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By Lisa Bennett
David picked up the phone in his sleep, held it to his ear and hung up without hearing a word she said. Clarissa panicked. After selecting David and Vinnie as the best parents for her child and spending six months getting to know them, she feared that they had changed their minds at the last minute. But at her mother's prompting, she called back and, this time, David woke up and raced with Vinnie to the hospital. Eight hours later, they witnessed Clarissa give birth to Christopher. "I was in love from the first moment, the very, very first moment - even though I was trying very, very hard not to be. I was trying to maintain some emotional distance, reminding myself that this was not our child," David recently recalled from the home he now shares with Vinnie and 3-year-old Christopher in Washington, D.C. David, who works for Microsoft Corp., and Vinnie, a former vice president and financial analyst for Goldman Sachs who is now a stay-at-home dad, recently shared their story because they believe there are other gay men who wish to become fathers but haven't done so, because open adoption is still not yet widely understood. They also wanted to share what they and others have observed: that many birth moms are very interested in prospective gay dads. Open adoptions among family members have occurred for centuries, as grandparents or aunts and uncles have raised children whose parents were unable or unwilling to do so, according to the National Adoption Information Clearinghouse (NAIC). But open adoptions in which unrelated birth parents and adoptive parents learn something about each other, and may even meet or select each other, have become popular only in recent decades.
Facing the fears As Christopher played with his grandparents who were preparing dinner in the kitchen - occasionally running in to the living room in his pajamas to ring a dinner bell he had discovered on the dining room table - David named some typical fears about open adoption and his responses to them. "First, most people think the birth mother will come back and take the child away," he said. "That cannot happen. We are Christopher's legal parents." Soon after Christopher's birth, Vinnie became his legal parent through adoption; a few months later David became his second legal parent. Second-parent adoption, which is the equivalent of a step-parent adoption, has been granted to gay and lesbian parents in at least 21 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation's report, The State of the Family: Laws and Legislation Affecting Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Families. (This report can be downloaded from HRC FamilyNet at www.hrc.org/familynet) "Second," continued David, "most people think the birth mother will always be in their lives. That's not true. She grows up and gets on with her life. And, third, most people think the child will be confused about who his parents are. But that's not true. To a kid, it's who changes his diapers and takes care of him." None of that, however, is to say that open adoption is an anxiety-free process. David and Vinnie have vivid memories of what they referred to as the "panic moments," those times when, like Clarissa, they feared everything would fall apart. Shortly after Christopher was born, for example, hospital policy required that David and Vinnie leave the premises for at least 24 hours. Moreover, state law required that Clarissa maintain her status as Christopher's legal parent for at least 72 hours. The rules were established, here as in other states, to free both sides from feeling pressured in the profoundly important decisions they were making, one of permanently taking on the responsibility for a child and the other of permanently surrendering it. But the upshot was that Clarissa could experience a change of heart. So after falling in love in spite of themselves, David and Vinnie left the hospital the same day Christopher was born - until David remembered that he had to return a set of borrowed car keys to Clarissa's mother. "I went back into the hospital room and saw Clarissa breastfeeding Christopher, and that's when I had my panic moment," said David. "My first thought was, there's no way she's giving up this child." David and Vinnie talked about it back in their hotel room - each fearing the worst - until they finally went to bed, emotional and exhausted. She is going to keep him, she isn't going to keep him, they agreed. We don't know and will have to deal with whatever tomorrow brings. The next day, they went back to the hospital and Clarissa said, "Take over." And they immediately assumed the responsibilities of caring for a day-old baby. Building on a partnership David and Vinnie met in 1983, when they were sophomores at the University of Pennsylvania and, as Vinnie says, they have been "inseparable ever since." "He completes me," David says of Vinnie. "His strengths offset my weaknesses, and vice versa. Vinnie is constant and steady, and he takes his time making decisions. I am impulsive and spontaneous. He is the ship's keel and mast, and I am the sail and the wind." They spent their early years together focused on their careers and enjoying an active social life in New York City. But in every home they ever lived in, they also had an extra room which they playfully dubbed "little somebody's room," and by their 30s, they began to wonder, now what? "In the back of my mind, I'd always wanted to be a father," says David. Then, in the fall of 1997, his sister gave birth to a son who, David recalls, "looked like me." His and Vinnie's life was turned upside down. "I remember the moment," says David. "He was 1 or 2 weeks old and fell asleep on my chest. It