Parenting Paul
Chapter 2: Finding the Magic in Parenthood
In Parenting Paul/Chapter 1: Becoming a Real and Natural Parent, I chronicled my somewhat lengthy and emotional journey to adopting my son Joel in Vietnam, including my concerns about becoming a single gay male parent of a boy. As much as I loathed the gender stereotypes that were prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s, there would be no hiding from my son that I wasn’t a typical boy growing up. I was a figure skater, played the piano, and sang show tunes and most of my friends were girls because they accepted me for who I was. I didn’t fit in with other boys because I was not good at any sports except tennis, and even that was subject to ridicule because there weren’t many boys in my town who played tennis.
To make matters worse, the town where I grew up was very small and there were no older boys who had paved a path for a kid like me. While there were other boys my age who I knew who also didn’t fit in with the other boys, we didn’t all have the same interests so I often felt very much alone. Even when we did gravitate toward each other because we didn’t fit in with the others, we were often targeted by bullies who called us fairies, sissies and faggots, and sometimes we were subjected to physical abuse.
Although things got somewhat better as I got older, homophobia and gender stereotypes still surrounded me throughout high school, college and adulthood not just in society in general, but also in my family. When I made my plans to adopt known to my friends and family, my friends were all immediately supportive, but my mother and my aunt cautioned me about adopting a baby as a single gay male parent, claiming that children need both a mother and a father. I reminded them that babies in orphanages in Vietnam are abandoned by their mothers and their fathers are not identified by the birth mother, so my being a single gay male parent was probably going to be better for the baby than staying in an orphanage in Vietnam and having no parents at all.
Ironically, being a single gay male had some benefits as a prospective adoptive parent in Vietnam because I didn’t have to intentionally omit a spouse in my home study or hide anyone when I went to Vietnam to complete the adoption process. Straight couples were allowed to have two parents listed as the adoptive parents, but gay and lesbian couples had to decide which parent would be listed on the adoption paperwork in Vietnam and then add the other parent when they completed the naturalization process for adoption in family court in the US. The parent who was not identified in the paperwork could go to Vietnam, but they couldn’t participate in any official adoption activities that involved government officials.
When I brought Joel home from Vietnam in 2002, any lingering anxiety about being a single gay parent and how that might impact Joel someday was overshadowed by 3 major events in my life that happened in the first 12 months after I came home including the sudden and unexpected death of my mother 5 days after I came home from Vietnam, being laid off 7 weeks after I returned to work from my month-long parental leave, and making the decision to sell my condo in Boston and move to the suburbs. Despite being consumed by grief, anger and stress for significant stretches of time during that first year, I did make a few attempts to find other single gay male parents in the Boston area, but was only able to connect briefly with one gay man who had adopted a baby from Cambodia a short time before I adopted Joel.
After we moved to the suburbs of Boston in 2003, Joel started going to a new daycare center/pre-school where there was little to no diversity and I definitely was the only gay parent, not to mention the only single parent of a child who attended that program. As Joel grew from baby to toddler to pre-schooler and his language skills along with the language skills of his classmates developed, he was regularly asked “where’s your mother?” and “why don’t you have a mother?” The teachers tried their best, but they were not able to guide the conversations appropriately, so I assisted Joel with the language to use to answer those questions and I read a children’s book about Vietnamese adoptions to Joel’s classmates when they were about 4 years old.
I had a sense that Joel was still too young to understand the concept of gay vs. straight and I also believed that a child will ask questions when they’re ready for the information. That being said, I figured it was just a matter of time before Joel would be exposed to the blatant homophobia that I was trying to protect him from like “gay and lesbian parents groom their children to be gay and lesbian.” I braced myself for the unknown and trusted that the universe would be my guide when the time came as it already had been many times on my parenting journey.
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The same year we moved to the suburbs, the Vatican proclaimed that gay people were doing great developmental harm to the children they adopted. Prior to moving I had been attending a Jesuit Catholic Church in Boston where the majority of the congregation were gay or lesbian, including several gay and lesbian couples who had adopted babies or had babies through surrogacy. After we moved, we attended a suburban Catholic Church with few if any gay or lesbians in the congregation, so I made a decision to leave the Catholic Church permanently and I joined a Unitarian-Universalist Church that was designated as a welcoming congregation for the LGBTQ+ community.
