. I asserted that, while they may have possessed the endless energy of youth, we would bring an economy of energy and sense of maturity and priority that younger parents just don’t have.

  Like my father before me, my twenties and thirties had been about me—my career, my identity, my drama, my impatience. So had Danny’s. If not then, when? But at this point in our lives, I was ready to make it about someone else.

  “There is no perfect time,” parents told us. “The perfect time is when you say yes.”

  That would be one of the phrases Danny hated.

  My simpatico friend, the actress Bridget Moynahan, asked me to be her birth partner after a tumultuous and highly publicized tabloid drama, which took the father, Tom Brady, out of the immediate picture. I said yes before she finished the request. We studied and planned and bonded and doulaed. We watched 1970s videos of au naturel water births with giant, hairy vaginas. We had to bow out of a very serious couples yoga class because we were cracking up silently as we formed heart-shaped tableau stretches, and then fully busted out when our Zen-monotone instructor urged us to “fe-e-el the love flo-o-o-owing between Mo-o-o-mmy and Da-a-a-dy and Ba-a-a-by.”

  To maintain her anonymity, when we were in public, I was to call Bridget by her given name, Kathryn. A couple of months before her due date, we went shopping for a crib and a changing table at a particularly pissy baby store, and I mistakenly called her Bridget. For the sake of the saleslady, she asked, “Who’s Bridget?” adding a hint of suspicion to her tone.

  I took her cue and we both dove in to play out the scene.

  “No one,” I said, with guilty innocence.

  “So you just can’t remember my name?”

  “I’m sorry, Kathryn,” I said.

  Suddenly emotional, she shouted, “I hope you can remember the baby’s name!”

  “Please don’t get upset. I’m just tired.”

  “You’re tired?! I’m the one lugging this thing around. This is all your fault,” she cried, touching her belly. “I can’t believe you did this to me!”

  And then she turned on the tears and I comforted her as we headed out, making excuses to the saleslady, and we barely hit the door before exploding in laughter.

  When the big day arrived, I experienced the entire momentous birthing process with Bridget from timing contractions through a difficult labor and delivery. It was the most primal, fulfilling, otherworldly happening of my life.

  And it only magnified my desire to have my own.

  But it takes two. At least it does when you’re in a relationship. Danny was suffering for his reticence. Everybody knew he was born to be a father. He had long been known as “the child whisperer,” with kids drawn to him like a Toy Story sequel, and the pressure on him was pythonic. I prompted and planted the subject at every opportunity. Comedienne Rosie O’Donnell, who had been advocating that we have kids for about ten years (and who has sixteen or seventeen children of her own), cornered Danny with the question “Do you not see yourself as a dad? Afraid you don’t have what it takes?”

  Danny sputtered, “No, it’s not that, I just—”

  “Well, that’s the only question,” she lasered in. “If you don’t think you’re parent material, you don’t like kids, you don’t think you’ve got what it takes, you’re missing the dad gene, then that’s the end of the conversation. But if you do, well, everything else just works out.”

  That was another one of the phrases that Danny hated.

  When he would voice his concerns, every parent we knew said, over and over, “You just have faith and it works out. It just works out . . . it just works out . . .”

  This was followed quickly by “It changes your life—for the better.” Blah blah blah . . .

  Or worse: “God doesn’t give you what you can’t handle,” which is the same phrase people use after a death or fire or cancer. It didn’t help.

  At one point, Danny was convinced that all parents were members of a secret society with required, join-the-club phrases meant to scam others into parenthood so they would not be alone in their wretched misery. Parents would stare at us with a vacant twinkle and say, “It just works out,” as if they’d been universally prepped at a murder trial. It didn’t seem reality-based to Danny. He wanted someone to say, “Run for your life, schmuck!” But no one did. I supposed anyone who might have said that had already run.

  Danny needed time, and not on my oddly ticking biological clock. Not technically, anyway. I didn’t want to bully or threaten him, so we sought therapy to get the advice of an outside, nonpartisan, unbiased, completely and thoroughly objective couples expert who would tell Danny he was wrong.

  I knew I was making headway when baby room possibilities began to sprinkle into our conversation. The obvious choice was to convert my home office, a large room with a lot of light and a walk-in closet. This meant Danny would have to share his office with me. As an alternative, he suggested we convert the small bathroom to a baby room.

  “We can build a bed over the tub and the toilet is so convenient!”

