By Todd Craig
As I said before, the word fatherhood carries some powerful
connotations with it.
I know this because five and a half years ago, my husband
and I became parents when we adopted an infant boy, and ever since, I’ve taken
on the title of father to my son.
Let me first say that fatherhood shapes you unlike anything
else. Things that used to be
important, like which club you’d meet up at on Friday night, fade quickly into
the past. Routines and structure
become more and more important. You start doing things that only responsible adults do like
shopping for life insurance, reading the nutrition labels on your grocery store
items, and talking about the importance of things like keeping yesterday’s pair
of Lightning McQueen underwear from hanging off the bookshelf.
In short, you become a dad.
When I was single, I would always get to that point in the
relationship where you start looking long term. I was greedy, I would tell my prospective boyfriends. I wanted the house, the fenced yard,
and kids. I wanted a family.
Most of the boys I dated would echo the same thoughts, but
from their mouths it always sounded more like an echo than an honest statement
of desire. How many of them felt
as seriously as I did about having a family? I don’t know.
So when the man who would become my husband and I began
getting serious, we talked at length of the future and of having kids; it was
something we both wanted. As our
relationship evolved, so did our plans.
We soon found ourselves engaged.
We held a commitment ceremony, and we bought a house in the suburbs of
Colorado Springs within two years of our first date. The house had three bedrooms.
We hired an adoption agency up in Denver about
six months later.
The agency had never worked with two dads
before. They told us they only worked with fifty couples at a time and profiled
couples that had been on the list the longest to prospective birth mothers
first. They told us that the
average wait for a couple was approximately a year, but because we were a gay
male couple, the wait time might double for us. Undeterred, we
filled out the forms that summer knowing that we could use the years of waiting
to get ourselves emotionally and financially as prepared as possible.
Four months later in October, a birth mother
picked us.
She gave birth on Halloween. That weekend, she
asked to meet us before going through with the adoption. We met at a local
restaurant. There we held this beautiful little three-day old baby boy in our
arms.
We left without hearing a decision. We arrived
home and sat on the sofa in a silent ball of emotions for a couple of
hours. We put in a DVD to kill
time and fill the dead air. It
didn’t help.
Then the phone rang.
We were dads.
We picked up our son that Sunday. He was five days old.
Those first few years flew by in a blur of
sleepless nights with a crying baby, and endless trips to our local Target for
formula and diapers. Life as we
had known it was wiped out in a nuclear explosion called fatherhood. More than once, we would exchange
what-the-hell-did-we-get-ourselves-into types of glances at hearing the 3 a.m.
cries echoing down the hallway.
But just when we were about to snap our mental
caps, our little guy started sleeping through the night. Soon, he was growing, babbling a few
words, and crawling his way straight into our hearts.
Now that he’s age five and a half, I find that
the role of dad to this little boy has grown in significance. He wants me to throw the football with
him in the back yard; he follows me throughout the day just happy to be in my
presence. I am constantly aware of
how this little boy looks up to my person, repeats the words that I say, and
takes his cues from my actions.
He’s five and a half now. If I’m lucky, I’ll have another twelve
to thirteen years or so to teach him the things that he’ll need to be a
man. I want to instill so much
into my son. I want him to
demonstrate respect. I want him to
make change for a dollar in his head.
I want him to open doors for ladies, read passionately, and laugh at his
mistakes while still learning from them.
I want him to fight through the tough times, take advantage of the quiet
times, and pursue his passions with undeniable enthusiasm and energy. I want him to feel at home in nature,
to stand up for the little guy, and to know the words to at least three Adele
songs. He should be able to throw
a football in a tight spiral, to dance without looking too foolish, and to feel
the love and support of his parents each and every day of his life. I want him to bound out of bed like he
does now, ready for life and ready for fun. I want him to be excited for ladybugs, homemade sugar
cookies, and Christmas presents – even when he’s 18. I want him to play more board games than video games. I want him to love his Buzz Lightyear,
Woody, and Lightning McQueen toys for another ten years. After all, we have a fuck-ton of money
spent on those.
Is all of that too much to teach to one
boy? And how in the hell did my
dad do all of this?
So now my husband and I find ourselves stressing
things like being polite and teaching him how to open the door for others, and
even though he tends to block the doorway with his little body, he gets the
idea. The highlight of my day is
reading his favorite bedtime stories at night, and he loves picking out the
story for the night by himself. We
get excited taking him to movies, volunteering in his classroom, and planning
his birthday parties.
In short, fatherhood is what our lives are all
about anymore. Dance clubs,
ten-dollar martinis, and tight shirts no longer exist in our world. We may be gay dads, but it's that label of dads that defines us.
Recently, this was illustrated when we took a
trip to Las Vegas for a convention for my husband’s work. There’s a huge jewelry show there every
year, and my husband couldn’t believe that he’d finally get to experience it
for himself.
While we were a little nervous at leaving our
son’s side for the first time in five years for the trip, it helped when we
made arrangements with my parents to come down and watch him for the duration
of the five-day trip. It’s hard to
be too traumatized with missing your parents when your grandparents are in
town. It probably also helps that
visits from grandma and grandpa are slightly more lucrative than visits from
Santa and the Easter Bunny.
Las Vegas proved to be a great time, however,
parenthood’s talons held us in a firm grasp as we were in bed by 11:00 all but
one night.
Our biggest expense of the trip wasn’t money for
the slot machines or the poker tables; it was our trip to the Disney Outlet.
When we our return flight finally touched down, we arrived home
late at night, well after our son’s bedtime by a long shot. While we were tempted to sneak
into his room and wake him up, we resisted the urge. For as fun as it was being in Vegas, it sure felt good to
get back home and back to being a dad.
This last idea was driven home the next morning when I was woken
up by a very soft kiss from a certain five-year old boy that afterwards whispered
quietly into my ear, "I missed you while you weren't here, daddy!"
Damn. Fatherhood is
powerful stuff, but you know what?
We wouldn’t have it any other way.
