Read Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?: Confessions of a Gay Dad Online
Authors: Dan Bucatinsky
Copyright © 2012 by Myrio, Inc.
Certain names and identifying characteristics have been changed, certain characters and events have been combined and compressed, and comedic license has been taken.
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First Touchstone trade paperback edition June 2012
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Designed by Joy O’Meara
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bucatinsky, Dan.
Does this baby make me look straight?: confessions of a gay dad / Dan
Bucatinsky.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Gay fathers. 2. Parenting. I. Title.
HQ76.13.B83 2012
306.874’208664—dc23 2011050819
ISBN 978-1-4516-6073-9
ISBN 978-1-4516-6074-6 (ebook)
For Don Roos, my kids’ Papi, and in memory of Julio Bucatinsky, my Papi
chapter one
Wake Up and Smell the Fingers
chapter three
What Happened in Vegas
chapter six
To Cut or Not to Cut
chapter seven
Pee on the Hand, Poop on the Coat
chapter nine
One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish . . . Three-Way
chapter ten
I’m Not as Competitive as You Are
chapter eleven
More Than I Can Chew
chapter fourteen
Faster, Pussycat, Swim, Swim
chapter fifteen
A Giant Valentine for a Tiny Heart
chapter sixteen
Keeping Them Off the Pipe and the Pole
chapter seventeen
Out in the Park
chapter twenty
Let’s All Do the Twist
chapter twenty-one
Keeping Up with the Bergmans
chapter twenty-two
You Are Who You Meet
chapter twenty-six
Birth Mom Barbie
chapter twenty-seven
Why Are We Still Talking About This?
D
addy?”
I’m in my five-year-old daughter Eliza’s bathroom rinsing her toothbrush when I hear her chirp from behind me on the toilet.
Even now I’m oddly caught off guard sometimes by the title “Daddy,” as though I’m suddenly looking down at a new suit I don’t ever remember putting on. But I like it. It fits me. Makes me look thinsy.
“Yes, monkey?” I reply, distractedly.
She holds her fingers up to my face. Then come three tiny words. Oh, how those words repeat in my head, over and over again, echoing in slow motion:
“Smell . . . my . . . fingers . . .”
Nothing good ever comes after those words.
I flash to where her fingers may have been. A field of lavender would be my first choice. But that’s not likely at this late hour. Any chance it’s the perfume counter at Bloomingdale’s? No. She doesn’t have her driver’s license yet. She’s five, remember? My brain is losing its desperate battle to steer away from the more likely candidates.
On the one hand, I don’t want her to feel any embarrassment or guilt. Her body is her temple. It’s all beautiful. And
my love for it and her is unconditional. On the other hand? Smell your own damn fingers, kid. What about me looks like I’d
like
to smell your fingers? Tell me now so I can change it immediately and no one ever makes this mistake again.
But there’s no time to get into all that. I find myself obliging. I hold her adorable, glitter-nail-polished fingers to my face and I smell. There’s definitely something there. Some smell. What is that? Is it ass? Could be.
“What is that, darling?” I ask, trying to hide my anxiety, although my voice is starting to climb north.
Eliza giggles. “It’s my tushy, Daddy.” Okay. Not great news. In fact, I feel light-headed. But it’s not her fault. Maybe she hasn’t mastered the finer points of the bum wipe. We’re in the early days of this particular skill set, even though she is five.
“Darling, we don’t touch our bum-bums, okay? Did the toilet paper slip? That happens, sweetie, but with practice—”
“No, Daddy,” she says with a conspiratorial grin. “It’s my
front
tushy.”
I don’t know what happens next because I’ve blacked out. The room is spinning. Images flash from my past—or maybe somebody else’s past, I’m too panicked to watch carefully.
All I can think is
How?
How the hell did I end up here, in this particular conversation, with this little girl, holding these particular fingers up to this face? I can’t seem to remember the series of events that led to this moment. Any of them. It is the same sensation I have after plowing through four bowls of cereal while watching
The Biggest Loser
.
Even though it feels like I was somehow propelled through time and space and then plopped unceremoniously
in this moment, in this bathroom, with this funky-fingered cherub smiling up at me, I know it happened in real time. Evolving into the man I’ve become: the son, the husband, the “Daddy.” It was life, happening one terrifying moment at a time, the result of big decisions and small ones, some easy and some daunting as hell.
I guess the Big Bang would have to have been around the filming of
Under the Tuscan Sun
. I had two and a half minutes of screen time with Diane Lane, which thankfully took six weeks to shoot in a beautiful countryside in Tuscany. I had become quite close with the director, Audrey Wells, who was there with her two-year-old daughter. She spied me playing with little Tatiana and asked if I’d ever thought about having kids. The answer of course was yes. I had. But my boyfriend had mixed feelings. (Ah, it’s been almost twenty years, I shouldn’t say “boyfriend.” I should say “partner.” Too cold. “Lover”? No. Too moist. Okay, “husband,” but only in California ever since Tom Arnold agreed to marry us on the patio of our house, our two kids as witnesses, only a few weeks before Prop 8 went into effect in 2008.) Don and I always managed to come up with perfectly good reasons why we shouldn’t have kids. Audrey, though, proceeded to give me an impassioned speech about “discovering the father in one another,” which really got to me. I remember calling Don from a pay phone and yelling, “I want to discover the father in—”
Click
. The line went dead as I ran out of minutes on my calling card.
