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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Get out of my bedroom!
The editor of Mothering magazine denounces a new warning against the family bed as the drivel of government terrorists.
By Peggy O'Mara
[09/30/99]

Home is where the revolution is
When they forsake the revolution to raise children at home, smart women fear they've made a stupid choice.
By Cecelie S. Berry
[09/29/99]

Wild Thing
How do I know I'm really me?
Children ask the big questions, and these dreamy books venture to answer.
By Polly Shulman
[09/28/99]

Thelma and Louise it wasn't
When you can't vacation without them, the kids can come too. Just change your expectations and leave your husbands behind.
By Mona Gable
[09/27/99]

Where have all the Eddie Haskells gone?
The daughter of a cool mom attempts to carry on the tradition, only to find that there are no smarmy, well-groomed takers for her act.
By Karen Karbo
[09/24/99]

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Nineteen months later, I can't talk about it without crying. It has seriously impacted our discussions about adopting again. We would want to do another open adoption, but we're not sure we could go through that again. We would live in dread of that moment because it was so hard. All three of us suffered, to the ultimate benefit of this baby.

We were really unprepared. No one talked about the moment of transfer, where Melissa signed the papers. We had been in the hospital room a couple of days just hanging out, changing the diapers and feeding the baby -- the three of us sharing those first couple of days, which was really important. There came a time when we had to leave the hospital with the baby and Melissa had to go home to an apartment. She put the baby in a diaper and a going-home outfit and buckled him into the car seat -- she was ignoring us and the counselor and interacting with the baby. I'm starting to cry. We physically had to pick up the car seat and pull them apart. Melissa, who's very stoic -- not a very emotionally available person -- started sobbing. It was really hard on us. I put my hand on her shoulder and said, "You're going to be a part of this child's life, you're going to be its only mother and we're going to see you." She still sobbed. When our child grows up, we'll be able to tell him what she looked like at that moment. And if, God forbid, as a result of the way she lives, she should die before he's old enough, we'll know. He won't have to wait until he's 20 and go on a biological mother search and find out his mother's dead and never know what happened. The emotional and logistical problems of open adoption are small potatoes compared to the value that being present at the moment has had for us and is going to have for our son. Seeing what we saw, what kind of monster would it take to deny her contact? It was a moment of absolute blistering pain.

There are inherent risks that come with staying in contact with the birth mother. Melissa is homeless and leads a dangerous life. Do you worry she will put your child at risk?

It's not really danger. If Melissa or the birth father came and dicked away with the kid, it would be a kidnapping and they would go to jail. They're not the parents; they're not the legal guardians; they don't have custody. It's fearful from the outside, but knowing them, I don't fear it. It's more like they're relatives of ours, Melissa and Bacchus [D.J.'s biological father].

The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Get Pregnant by Dan Savage Dutton 1999 246 pages.

How much contact do you still have with Melissa?

In an open adoption agreement, you agree to a minimum number of visits -- a floor, not a ceiling. It's enforceable. If we try to deny Melissa her four visits a year, she could take us to court, or she could go to the police. We wouldn't do it -- she can come over as much as she wants whether it's agreed to or not. She can disappear on us, but we can't disappear.

She's a homeless street punk who travels around. She calls us collect, but we're not home a lot of the time. We frequently get hang-up calls from the AT&T operator, and we go, Oh, Melissa tried to call. We're relieved when we hear from her. It's like having a new kind of a relative -- my son's mother, who is not one of my son's parents. We are related to her through this kid, and we worry about her in the way that I worry about my cousins or my aunts. It's not an obsessive worry, I just want to know that she's fine. She lives a very dangerous lifestyle right now. We want her to call us to tell us every once in a while where she is.

You've made a lot of sacrifices in your own lifestyle for the sake of parenting -- especially some of the perks of urban gay culture. How would you react 10 years down the road if Melissa comes back to visit, high on pot, riding the rails, and your son is old enough to be bothered by it? Will you be open to it, or will it be a problem for you?

We are going to want to do what's best for the kid. If he's uncomfortable with or disturbed by his mother, we will help him process that and deal with it in the same way that someone who has sole custody of the child with another parent they have to see. Sometimes those relationships aren't all beautiful. We still live an urban life. We don't think gutter punks are bad people, so we're not going to raise him to believe that people who do drugs or are homeless or want to ride the rails around the country for four years and not have an apartment aren't good. We're not going to hardwire emotional conflicts into this kid so that will play out when he meets his mother.

I lived my whole out life on the five-year plan. That as a gay man, I should expect to die, and that I expected to get infected. People who took similar calculated risks to the ones I took got infected and died. I also felt it was disrespectful to the gay men in my life who were going to die to talk about 20 years down the road. One of the things that the Protease moment and end of the AIDS crisis has done for me is allowed me to think about the next 50 years, instead of just the next five. Thinking about the next 10 years, we really think Melissa will be dead if she doesn't stop what she's doing. We've said that too her. She's been doing it for three years, and it feels like it's the only way she knows how to live. We've offered to help her if she wants to live some other way, without trying to be prescriptive, without saying, "Why don't you go to nursing school?"

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