Two babies.

This post will be ineloquent and unpoetic and nothing like I hoped it would be the million times I’ve written it in my head since Thursday night.

On Thursday afternoon at 3:10pm, I received a call from our adoption worker. She told me that there was a possible placement of two little girls and that another worker would be calling me within minutes to find out if Jenn and I would take them immediately. She provided minimal details and asked that we make a decision as quickly as possible to get the girls settled in for the night.

Mind you, I’ve had the worst cold of my life this week. As the week’s gone on, I’ve gotten sicker and sicker. (I think I’m turning the corner today, thank God.) So, when the placement worker called, I had the beginning whispers of laryngitis. I called Jenn, who was just finishing up her school day, navigating the 12 “press this number” prompts to get to the main office to have her paged. “It’s an emergency’, I told the receptionist. When Jenn reached the phone, I said, ‘Don’t talk, just listen. And absorb as quickly as possible because this is real.’

I told her what I knew about the girls and we agreed that, yes, of course, we would take them. We went into preparation mode instantly, Jenn trying frantically to locate one of her principals at school to let her know she would be missing work, at least for the next few days, and me calling back the placement worker, as well as my mom and stepdad  to find out if they would be available for a Target run. With each call, my voice faded until, by the time we waited in the lobby for the girls to arrive, it was nearly gone.  The girls arrived with their caseworker at 7:30 that night and life has been nothing like we imagined it could be since then.

All I can really say about the girls is that they’re 18 months and 12 days old. Sisters. The rest I protect for reasons of confidentiality. They’re in our care now as a foster placement. (We’re foster moms!!!) Early next week there will be a hearing to determine whether they stay with us longer, and then it’s a long, arduous, legal process to determine whether the girls will be made available for adoption.

Right now we’re taking things one day at a time. My mom & stepdad were an immense help with errands and baby holding and diaper changing and bottle feeding the first night and day. Then, last night, two of Jenn’s friends from work arrived with a van — literally — of stuff they’d collected from various members of their school community. We’ve gone from having absolutely nothing to having almost everything we need overnight. Jenn’s mom and stepdad can hardly wait to send their care package from Florida and we’ve been overwhelmed by so many offers to help, we haven’t been able to respond to even half of them.

Needless to say, we are in love. The girls are perfect. At first there was the worry: ‘We can’t get too attached b/c what if they don’t stay in our care for very long.’ That worry was quickly usurped by the ardent belief that ‘These are our girls now and we will be everything to them for as long as they’re with us. It’s not about us. It’s about them.’

Of course, we’re exhausted. Even with all the help so far. I’m still getting over the illness that shall not be named. This morning, Jenn pulled what she thought was a clean bowl from the cupboard only to find it covered in peanut butter from yesterday’s snack. We are putting dirty bowls in clean places, people!

What we need now are hopes and prayers that, as this whole process moves forward, all decisions are made in the best interest of our girls. Also, anyone in the local area (aka. any family & friends who know what I mean by local area) with a couple hours to spare this first week, particularly during the upcoming work week, we would so, so, so appreciate extra baby-holding arms around while we find our bearings.

Case in point:

It’s been a whirlwind and we have no idea where it’s going…but never in a million years did we imagine such unbelievably satisfying days.

BGAI Together: I do? That’s easy for you to say. (guest post by headbang8)

Naturally, Master Right and I are in favour of gay marriage. But we violently oppose gay weddings.

So many trappings of a conventional wedding demean and insult the couple whose joint life it is meant to celebrate. The bride officially becomes property of the groom, while the groom is more-or-less a bytander at the whole affair. Mainlining alcohol, guests unpack their emotional baggage on each other and behave like monkeys. Yes, weddings suck.

Thankfully, in Germany, one doesn’t need to do all that. One simply visits a notary’s office, signs an agreement, and you’re hitched. Gay or straight.

Well, it’s simple if you’re German. If you’re a foreigner, you need to wave a brace of documents under an official nose, to guard against bigamy, marriages-of-convenience, or other hanky-panky.

