In Our Beginning

In the 1990s we were living in a very different world. That’s ok, we were different people then with very different lives. Pauline and I spent most of that decade in a process of coming out; a different process with different people in our lives. The process was made somewhat more difficult because we were both elementary teachers, a job which of course our society entrusts only to the most honorable and trustworthy individuals with the utmost in traditional Judeo-Christian morals. Children are so vulnerable that having a lesbian or gay teacher will turn them gay, or something. Or maybe gay people are different only in who they have sex with, therefore we would have sex either with the children or in front of them? In other words, since prejudice is irrational it is often justified by religion and shrouded in righteous indignation, so coming out under the wrong circumstances could have lost us our jobs.

I don’t remember when we decided to have children. I have always assumed I would have children, and I have always wanted to be a mom. Having a female life partner didn’t change that. I think Pauline felt the same way. I know that by the time we bought our first house together in the late nineties we had children in mind. We knew that we couldn’t be closeted with children, and buying a house together will speed up the process of outing yourself, as well.

When you can’t make a baby with your spouse the old fashioned way, you have to stop and think about other options. With the typical tunnel vision of most couples (gay or straight) we dreamed of ways to get both our genes into the kid. Maybe my brother could donate sperm for her, and her brother could donate sperm for me! Could we ask a brother or cousin to donate sperm? Uh, no. Well, we need sperm. How about asking a close friend? You can always ask. They can always say no. Ok, then, a sperm donor who seems to be as much like us as possible. My God, or as we say in this decade, OMG, do you know what that costs? We had the money for about six months of inseminations, but what if it didn’t work? We could very well be out of money with no baby to show for it. (What about insurance, you might wonder. Didn’t cover any of it unless you were hetero, married, and medically proven to have fertility issues.)

We did our research. We looked at donor catalogs. Now that’s a weird experience. If I had to fill out one of those family medical history forms, it wouldn’t look so great. I wouldn’t choose me to be a donor (or my brother, come to think of it). And somewhere in there it occurred to me that if Pauline had a baby with donor sperm, that child would not be in any way genetically related to me. In effect, I would be adopting the child. In reality, legally, I would also have to adopt the baby. Hmm, those costs had to be figured in, too. But with adopting someone else’s baby, a baby who needed loving parents, we could spend the money we had and know that there would be a baby at the end of the rainbow.

We did our research. We talked to adoption agencies, we talked to the state’s department of family services, we talked to other gay couples who had adopted. We learned about the legalities. We did what we could on the internet, but remember this was the late nineties. No Google. And we learned what potential adoptive parents learn: healthy white babies are hard to come by and cost more. We came to the conclusion that our best bet was an agency which had been founded by a lesbian adoptive mother, and which focused on the placement of African American babies. Transracial adoption was a new term for us.

So it came down to this: take a chance at growing our own, white, baby or adopt a Black baby.

We wanted to be parents more than we wanted a Mini Me running around the house. Pauline and I had taught in areas with racial diversity that most white Americans never see. We considered ourselves to be enlightened and liberal. The babies we were thinking of adopting would likely come from a community similar to ones we had worked in. We knew the medical risks that a baby can have from having a mother who lives in a low income, high stress area. Who better than us, we thought, to give such a child everything they might need? We were educators, after all. And clearly, all children matter, not just white ones. Would it be harder being an interracial family? Sure. But if we didn’t adopt one of the children who really needed a home, that other prospective parents might not be able to accept, what family would that child have? If you were a Black child in America, would it be better to have white lesbians for parents or to grow up in a seriously messed up foster care system with no real family at all? Not only were we sure that we would have a baby by adopting, we were sure that we were morally superior than people who were overpopulating the planet by breeding more of their own.

Our families did not exactly agree. At least, some members didn’t. One sibling said “I’d rather slit my wrists than be a Black kid being raised by white lesbians.” Another’s first reaction was, “Why can’t you adopt a Vietnamese baby?” There isn’t going to be a post-racial America for a very long time.