  He also suggested we utilize the garage, which was separate and on a different level from the rest of the house with no interior entrance, and was unheated and un-air-conditioned. I imagined the jarring, mechanical grind of the garage door opening for late-night feedings, with our child’s crib set against a wall between a chain saw and a bike rack. Danny was grasping at straws, but at least he was imagining the prospect. I begged him not to tell anyone about his baby room ideas.

  We hadn’t even begun the process and Child Protective Services would already be at our door.

  I was confident that, beneath his angst, Danny wanted to be a father. He’d said as much many times, so I knew this wasn’t just a Sam thing. Though he’d been the spontaneous life-embracer when we’d first met, our roles seemed to reverse around anything that spelled big change or ongoing obligation. Bull running or cave diving sounded great, but buying a houseplant was paralyzing. It had been the same when we first moved in together on the road, then moved to New York, then got a dog, two dogs
, moved to Los Angeles, bought a car, two cars, a house. He was a foot dragger. But once he was in, that was it. Forever. I once said to him, “I’ve had to pull you into everything in your life that you treasure most!”

  Translation: I know more about you than you do. Not really a welcome opinion in a relationship . . . even if I was right.

  But he was being justifiably cautious. Becoming a parent is scary stuff—Big—the single most important decision we would ever make. Most straight people grow up presuming they will have children, so not all of them look at the gravity of the decision. If there is a decision at all. Gay people really have to map it out. We don’t get knocked up, try as we might.

  On September 17, 2007, at 7:32 p.m., Danny told me he was ready. I said, “Are you sure? For real? This is what you want?” He said he was sure, for real, scared but sure.

  And so it began.

  • • •

  The next morning at nine o’clock on the dot, I called David Radis, an adoption attorney, whose number I had already programmed into my phone to save the four seconds it would take to manually enter it. His name had come up repeatedly as the guy in town. Another actress friend, JoBeth Williams, had hired him nearly twenty years earlier when she adopted her two boys, and she said that David “matches souls.” I dug the idea of soul matching. It sounded metaphysical, spiritual, and organized, like socks, all at the same time.

  We met with Radis the next day. His offices were in one of the very intimidating, monstrous buildings in Century City on Avenue of the Stars, which is as pretentious as it sounds. Thankfully, David Radis wasn’t. He was warm and direct and looked just like Robert DeNiro, with the same uneven grin and arched eyebrow and even the distinguishing mole. With the vast DeNiro film catalog flashing through my mind, I somehow landed on The Deer Hunter and it made me like him even more. I sensed he would see us through this undertaking heroically, even as we felt we were playing Russian roulette just like in the movie.

  We sat at a formal conference table and Radis performed a few card tricks to ease the tension. A little showbiz is always a good opener. He asked if we’d considered surrogacy and we explained that since the child couldn’t biologically be both of ours, and there were so many kids in need of a loving home, we’d chosen to adopt. Danny admitted his concern about potentially not knowing the medical history of the birth parents. I reminded him that between our two families, our own pedigrees included various cancers, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, diverticulitis, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic alcoholism, drug addiction, acid reflux, acne, and restless legs syndrome. Plus everyone in both our families was basically crazy.

  Danny and I agreed that the genes of almost anyone else would give the kid a better shot.

  Radis explained that it could take as long as two years to find a match but felt that we’d have a child much sooner because we’d been together for thirteen years and we had a good parental profile for the “book of our life” we would prepare.

  I presumed he meant we were photogenic.

  He asked if we had a gender preference. Danny really wanted a boy. Or rather, he was afraid that his athletic, high-energy, rough-and-tumble nature would fall flat on a girl unless she turned out to be a tennis pro or a lesbian or both. He is not the princess-and-tea-party type. I knew he’d be a great dad no matter the gender and I didn’t want to limit our opportunities, so we agreed that if the birth mother knew it was a boy, great. If she knew it was a girl, we’d hold off. But if she didn’t know the sex, we were up for that possibility.

  There was an absurd amount of information to absorb and tasks to complete, which included interviews, physicals, fingerprint scans, criminal background checks, endless paperwork, agency meetings, house inspections, classes, written essays, and money flying out of our hands at every turn. We didn’t mind. We were proving our qualifications to be parents and it was a constant psychological reminder of the mammoth role we were asking to take on. In the middle of it all, I felt that even biological parents should have to jump through the same hoops. There’d be a lot fewer lousy parents out there, and a lot fewer screwed-up kids.

  On the other hand, my mother and father might not have passed the bar, and that would have been a shame. At least to me.