First, you need to prove when and where you were born, and that you are not married to anyone else.

No problem for Master Right. His birthplace, Japan, is sensible. The whole thing can be taken care of in a single visit to the consulate.

As a citizen of both the USA and Australia, I am in a messy position. Both countries are federations of states, and each state keeps track of hatches, matches and despatches.

The US authorities are uncooperative or obtuse, and the Australians are mostly drunk or something. The US is not a signatory to the Hague Convention for the internationalization of documents, so my birth certificate needed to cross the Atlantic several times to be stamped, sealed, confirmed, apostilled and vouchsafed by an army of civil servants. And in spite of letters and sworn statements which showed the contrary, the Australian Botschaft (embassy) still issued documents which referred to Miss Master Right. The Australian Botschaft? More like the Australian botch-up.

If you and your spouse wish to live here, the demands mount. One needs to prove coverage by health insurance and a sufficient income. You must submit a floorplan of your home; German law demands a home provide 12.5 square metres per person.

Further, the notary must satisfy herself that both parties understand the agreement. This means that one needs a sworn translator into one’s native tongue.

Thus, a rather peculiar wedding party assembled last week, amid the girly, weddingy decor at the offices of Frau Ehe, Notary Public. There was Master Right, his Japanese translator, my English translator, and me.

As we waited for Frau Ehe to arrive, our translators chatted. Both had recently served time behind bars; that is, they translated in prison. I joked that they need adjust their vocabulary only slightly from arraignment to marriage. The Japanese translator remarked that foreigners can get themselves into trouble under both circumstances.

I really lucked into a great English translator; a leader in her field, and office-holder in the professional association of translators. She was curious to observe her Japanese counterpart, another highly-qualified professional, who faced quite different obstacles with her assignment.

The Japanese language uses sparse grammar and limited sounds. Much day-to-day Japanese is structured to keep a polite distance between two speakers; it can be constructed to reveal little.

When one needs to speak of more complex matters–like law, love or laughter–Japanese reverts to elaborate metaphor. And emotional arguments sometimes carry the same weight as rational ones.

A linguistic challenge, given the thorough, and thoroughly dry, German documents that Frau Ehe led us through. She took great pains to stress that the Lebenspartnerschaft wouldn’t apply in the US, Australia, or Japan. She wanted to make clear that this union was not a back-door way to obtain a legally-binding marriage in our home countries,

Therefore, it was only useful if our life would be based in Germany. Herr Headbang has chosen to make his life in Germany, she observed, and asked if Herr Right had yet done the same.

Before Master Right could answer–indeed, before this were even translated into Japanese for him–the translator leapt into a passionate speech. This man, she pleaded, was a man of courage, following his dream and creating a new life in spite of the odds. This went on for several sentences. Master Right was touched.

“Would you like me to tell you our story?” I offered, in English.

“No,” replied Frau Ehe, “I get it.”

Naturally. our Japanese translator embarked on a subsequent translation of this whole exchange. And it served as a neat segue into Frau Ehe’s next subject. A little homily.

We asked for no wedding vows or such silliness, but Frau Ehe decided she’d toss in a speech, for free. It picked up on the theme of courage.

She reminded us that the uncertainty which affects modern life acts against the idea of marriage. That making a commitment to a shared life, forever, takes bravery and faith in the future. She congratulated us for making that choice, in a binding agreement before the state. And, she added uncomfortably, God. Or, um, whatever we would like to call that thing up there. Ah, good ol’ Catholic Bavaria.

Both our translators signed the document, along with Master Right and me. Et voila, we were husbands. We declined the you-may-now-kiss business–we’re not into PDAs–and gave each other a hearty, relieved hug.

The perfect wedding, I think.

###

UPDATE

We presented our Lebenspartnerschaft to the Kreisverwaltungsreferrat. (Don’t you love German words?) Good news. Master Right now has a visa to stay in Germany, but he has five years to learn German. That will be amusing.

********************

Headbang8 describes himself as a “A fiftyish American-Australian chap, recently posted from New York to Munich. He and his Japanese husband [Master Right] regularly discover new reasons to think the other odd.”