It took about a year for Don and me to get on the same page. After all, our options were limited. We couldn’t just “forget” to take a pill. Don kept waiting for someone to leave
a newborn in a basket on our doorstep. Our close friends Michael and Mary urged him to be a tiny bit more proactive.
“That’s bullshit!” I remember them saying. “Nobody is going to leave a kid at your feet. If that’s how you really feel, go out there and get your baby!” It was all Don needed to hear, apparently, his “aha” moment. Because after that we started making the necessary calls.
Surrogacy was the popular option. But Don was convinced we’d wind up using
my
sperm and he’d instantly feel left out by the two-against-one shenanigans. He grew up with two brothers and avoids triangulation at all costs. More importantly, he was uncomfortable with the idea of surrogacy, felt it was nothing more than “womb leasing” and wanted no part of it. I knew adoption was the only other choice. And since there are so many children being born every day who need parents, we both thought this would be the best. I’d be lying, though, if I didn’t say I had some hidden trepidation.
I don’t like to admit it but I was petrified about my own ability to bond with an adopted baby, a child with no genetic ties to me. It was lack of experience, really. Maybe ignorance. Fear?
What will it smell like?
I’d think.
How will the baby know I’m its daddy?
Let’s face it: I was an idiot. That was until the day of the birth. The second Eliza was lifted into the air, like Kunta Kinte in
Roots
, I fell in love. And I mean that
second
. Which made the road to get there, worth every gut-wrenching, nerve-wracking, tear-squirting moment.
The process of making an adoption plan isn’t easy. For anyone. But for same-sex couples, it’s even more of a challenge. Foreign adoptions for the “gays” are impossible these
days. Homophobia is more the rule than the exception. In most parts of the world, like China and Guatemala, the words “I’m a man looking to adopt a baby” must be the same as “Sociopath seeks naked hugs and finger fun!”
No. Our best bet was something called open adoption, where we’d be chosen by a birth mother and then keep in some contact so that our child would have a healthy understanding of who she is and where she came from. At least, that’s our hope. We needed information. And courage. So we talked with other couples who had adopted and read every book we could find. We derived not a small amount of inspiration from Dan Savage’s book
The Kid
—a wonderfully funny and honest account of his and his partner’s journey through the adoption process.
After a meeting with an adoption lawyer, background checks, fingerprinting, and registering with a family services agency, the very next step was creating a “birth mother letter.” It was more of a brochure where we described ourselves, our relationship and our life together as a way of enticing birth moms to call us. Smile till it hurts. Don and I struggled with this process for several weeks. I mean, how could we paint an accurate picture of ourselves in a way that communicates what perfect parents we thought we could be without sounding immodest or entitled or, you know, not gay-gay?
The key was to understand what kind of person our birth mom might be. Our lawyer told us that the majority come from Vegas and usually fall into one of two categories: the college coed or the stripper. Believe it or not, he said we’d be better off with a stripper. The coeds, he said, often had multiple
partners, were binge drinkers and in denial about being pregnant at least until after finals. Strippers, he said, were more responsible and used fewer substances. I guess it’s not so easy to swing naked from a pole on crystal meth. Naturally, Don and I were all about tailoring our brochure for our particular exotic-dancing birth mom. But where would we start? How much should we let her know? I was dying to tell her about my first professional showbiz job as a backup singer/dancer for a
Playboy
playmate in a hideously tacky variety show called
Truly Outrageous
. Don was adamant I bury those details with the sequined wrestling singlet I wore for our “Steam Heat” number.
“How do you know she won’t respond to that?” I asked.
“How well did people respond who saw the show?” he asked. Good point. My parents, who came out to see their son in his first professional job as an entertainer since graduating from Vassar, described it as “not their cup of tea.” Generous, I think, given the racy show was a “one-night-only” engagement, at midnight, on Yom Kippur—the most solemn and holy of Jewish holidays. The show
was
truly outrageous and not in the way that might help us get a baby. No. We had no strategy which highlighted the fact we had no real idea who our birth mom was.
Don thought he knew: she was a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two who did volunteer work during the day and only stripped at night to put food on the table. Yeah, okay. Uh-huh. I was convinced I knew strippers better than Don. After all, I was the one who went to a Vegas bachelor party for my friend John a few years back and saw, much to my horror, a girl named Phenomenon pour ginger ale through
her vajayjay and into John’s mouth. I was pretty sure she wasn’t wrapping up her gig at Nude Awakening to race home and put the kids to bed so she could finish her thesis on Chaucer.
“We should write that we like the outdoors,” I said, as we opened a blank page on the computer to write our BML (birth mother letter).
“No. We’re not writing that,” Don argued. “We may as well say we’re Navy SEALs or circus clowns.” Don hates the outdoors. He likes big, dark hotel rooms, room service, and twenty-four-hour HGTV.
“Put down water-skiing!” I said.
He rolled his eyes. “You haven’t water-skied in twenty years.” He wasn’t wrong. But what version of “me” did I want the stripper to know? I mean, I do love water-skiing. That was the truth. So what if I hadn’t done it in a long . . .
long
time? Better than what Don wanted to put in the letter:
“Hello. My name is Donald. I’ve always been a movie buff and an avid reader. I love Jane Austen. And I don’t know how to throw overhand.”
“No way!” I argued. “May as well write ‘Your baby will be a class A nerd, destined to be stuffed in lockers and toilets.’ No. Even I wouldn’t give my baby to that.”
“At least it’s honest,” he defended his position.
“So? Are you trying to have a family or give a deposition?” I said, self-righteously.