Six lesbian mothers gasp as I unpack three cans of Enfamil. Today is the beginning of our nanny share-care system and I am exposed in the first 10 minutes as a deficient parent.

I apologize. "Carol, uh, forgot to bring home what she pumped at work and I forgot to put last night's milk in the refrigerator so it spoiled ..."

Rachel, Monica, Darcy, Thea, Ren and Corey stare at me with pity. They don't feed their babies formula like dizzy straights do. Milk accidents occur in my chaotic hetero home but never in their same-sex nurturing nests. Their lactose packets are labeled and dated and two of the birth moms, Darcy and Ren, spend their lunches nursing their infants.

"Your baby is so ... beautiful ..." Corey hesitantly compliments Tallulah, my 6-month-old daughter. "But why is her face so scratched up?"

"Because, uh, well, you know," I blush. "We need to trim her fingernails."

"I bite off Nathan's," says Rachel. "I enjoy it. I could chew off Tallulah's if you want me to."

"Gosh, really?" I abandon all pride.

"And I could give her some real milk," Monica volunteers, jiggling her breasts. "I've got at least 3 ounces in my upper ducts."

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The beautiful baby plucked from my wife's C-sectioned womb is purple, pretty and as pudgy as a Buddha with enormous bright blue eyes and fat fists that she swings defensively as she tries to fight off the hoses that three nurses are slithering down her esophagus to extract all the meconium (neonatal feces) that she has possibly swallowed.

"Sit down," a nurse orders me. "Here, hold her. She's yours."

My daughter, Tallulah. Squirming, like my heart. She's my angel, delivered to me to illuminate and exonerate my measly 47-year-old life, which in retrospect seems to have been so shallow and devoid of integrity before her arrival.

"You are m-my ba-baby." Sniveling, I introduce myself to the quizzical face swaddled in a cotton receiving blanket. "I am your daddy. Don't be afraid. I will protect you."

Glancing sideways, I examine with horror her mother, Carol, who is strapped to a horizontal cross with her abdomen eviscerated. Her uterus and other bloody organs are perched on her torso. Surgeons are hurrying to reassemble her. A furious hose is slurping an enormous quantity of blood out of Carol's interior into an object that resembles a clear plastic pony keg. The pony keg is rising quickly with my wife's crimson life fluid. Has the cesarean gone awry?

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"Huh?!" I blush. "What do you mean?"

Rachel is my quirky, curly haired lesbian friend. My wife Carol and I are
feeding rock cod and tofu to her and her gal-pal Monica tonight.

"I felt so studly, so powerful," she explains. "Sticking the syringe in
Monica. I loved squirting your semen in her and knocking her up. Dang! I
want to do it again!"

"It's a potent pleasure," I agree. "But doesn't Monica get to be 'phallic' next? We want YOU pregnant, too, Rachel."

Our tjte-`-tjte is interrupted by our corpulent partners, who enter the
dining room, waddling arm-in-arm. My wife is a tall, blue-eyed WASP, while Rachel is diminutive, raven-haired and Jewish. Tonight they look identical because their T-shirts are both cinched up, exposing big bulbous watermelon-bellies.

"I'm fatter than you," remarks Carol. "But your boobs look bigger."

"What did the doctor say your due-date was?" inquires Monica. "Mine is
January 1st -- a millennium boy-baby."

"December 25th," replies Carol. "Our daughter is the antichrist."

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"What's up with you?" I asked. "Is your clock ticking?"

"Rachel and I want to have babies," she replied. "We want to start a
family immediately."

"Both of you? At the same time?" I mused. "Wow! Heteros can't do
that."

"No," Monica corrected me, "I'm first, because I'm older. Rachel will
wait two years. But we are in the mood. Absolutely."

"Adoption is out?" I asked. "You could get a Chinese girl, like
everyone else."

"That's a generous act, but we want to be pregnant."

"Sperm bank?"

"No," she corrected me again, "we want to know exactly what we're
getting. Plus we want to tell our children who their father is."

"So some guy-friend will masturbate in an empty mayonnaise jar,
Rachel will slurp it up in a turkey baster and squirt it inside you?"

"Precisely."

Monica paused before asking in a soft voice: "Do you know any men
who would like to be donors?"

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| H A N K |

Sylvia, in a panic, tried to salvage the training. "I didn't know they would say that," the Adoption Recruitment Coordinator said, smoothing her hair nervously. "None of the other guest adoptees have ever talked like that." But it was too late. They had made their point. If blacks and Latinos didn't want me raising their kids, how could I dismiss their wishes?

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"Well, maybe I do."

"Cultural colonialist."

"Spineless militant."

"Neoliberal."

"People, people," interrupts the therapist. "We're talking about adopting a child here, not a political platform."

We both turn on her. "Says who?" we cry. "Have you read the statistics, the law journals, the autobiographies?"

The therapist blinks and opens her mouth. Nothing in her family counseling training has prepared her for debating the finer points of race relations and child welfare policies.

Parenting, we are raised to believe, is personal. Learn active listening, emotional expressivity and limit-setting and you are on your way. But when we embarked on the road to public adoption, we stumbled into a political minefield -- only to realize we were fighting on opposite sides of the battle.

| H A N K |

In college I attended a lecture by Dr. Paul Ehrlich, the proponent of "Zero Population Growth." Terrified by his statistics (human numbers have quadrupled since 1900), I vowed never to add to the dilemma: I would refrain from siring a child.

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