Gotcha

A Mothers Day Reflection

Mother’s Day in our house is not a Hallmark situation. There are two moms, both of whom lost their mothers at a young age. There is a son who lost his birth mother even earlier, before he ever knew us. There is grief layered inside gratitude, absence sitting right next to presence. We celebrate anyway, loudly, intentionally, with full knowledge that the day holds multitudes.

Ann and my first Mother’s Day took place on a plane. We were somewhere over the Atlantic, toasting with nervous, electric energy, on our way to Ekaterinburg, Russia, to pick up the child who would become ours. We didn’t know what we were doing. And yet we knew it was exactly what we were supposed to do

David came to us at almost three years old. He is almost 26 now. On May 16th we will celebrate our 23rd Gotcha Day, the day we became a family, the day that divided our lives into before and after.

The story of how we got to him is, in our family’s telling, legendary. It involves a life-sized hooked rug of Vladimir Putin, numerous bottles of vodka, and a man named Sexy Alexi who pursued me with alarming dedication. It deserves its own essay. Maybe its own Netflix series.

But before any of that, before the plane, before Russia, before even the paperwork, there was a nap.

July 3rd, 2000. It was a few months after we got engaged. Ann and I took a midday nap before heading out to watch fireworks from a friend’s boat. Each of us woke up strangely quiet. We had both had dreams, different stories with one similar theme: adoption. At that moment we knew how we were going to build our family. We didn’t talk about it much that evening. We just both acknowledged that sense of peace that comes over you when something is meant to be.

Two and a half years later, post wedding and not long after we moved into the home we would raise our son, we got a referral picture from our adoption agency of a little boy with soul-filling eyes, a scratch on his nose, and a birthdate of July 3, 2000.

That was the first moment we saw our son. The son who yesterday planned an EPIC Mother’s Day celebration that filled our house with balloons and individual cards and two separate flower vases based on our two moms with individual likes. We ate Chipotle, a bowl for Annie and a salad for me, and as always, all leftovers joyfully consumed by our kid.

The pinnacle of our day was a team building adventure for just the three of us. Three people, once strangers, now all wearing matching KP3 tattoos, running through laser mazes, knocking out video asteroids and sweating, laughing and high-fiving when we won enough points to get a KP family prize of a Chicago Sky colored basketball.

As I went to bed reveling in our incredible day, I thought about a recent interview I heard with Jennifer Aniston where she said: “I don’t want to adopt. I want my own DNA in a little person. And that’s the only way, selfish or not, whatever that is, I wanted it to come from me.”

All I could think was “wow, your loss.”

While I understand the desire to be a parent, what I have never understood is the need for a biological connection so fierce that people will go to extraordinary lengths and expense to manufacture one. Some may take issue with me saying that - but, if the goal is to be a parent, there are many ways to become one. Hard stop.

And if you think a biological connection means that you and your child will share a meaningful personal connection, to quote my beloved Brandi Carlile, "the joke's on you."

This may sound judgy. Maybe it is. But after 23 years of other people’s unsolicited, and often unkind, opinions on adoption, I’ve earned my turn.

To be clear, Annie and I did not adopt to “save” a child. We adopted because we wanted to be parents. And we can hold the multiple truths of how adoption helped each of the three of us in individual and collective ways.

So, every time someone explains to me why they can’t get a shelter dog, I hear the exact same reasons people gave us for why they couldn’t adopt. The idea of “you do not know what you get.” Or “they come with unknown baggage and trauma.” As if it’s a far lesser option. A compromise. A consolation prize.

Just as there is no such thing as a truly hypoallergenic dog (the inventor of the doodle has admitted it was his “life’s biggest regret”) there is no such thing as a perfect, predictable child. The doodle did not save you from the sneezing. Biology will not save you from uncertainty. It never does.

As someone born with a cranio-facial abnormality, here is what I also know about biology: it is all a crap shoot. Sure, I look like my father. I scratch my arm the way my mother did. That’s real. Genetics matter. But the thing we know most about genetics is this: children are born who they are.

I have friends with children who have ADHD, autism, all manner of magnificent and exhausting wiring that no one predicted and no amount of genetic planning could have prevented. There is no guaranteed child. There is only your child. And if I have learned anything in the past two and a half decades it is that the only role of a parent is to parent the child you have.

In hindsight, one of the things I valued about adoption was how queer it was. There was something about early LGBTQ families that I loved - because we built them sideways. Our kids often didn’t look like us, but they were of us, as we fought for them with a ferocity that was almost defiant. Adoption wasn’t plan B, it was the whole plan, and it was radical and beautiful.

Now, most queer families are having children the conventional way. IVF, surrogacy, the biological route. And, I get it. We have earned the right to do whatever we want with our bodies and our choices. But if I’m honest, I’m celebrating that alongside a quiet sadness that breaks my heart a little, for reasons I’m still working out.

What I know about our experience with adoption: twenty-three years in, it does not get easier to think about the time before David was ours. It actually gets harder. Because now I know him. His blood runs through me, not biologically, but in every way that actually counts. I know his smile. I know his smell. I know the way he twitches his toes just before he falls asleep.

I also know somewhere in Russia, there are people who move their toes the same way. That’s true. That’s real. I hold that truth gently, because his story, and our family story, belongs to them as well. There is no competition in honoring that. Only gratitude.

Every year on Gotcha Day we read the birth book we made him, filled with pictures and stories of his life before we became a family. We don’t erase the before. We make room for all of it.

We also make room for all the people who parent our child. The chosen godmothers and godfathers who see what we see in our kid and our family: that we have more than one origin story. And more than one predetermined destination.

So yes, Mother’s Day in our house is complicated and grief-touched and beautiful. It carries within it 23 years of losses and everyday moments - of Gotcha Days and birth books - and most importantly, it carries the love of this family. The one we created. By choice. With love. The KP3.

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