Journey to Same-Sex Parenthood. Eric Rosswood

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      When my wife and I met in 2001, she was twenty-three and I was thirty-eight, so obviously we had a fairly significant age gap between us. But she was clearly an “old soul” and I’m perpetually immature, so we sort of met in the middle and it worked for us. One area in which the age difference was clear, though, was in our different points of readiness for children. I was ready to start a family and hoping to meet someone with whom I could build that family. Novia wasn’t quite ready for children yet, although she did want a family eventually. She just had other things she wanted to do first. Although I wasn’t getting any younger, I hadn’t yet hit that unknown age where I would be uncomfortable as a “mom,” so we waited. We originally planned on artificial insemination, but knew adoption was also a perfectly acceptable possibility to both of us.

      Our lives and relationship were certainly complicated and not just because of our age difference. When we met, I was living in Little Rock and working full time as a Major in the Arkansas Air National Guard. In those days of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” being a lesbian in my field was downright oppressive. By law, I couldn’t be “out” in the military and I lived in constant fear of being outed and losing my job. I had been living in the closet my entire military career, which at that point spanned almost seventeen years.

      Novia was also in the military. After we started dating, I convinced her to transfer to the Air National Guard and she was eventually hired into a full-time position in my unit. So there we were, both of us working for the same Guard unit, living in a military town and trying to make a relationship work while avoiding getting drummed out for being gay.

      Because of the nature of my position, I was very well-known and recognized by virtually everyone in my eleven-hundred-person unit. Pretty much anywhere I went around town, there’d be people who would recognize me. Novia and I were in constant fear of being seen together. We’d drive to the grocery store on base in different cars and shop separately, starting at opposite ends of the store while talking on our cells to make sure we got what we needed. We’d worry about going out to dinner together or Novia being seen mowing our yard and having people realize that she lived there with me. We struggled with trying to figure out how we might raise a child in that environment.

      Then something happened during my deployment to the desert in 2005 that significantly changed our lives and our relationship. Just a couple of months into my six-month deployment, my appendix ruptured and I became very ill, almost septic. That event made me realize I didn’t want my entire life centered on hiding who I was and having to hide my family. I realized there was no way we could have the family we wanted if we stayed in the military full time. So we made a huge decision to leave full-time military service and move away.

      Now a Lieutenant Colonel, I started job hunting and I eventually landed a federal job with the Department of Veterans Affairs in Louisville, Kentucky. It was a beautiful area, a big enough city where there was lots to do, yet not so big that it was a concrete jungle. I moved there just after Christmas in 2006 and Novia followed me there six months later after also getting a federal job. It wasn’t until we moved out of the “fishbowl” existence in which we’d lived for the previous five years that we realized the stress and emotional toll it had taken on us. We felt like we could finally breathe.

      Novia and I were able to be more open at our new workplaces and live more authentic lives, so we moved forward with our plans to start a family. We wanted to get settled first, so we built a new house and moved in about a year later. Then the family planning process started in earnest. At that point, we wanted to just go straight to adoption. We ultimately decided against artificial insemination for a couple of reasons: My age was starting to be of concern in carrying a child and Novia had some health issues with childbearing, plus we only had finite resources to use in starting our family. If insemination didn’t work, we’d have exhausted them with no child to show for it and no further resources for an adoption. So adoption it was!

      As with anything I do, I thoroughly researched everything I could find about adoption, including what types there were and how to go about it. I shared all I learned with Novia. We weren’t going to hide our family or pretend this child wasn’t going to be raised by two mommies. We thought about foreign adoption, but soon learned that many countries don’t allow gay couples (or single women, older women, etc.) to adopt. We also considered adoption through the state foster care system but decided against that, because we really wanted an infant—preferably a newborn—and didn’t want to risk getting a child who we would have to give back. I knew myself well enough to know I couldn’t stand that. With those constraints, our chances within the state system slimmed down considerably, so we opted for an agency placement approach.

      I read everything I could find on how to pick a good agency. I searched for reviews online, sent e-mails and asked for references. There was a good deal to be leery of: a lot of scams are out there, as well as legal pitfalls with potentially disastrous consequences. Again, we couldn’t afford to waste resources by making any mistakes. I talked to quite a few agencies and the first question I always asked was: “Do you work with same-sex couples?” I got a variety of answers, from flat out “No” to “Absolutely, we have placed many children with same-sex families” to “Yes, but you’d only be eligible for our African-American program.”

      It didn’t matter to us what race, nationality or ethnicity our child might be: white, African-American, purple or Martian for all we cared! But we were highly offended that an agency believed minority children were somehow less worthy and could “settle for” same-sex parents or that we weren’t “good enough” for a white child. I refused to even consider those agencies. Then there were some agencies that left me feeling like it was just a business to them, some sort of “baby transaction.”

      We finally settled on an agency that we discovered through word of mouth. A gay coworker and his partner had adopted through them twice and described a very accepting environment that was focused on creating loving families. It was a small agency and we liked that aspect. They didn’t work with a large number of couples, but being smaller also meant fewer birthmothers coming to them. However, they seemed to have a pretty good success rate and had worked successfully with numerous same-sex couples. So we signed on!

      That was when things got complicated. We had built our house and now lived in a small rural town in Indiana, just across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky. But like many in our area, we worked and most often “played” in Louisville. Our adoption agency was located in Louisville as well. Adoption law is state-specific, with each state setting its own rules and requirements. Most states have “agreements” with other states that allow adoptions to occur across state lines, but these are very tightly controlled. Because we lived in Indiana, our home study and all pre-placement requirements had to be conducted by an Indiana agency and conform to Indiana rules. But because we were working with a Kentucky placement agency, we also had to meet Kentucky requirements and follow that state’s laws as well. Upon placement, we were not allowed to bring the baby across state lines (even just the few miles to our home) until the state of Kentucky authorized it—and they likely wouldn’t do that until they had full termination of parental rights. We were told this could take as long as ninety days. During that time, we could not live in anyone’s private residence that was not home study approved, so we would have to stay in a hotel!

      I have to admit, it was more than a little daunting to think about trying to care for a newborn baby in a hotel room for three months. But we pressed on with little choice, particularly since we hadn’t been able to find a placement agency in Indiana that we were comfortable with. So we began filling out forms and got our fingerprints taken multiple times. We were sent to three different government entities for checks and got letters of recommendation from what seemed like everyone going back to elementary school.

      Next, we found an agency to do all of the pre- and post-placement work required by Indiana. We drove two hours to Indianapolis on multiple occasions to take the agency’s training and complete the interviews СКАЧАТЬ