When Joel was in kindergarten, a gay couple we knew from the church in Boston got engaged. On the way to their wedding, Joel asked “Papa, who is getting married?” When I replied that it was Ted and Ed, Joel asked “Isn’t that 2 guys?” I reminded him that indeed it was the two guys whose house we went to on New Year’s Day a few times and then I watched Joel process the information in the rearview mirror before asking “Papa, who gets to wear the dress?” and “Who gets to throw the bouquet?” I replied that both things are optional even at weddings between men and women, and that seemed to satisfy his curiosity. At the wedding, I observed Joel gazing enchantingly at the two grooms while they danced, and I was prepared for more questions on the way home, but none came and Joel fell asleep as he normally did when we had a long day.
When Joel was in the second grade, we were shopping for clothes one day and out of the blue he said “Papa, I think you should marry your boss because I really like her.” I had gone on two dates with someone that year, but Joel hadn’t met the person because I was leery about introducing someone to him unless I knew that the relationship was going somewhere. Getting married was probably the furthest thing from my mind, but I said to Joel, “I know you like my boss, but if I ever get married, would it be okay if I married a man?” He paused, then said “That’s ok, then my other Dad can stay home with me and play Legos and you can go to work.” I was both amused and bemused that he could work out a scenario in his head so quickly, and even more so that the scenario would benefit him the most!
Around the same time, it was becoming clear that Joel was very athletic, and he developed a mild obsession with basketball and to a lesser extent with baseball. Even though I didn’t play either sport when I was growing up, baseball and basketball were the two sports I knew the most about because my mother was an avid baseball fan when I was a kid and I loved going to basketball games in High School to cheer on my classmates from the stands. Some of my favorite memories of Joel’s pre-teen years were spent watching him play basketball and baseball and getting to know the other parents, and I was especially proud of myself for learning how to do “the book” at basketball games, which meant paying close attention and keeping track of points and fouls.
When Joel was in the sixth grade, I briefly dated a man who I met at an event in a neighboring town that was connected to my church. Even though I wasn’t sure it would turn into a relationship, I decided to invite him to dinner along with some other people from my church that Joel knew, including a lesbian couple and their son who was Joel’s age, and with whom Joel was friends at church. When I was in the car with Joel the next day, he asked me “Papa, were you kissing that guy the other night when he left?” Although I wasn’t trying to hide the kiss from Joel, I didn’t realize that he had seen us. I told him that I had in fact kissed the guy and after a slight pause Joel asked, “so, you’re gay?”
Joel had regularly attended religious education classes at the church where we belonged, including a sexual education program that is designed to teach more than just the mechanics of sex and reproduction. The program included some modules that focused on sexual orientation, and there were two lesbian couples at church, both of whom had children, so up until that point, we had only talked in general terms about gays and lesbians. I immediately replied, “yes, I am gay, but I thought you already knew that when you were in the second grade and you told me that I should marry my boss and I asked you if it would be okay if I married a man?” He paused for a second and then acknowledged that he remembered that conversation. I asked him if it was okay with him that I was gay and if he had any questions or wanted to talk about it some more, but he said “no, that’s fine.”
When Joel was in the seventh grade, I heard him singing Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ in the shower one day. We had a large collection of movie musicals on DVD that Joel had watched and loved since he was a toddler, but we didn’t have Oklahoma and to my knowledge he had not seen it on a cable channel. When I asked him how he knew that song, he said that he had watched Oklahoma in music class at school. Apparently, the universe had sent me an angel in the form of a music teacher who had shown several other musicals in class including West Side Story and My Fair Lady in class, not just for entertainment, but also to study the historical, social, and cultural themes that musicals explore.
When Joel was in high school, I knew that he had a few friends who identified as gay, lesbian and bisexual, but I still couldn’t help wondering whether he had ever been subjected to homophobia because of me. One day I summoned up the courage to ask him and with a heavy dose of teenage exasperation, he looked up from his Xbox and said “no one cares anymore, Papa, it’s not a big deal. My friends actually think it’s kind of cool that I have a gay Dad.”
I soon realized that over the years I had internalized all of the homophobia that was directed at me and the gay community in general. My own self-loathing had traumatized me almost to the point of not pursuing becoming a parent, and it was my straight, athletic, show tune singing son who had helped me heal those wounds. I had originally pursued adopting a girl because I didn’t think a boy would accept me being gay or he would be bullied because his father was gay. In the end, the universe gave me the baby that I needed, not the baby that I thought I needed, and for me, that has turned out to be the most magical part of being a parent so far.