He blogs at Deutschland uber Elvis. This post first appeared here on September 19, 2008.

BGAI Together is a grassroots storytelling project where LGBTQ persons and their Allies share stories of love, dignity and affirmation. Click here to shine your light on love today.

I have a sign!

I’ve had a touch of gay fatigue lately, which is why I haven’t posted anything gay-themed, politically, personally, or otherwise in awhile. Sometimes I need to take a break from all the outness and just be Erika, you know? So, I tune out all the debates, the blogs, the referenda, the noise, but today — today I saw something that can’t be ignored. It’s simply too good not to share.

If you’ve ever been to a Pride event or if you’ve ever seen coverage of a Pride event on television, then you’re familiar with the likes of Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church. These are the crazy haters who show up to protest just about everywhere with their “God Hates Fags” signs. They’re actually banned from entering the UK. Don’t get me wrong — I’m all for the First Amendment and crazy haters’ right to express themselves with their supersize signs. But really — “God Hates Fags”? God doesn’t even hate haters.

The WBC showed up outside Twitter headquarters in San Francisco last week. Seriously? Know your territory, haters.

My heroes.

Photo credits listed at The Laughing Squid.

The worst call.

The phone rang at approximately 11:30pm. She answered, more alert than anyone else might have been in that moment, startled from sleep in the middle of the night.

It was dispatch, an automated recording, stiff and impersonal. She caught every few words.

‘Domestic disturbance …all squads…shots fired.’

The electronic voice penetrated the earpiece, violating the peace she somehow managed to find all the other nights he’s on patrol.

The call ended.

The night returned to quiet, except for the full throttle thrum of her heartbeat and the million thoughts charging through her head, while their two little girls slept blissfully unaware down the hall.

********************

Last night, while out with friends, I heard a side of the story I hadn’t heard before. As the band propelled meaningless, too loud music from the stage, he leaned against the dart machine, hand curled around his plastic cup of ice water, unreasonably calm for what he had experienced the night before. We circled him in groups of two or three to hear the story, to bear witness. The men listened, their arms folded across their chests. The women leaned in.

One by one, we clasped his hand or hugged him, shouting over the band that we were glad he was alive.

********************

The call came through at 10:32pm. It was a 911 hang-up and standard procedure was for two squads to respond. He was the second to arrive and, upon reaching the country address, he recognized the house. Dispatch said the only prior incident at this address had been a civil matter, but he knew better. Six years ago he was on a call at this address and there was nothing civil about it.

He cut his lights, noticing that the first squad to arrive had parked at the end of the driveway near the road. All the lights in the house were on, blaring through the large bay windows onto the snow-covered lawn.  This was not some kids at a sleepover cranking dispatch, he thought. The hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention. He got out of the car and started to walk up the driveway toward the house. He hadn’t heard the 1032 on his radio until it scratched through again halfway up the driveway. When it did, he clipped behind the nearest tree, readied his gun, and watched.

The windows revealed everything, a technicolor talkie in the middle of nowhere, the scene crisp against the blackness of the night, but soundless from his post across the yard.

Inside, a middle-aged man waved a gun at a middle-aged woman. She picked up her phone. He grabbed it and threw it across the room. She sat on the chair. He sat on top of her. Eventually, he stumbled onto the porch into the cold. He fired, one, two, three, four shots into the air.

One of the bullets buzzed, inches, above the deputy’s head.

********************

‘When he went back in, we could hear him yelling. He threatened to kill himself. If he had said anything about killing her, we would’ve gone in. Intent is a tricky thing. Legally, we can’t move in until someone threatens someone else.’

‘She was able to get out of the house somehow. She tried to leave in her truck, but got stuck in a snowbank. We got her to the other side of the yard, where he couldn’t see her from inside the house. We needed to keep her away from the driveway because he could’ve, you know, bang, right out the front door and that would’ve been it.’

‘It was freezing out, near zero, and all she had on was a T-shirt and shorts, no shoes, no socks.’