  Our “book of our life” was a meticulously prepared pictorial scrapbook, created as a sort of audition for potential birth mothers. We assembled a retrospective that dated to our meeting and included photos of our house, our dogs, our world travels, our humor—and every word toiled over like a final thesis for a parental doctorate at the University of Hallmark.

  Your baby will have two loving daddies.

  We have been together for 13 years

  of extraordinary love, adventure, and joy.

  We share an enthusiastic zest for life.

  It is time for us to pass on

  all of this love to one special child.

  All of it was true.

  We announced to our family and closest friends that we were “in the process.” Everyone was thrilled beyond expectation, except for Danny’s born-again brother and his wife, who said, “We feel sorry for the child to have gay parents.” We tried to feel sorry for them and particularly for their children. They asked if we would be “raising the child as a homosexual.”

  “Most definitely,” we confirmed. “Just like our parents did. All gay people we know were raised as homosexuals by their straight parents.”

  Seriously?

  In my first year with Danny, my introduction to this particular brother was his refusal to attend Thanksgiving if we were coming. Danny’s mom wisely said, “All my children are invited. If you choose not to come, that’s your prerogative.” They didn’t come.

  I’d always been a take-the-high-road-and-love-will-always-win kind of guy, and we exhibited the kind of character most would deem “Christian,” continuing to turn the other cheek. The years brought a sense of slow progress and everyone began to attend family gatherings; however, a kind of contempt, carefully tucked behind a mass of scrambled Jesus and counterfeit grins, continued to be scattered like drops of acid.

  Danny and I had grown up in a generation that had encouraged us to accept bigotry as beliefs and we blamed their insolence on everything but them: culture, ignorance, religious dogma. I even convinced myself that part of their behavior was due to an overabundance of dip.

  Every single time we saw them, they only ate dip.

  Taco dip, crab dip, spinach dip, BLT dip, buffalo-chicken dip, seven-layer dip, artichoke dip, Reuben dip, hoagie dip, shrimp dip, corn dip, and, for adults only—beer dip and margarita dip. Technically, all the food groups and accompanying beverages were represented, but I still believed lack of chewable food could have significant mental, dental, and spiritual repercussions.

  However, this newest slur changed me. It changed us. Or rather, it woke us up. You can only turn the other cheek so many times before both sides are equally raw and bloody and require reconstructive surgery.

  “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” was their credo.

  “Love the hypocrite, hate the hypocrisy,” had been ours.

  Though not yet fathers, our new motto was “You can fuck with me, but don’t fuck with my child.”

  For the sake of the family, we chose space and caution over confrontation, but finally, their very public plea to collect signatures for legislation against marriage equality was the last indignity. The pack of straw was backbreaking and the camel was dead. And we could no longer assemble the patience or empathy for a malevolence we’d previously excused as merely ignorant or dippy.

  I’d never understood “gay pride.” How could I be proud of something I had no part in, like having brown hair or green eyes? Pride came from accomplishment, I’d thought. But now I got it. While we were sadly forced to acknowledge that love doesn’t always triumph, we were unflinchingly proud to have emerged from the brainwashing of our adolescence, resolute in knowing that bigotry under the guise of beliefs was no lo
nger unacceptable. Ever. From anyone. And that was an accomplishment.

  Thankfully, the born-agains were the exception. Throughout the entire adoption affair, their sad comment was the only dollop of prejudice we encountered. Soon we were telling everyone: all of our friends, acquaintances, and, finally, strangers—usually people with strollers or pregnant women.

  “We’re having a baby too!”

  “When?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Well then . . . congratulations.”

  Everyone was happy for us.

  Adoption does, however, invite some strange encounters.

  “My friends adopted a boy,” someone we barely knew shared with us. “And then a year later they had a real boy.”

  Danny and I stared in shock. Then, to break the silence, I said, “Did they name him Pinocchio?”

  “What did they do with the fake one?” Danny added.

  Only a month after our first meeting with the attorney, we got a call from a birth mother carrying twins who was deciding between us and another, older, straighter couple. Twins! I trembled at the thought. Optimistically, I reasoned that though the first years would be a living, breathing nightmare, they’d have each other to play with . . . and to gang up on us. We took a deep breath and proceeded. The birth mother sent a picture. She was tiny and round and blond. Adorable. She loved to sing. Fantastic.

  The only slight drawback was that she couldn’t leave Wisconsin because she was under house arrest with an ankle bracelet alarm and transmitter.

  She’d been convicted for laundering money. Ever the liver-loving optimist, I found the bright side to her being a federal criminal: “It’s white-collar crime! She’s smart! This is great!”