was absolute heaven. That's when I decided, we have to figure out how to make this happen." They thought briefly about surrogacy but ruled it out because they were afraid that there would be an imbalance in their parenting if only one of them were a biological father. "We didn't understand parenting then," says David, explaining that he has since learned biology has nothing to do with a parent's feelings for a child. "I couldn't love Christopher more if he was my clone." Choosing adoption There was also a more compelling reason to choose adoption. "My parents created their family through adoption," Vinnie says, "and I approached adoption as my first choice for parenting." Yet while Vinnie had been adopted in 1964 through a closed adoption, which was typical for the time, both David and Vinnie were certain they wanted to pursue an open adoption in which the identity of their child's birth mother would never be a question. "Clearly, since there were two men, he would know there was a mother somewhere," said Vinnie. "And we wanted him to know he had a mother. We wanted to be able to answer as many of his questions as possible." "That's what open adoption means, being able to answer the questions, why, how?" says David. Moreover, he adds, "I believe that in the heart of every adopted child there is a hole, and I can't make it disappear but I can make it smaller. And we thought that by giving Christopher some information about his birth mother, we could make the hole smaller." So just six months after they decided they had to become parents, they had their first meeting with an open-adoption facilitator and, the next month, met Clarissa, who was then three months pregnant. "We had decided not to say yes to the first birth mother we met, but we said yes to the first one we met," says David. She was young - too young, she thought, to raise a child - and impressed with Vinnie and David's background and values and appreciative of their enthusiasm about becoming dads and helping their child understand why his birth mother allowed him to be adopted. Indeed, as David and Vinnie's adoption facilitator Nancy Hurwitz Kors has observed, many birth moms look favorably upon prospective gay dads. "The guys are much easier to work with," says Hurwitz Kors, who is based in San Francisco. "They do not have infertility issues, and they do not come in with a reservoir of anger about never being pregnant and not having the opportunity to breastfeed. They also treat the birthmother better during the pregnancy and seem cognizant that they are getting a gift. "The heterosexual families," she continued, "feel as though they are getting second best - their first choice, of course, being their own biological baby. The guys never expected to have their own biological child, so they do not need to let go of that dream before being ready to accept an adopted baby." Other birth moms are also moved a desire to help gay men become parents because they have fewer options for doing so than heterosexual couples do. In David, Vinnie and Clarissa's case, the three spent six months getting to know each other, as David and Vinnie traveled from their home in Seattle to Clarissa's home in Reno, and all of them flew to San Francisco to meet with the adoption facilitator and have some fun over dinner and a play. When they arrived at Clarissa's hotel room to take her out, they brought her flowers and noticed that she was wearing a new dress. "She looked beautiful," said David. "That's when I realized that it was a two-way street. We were trying to impress her, and she was trying to impress us." And so they did, as David and Vinnie tried to be as respectful as possible of Clarissa, and she entrusted them with important parental decisions - like naming Christopher when he was still in her womb. In fact, says David, they began thinking about consciously demonstrating good values - and behaving like good parents - long before Christopher's birth, partly because they were so conscious that that they were lead actors in a story they would someday tell him. It was proof of their capacity for loving a child that Clarissa shared - for on Christopher's third birthday, she sent him a handmade picture book that told the story of her pregnancy and realization that she was too young raise him. "I looked high and low to find the perfect parents," she wrote next to a drawing of herself doing just that. Then, after explaining how she found the perfect parents in David and Vinnie, she drew a picture of all of them hugging at the airport as the men prepared to bring Christopher home. "I cried," she wrote, "because I love you and I always will." Today, David and Vinnie hope that Clarissa might visit their son once or twice a year and check in with a phone call now and then. But whether it will ever develop into more than that, they say, depends on Christopher. "I feel like we are the guardians of the relationship with his birth mother now, and it will be up to Christopher to decide whether he wants to have a relationship with her after he grows up," said Vinnie. But the important thing, David adds, is something they already have to give him: a true story of love and commitment about his birth and their creation of a family. Lisa Bennett runs the Human Rights Campaign Foundation's FamilyNet: the most comprehensive and up-to-date website covering relationships, parenting and home life for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people and their families. Visit HRC FamilyNet at www.hrc.org/familynet |
At 2 a.m., the phone rang in David Goodhand and Vinnie Griski's Reno, Nev.,
hotel room. It was Clarissa, a 17-year-old who had just gone into labor with
a boy she was prepared to let the two men adopt and raise as their own.