‘By then back-up had arrived, the guys with the long-range rifles. One of the deputies took the shot, three rounds and the guy was down. We thought for sure he was dead. The medics waited while we secured the house. I thought for sure he was dead, but then he started coughing and gurgling. The son of a bitch. He was alive.’

********************

‘I just kept thinking, how am I going to raise these girls? Who’s awake that I can message on Facebook? I couldn’t sleep. I was wide awake. All I knew was that he was at work and shots were fired and that’s it. I was going out of my head.’

********************

‘She’s really shaken up about it. I called her after, at about 12:30am to check in. She was asking me a million questions. Apparently, dispatch had called the house by accident. Normally, the call goes out to the deputies in the squads, but one button and it goes out to the squads and the deputies’ houses. It’s a simple mistake. That whole time, she knew something was going on, but didn’t know what. I told her I was okay, here’s what happened, it’s all over, I’m okay.’

********************

As we stood there entranced, listening over the screaming speakers and blinking back the heavy fog of smoke, I wanted to know everything. I wanted to know their protocol for domestic disturbance calls. I wanted to know what happened to the woman. I wanted to know how he was feeling, if he had slept, what had gone through his mind. Jenn asked him what the guy will be charged with and if this is all in a day’s work in the quiet bedroom county where he’s on the force.

********************

‘We get calls like this at least once a day, seven times a week. So far this year, we’ve had three really bad ones, with shots fired. One guy shot up the whole house, flipped over tables, tore up everything while her kid and the kid’s friend slept through it all upstairs. This went on for two hours. Then they went to bed. She didn’t call it in until eight hours later. That’s the part that’s frustrating to us, when they don’t report it. We help them out, arrest the guy, then she gets to court and recants everything. I don’t get it. It’s so frustrating. Then we’re back out there again, at the same house, arresting him again two months later. The woman last night blew a .25. I don’t know what he blew because they had him do it at the hospital.’

********************

Normally a gregarious, move-around guy, he held his place at the dart machine the entire three hours we were at the bar last night. It could have been that we cornered him there with our need to see and feel and hear our friend in close proximity. Or, I wonder if it was his way of dealing, of making his space smaller, more contained, while the crowd of Saturday night strangers danced to a cover of Cowboy Casanova, half-drunk pitchers moored to every two-top in the room.

He glanced at his wife a few feet away, her gestures telling her own version of the previous night’s events to another circle of three.

He smiled.

‘It’s the worst kind of call you can get, because you just don’t know what’s going to be there when you pull up,’ he said. ‘You just start thinking about your family, if you’ve planned well…’

He stared straight ahead, at something none of us could see, this humble hero from this unspoken war at home, our friend, her husband, this father of two little girls.

He shook his head.

‘The worst call.’

A. (or whatever it turns out to be).

I kid you not when I tell you this, but the day after my last adoption post, we received an email from our adoption worker, subject line:

“Possible placement.”

Jenn was at work and we were on the phone with each other in seconds. We opened the attached description of 18 month old A. and couldn’t skim it fast enough. We said, ‘Okay’ out loud to every one of his special needs, each ‘Okay’ a verbal assertion that we could handle it, that this wasn’t as bad as the scary special needs adoption class made us think it would be, that for all we knew, if we said yes, we were reading the very first biographical bits about our son!!

Our adoption worker asked us to consider the details and get back to her with our answer within four days.

We obsessed about it the whole night. ‘What names start with A?’, we wondered, practicing their sounds in the dark. ‘Aaron, Abraham, Anthony, Alfonso, Archimedes, Armando, Andy.’ We sacrificed our first night of sleep for A. in true new parent form. ‘Alvin, Allen, Albert, Art, Alejandro, Ahmed, Antoine, Amos.’

Anything was possible.

We emailed our adoption worker some logistical questions the next morning and, while waiting for her response (on which our answer hinged), started to plan our first trip to meet him. Knowing that our first  visit would require us to stay overnight far from home and since eating out is difficult with all my food allergies, I was ecstatic to find a Holiday Inn Express with a mini-fridge and microwave in the small town where he lives. We debated whether we should bring a car seat with us the first time and, if so, whether we should borrow or buy one and, oh my God, we have no idea which car seat to buy! We even thought about whose laptop we could borrow so I would be able to blog while there.

Her response came and we emailed her ‘Yes’ and asked about next steps.

‘This is really happening!’, we gushed. ‘You just wrote that post!’ Jenn said. ‘I know!!’, I blurted.

We let her know we were available to make the trip as early as the next weekend and she wrote back right away with, ‘Awesome! I will consult with A.’s caseworker and get back to you with details.’

I mapquested the trip and scribbled out a packing list. Jenn made mental notes as she taught her classes that afternoon about what lessons she’d need to prepare for her substitute during her absence. She kept her phone on vibrate in her pocket while she taught first graders about choices and manners and all the things first graders learn in guidance class, just in case I heard any news.

One hour later, I did.

It was an email from our adoption worker.

She said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t explain the process very well. You are only a potential family at this point and will be considered in a pool of potential matches for A. by his case worker. She anticipates making a selection by the end of the month and I’ll let you know when I hear her decision.’

Gravity sucked us underground. Everything stopped.

We were furious at first with this, yet another act of ‘duh’ by our adoption worker. ‘Are we your first case, lady? Have you never done this before? How do you NOT KNOW HOW THE PROCESS WORKS?’ (She’s been doing this for a few years now, actually, but communication skills seem to elude her.)

We calmed down, eventually, because really, what could we do?

‘Okay’, we said, our verbal assertion that if A. was our son, we would be chosen.

We resolved to wait at first, but I couldn’t shake my mounting frustration with our adoption worker. Taken singly, her acts of ‘duh’ over the past nine months are not terrible. Listed together, we’re left wondering how we’re ever going to find our kid with her futzing with the flashlight.

We had been exploring other paths to adoption already and, while waiting to find out about A., I googled some things. It’s hard to do nothing. It’s hard just to wait.

One of my searches led me to these guys which, in turn, led me here. I poked around, called Jenn in, and we read the entire website in one sitting. It seems like a totally viable option, more viable than any other private agency we’ve read about, and as an added bonus, their gallery of waiting families is a utopian panoply of ages and races and straights and gays, all of them beaming, so happy as they wait for their babies. We requested an info packet and resumed waiting to hear about A., feigning patience as best we could.

It’s so hard to do nothing. It’s so hard to wait.

We went around and around about the process so far, our gut feelings, everything we’ve heard from anyone we’ve known to be connected to foster care or adoption. We talked and talked and talked and talked.

Finally, we reached a peaceful resolution. If we are selected for A., then that is our path. If we are not selected for A., then we count the last year as a learning experience and start over with the other agency.

‘Okay’, we agreed, and went to sleep.

The next night we talked some more (as only two women in a relationship can do) and doubted our decision. We played the Devil’s advocate game until we couldn’t hold our heads up. ‘What if A.’s special needs are more challenging than we thought?’ ‘ What if we’re giving up on the system too soon?’ ‘What if we invest in this new path with this new agency and, a year from now, we’re back a square one again?’

The pinnacle?

Me: ‘What are we going to do?!’

Jenn: ‘About what?’

Me: ‘EVERYTHING!!’

Sooner than we thought, her email came. It read:

‘Thank you for participating in the process of selecting a family for A.. I have just learned that the regional worker has narrowed the selection to two families, and your family was not selected.’

It’s silly how childless I felt in that moment.

Our decision about our path is still in flux, though leaning harder in one direction than another. Never in a million years did I imagine this would be so hard. I picture us with our baby, so clearly. I picture Jenn cradling him in the crook of her arm, propping the bottle up on a pillow while she watches The Daily Show.

I picture him at 4, running around like a madman, begging us to chase him, giggling, his little green windbreaker shooshing in the wind.

I see him, I swear it. He’s there.

He’s ours.

Anthony. Abraham. Amos.

Son.