{Originally Published on Production, Not Reproduction}

I haven’t said anything about my daughter’s first (birth) dad in awhile. Truthfully, I’ve not known how to comfortably approach it here. I am sorting through conflicting thoughts and feelings about him. It is hard to know what is appropriate to share.

After a chance meeting at a pizza place with an adoption agency social worker, he did go into the office to meet with her before Firefly was born. It was…less than positive. He had already made clear that he felt no obligation toward Beth (our daughter’s first mom), and as of now he apparently feels no obligation toward his daughter either. Nobody has heard from him since.

My husband and I have never spoken with him. We’ve never even seen a picture of him. We know his name and his age and some sketchy medical history. My amateur sleuthing hasn’t turned up any online presence for him, so I can’t peek at his life through Myspace or Facebook. He is a complete mystery to me. Yet he is one-half of my daughter’s genetic heritage.

This is uncharted territory for our family. Our son’s first dad, Ray, has been around from the beginning. It’s easy to include him in what we say to Puppy: “Kelly and Ray made you, they took care of you, they decided we would be parents to you. You have his smile, his hair, his eyes.” Ray underscores it all through his continued presence in Puppy’s life. I feel like Firefly’s story thus far has a glaringly missing player. What do I say about a man who chooses to ignore her? What do I say about a man about whom I know next to nothing?

One day before Firefly’s birth I sat down with Beth and laid how we had approached our relationship with Puppy’s first parents. Our priority has always been maintaining healthy relationships for Puppy. So our separate relationships with Kelly and Ray are our business and their relationship with each other is their business–we don’t take sides when there is friction between them and Puppy doesn’t get put in the middle of anything. I told Beth that we knew Firefly’s dad hadn’t done right by her. That we didn’t want her to think that us wanting a relationship with him meant we condoned that or didn’t care about it. Yet none of that changed the fact that Firefly still deserved to know him. The only thing we would expect from her would be to not to stand in the way if he ever started up a relationship with us.

It’s not that cut and dried, of course. It’s not like we can truly separate everyone into their own corners of our life. Beth is the one who is becoming our friend, who vulnerably opened up her life to us–and who received us likewise. She’s shown her commitment to this budding open adoption in myriad ways. Her opinions matter to us, including her opinions on Firefly’s dad…

{Originally Published on Lizzie’s Home}

When I was nineteen years old, I found myself taking a front-row seat in an honest-to-God, wish-I-could-bottle-that-feeling miracle.

After a twenty-eight hour labour, an ugly, red, scrawny mess of arms and legs was twisted from my body, four weeks before his due date. The conehead my son sported from his prolonged journey down the birth canal was very pronounced and truly awesome to behold. His Apgar scores were low. He was whisked away for some oxygen.

At that point, I didn’t care where he went, as long as he was being cared for appropriately and I could cover up the bits of my person that in any other circumstance would never be displayed. It is amazing how the most prudish of women can become the most liberal when in the throes of childbirth. There were bits of me that were irreversibly altered by the birthing process but in the end those particular battle scars would fade, and new ones would take their place.

On the second day after his birth, J turned an alarming shade of buttercup yellow which had the doctors scrambling for the big scary humidicrib with fancy lights and cords. You know, the type with holes in the side where distraught parents are permitted to insert only their hands to stroke babies they should, by rights, be cradling in their arms.

My little six-pound-nothing imp modelled a hastily cut blindfold of black vinyl almost every moment of the first week of his life. We were allowed to remove him from the phototherapy unit for feedings and changes only. The rest of the time he was to lay naked and sunbathing, save for his Zorro mask, under special lights designed to speed up the expulsion of the bilirubin from his blood. There’s a reason why babies are meant to be covered up. Meconium poops are legendary, and more so for babies undergoing phototherapy…

{Originally published on Sleep Deprivation Ninja}

Life is hard. I’m not going to lie to you, baby girl. Someday things are going to be really difficult. I can’t stop that. All I can do is give you the ninja skills necessary to take on some of the challenges you will face. But you will face challenges that even the greatest ninja skills cannot overcome.

I think about these things when you reach up and wrap your little arms around my neck, squeezing me out the biggest baby-bear hug you can muster. I know you are really trying to eat my neck but I like to think of it as a big hug. I could hug you all day. And I think of this also when I hear of bad things happening–things that someday soon, you will have to face.

Bad things are happening as I write this. People are dying. People are killing other people. It’s crazy. It’s just madness. I can’t explain it to you; All I can say is that it is. These things happen.

{Originally Published on The Playpen}

You know, there are a lot of articles, resources and links these days for expectant mothers, new mothers, old mothers, you name it. One of the things I realized when my daughter, Frankie, was born eight weeks prematurely was that there weren’t many resources available to dads. Even the books for new dads are all about how to keep your wife happy. What’s the deal with that?

I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t know (still don’t know, come to think of it) the first thing about parenting. This is not a “how to” article by any stretch of the imagination. Its simply me, a young dad, looking to get some thoughts out there and maybe provide a little comic relief to other dads at the same time.

As I mentioned, my daughter was (is) a preemie. And she was little….real little. My wife had an emergency C-section after some difficulties with her pregnancy. Lets start there. Going through that process was no picnic. Getting your thoughts in order is virtually impossible. “What if my kid isn’t okay?” “What if something happens to my wife?” “How come that doctor over there looks unsure of himself?” “I didn’t paint the nursery yet!” “There’s a LOT of equipment in here…this is going to cost a TON.”

So you’re dealing with that side of things while at the same time trying to provide reassurance to Mom who, yes its true, is freaking out worse than you. Not an easy situation. As I was sorting all that out, and as I was sitting in the operating room, I made the biggest mistake of my life.

“Do you want to see your new daughter?”, my wife’s doctor asked me, apparently completely unaware that I was about two seconds shy of a heart attack.

“YEAH,” I said, and stood up from my stool, eagerly peering over the sheet that was placed over my wife’s mid-section.

{Originally published by ConverseMomma on Ordinary Art.}

When I was having the first of three miscarriages, sitting on the couch stuffing ice cream in my mouth, and sobbing at all the EPT commercials on television, a bloody maxi pad tucked between my legs, I got a phone call from someone close to me. She was pregnant, young, scared, and about to have an abortion. She wanted me to console her. She wanted me to wrap my arms around her and rock away the regret. I remember wanting to slap her. Instead, I spoke calmly through clenched teeth. I told her it was going to be okay, assured her that I loved her, even as I felt the soft spots of my heart, that once she had claimed, hardening against the impact. It was not fair of her, of me, of circumstance. But, this is how it was.

Two miscarriages, an oncologist office, and a handful of “experts” later, they told me I would never be a mother, not in the traditional sense that I had always imagined when I was young and reckless with the way I used my body. Instead, I pinned my hopes to adoption, on an 18 year-old girl. She wore a tiny bikini the weekend that we met, and swam beside me in the hotel pool. She just knew she could never have an abortion, not with all those couples eager and waiting. She wanted, instead, to give a gift. I thought about her capacity for bravery, and all I could do was hug her, go back to my hotel room, and cry.

When my son was born, and the nurses called me Mommy, the woman who carried him for nine months and pushed him out into this world, lay weary in her bed beside us. The beginnings of her loss were already creeping across the hospital room. I just could not see it. I did not think her choice was anything but noble, me being on the receiving end of it. We celebrated with popsicles sticks that left our fingers sticky and blue, and I tried not to see the way her mother had to hold her up, her unsure legs too shaky for the long walk to the parking lot, unassisted. In the months that went by, her grief only grew. It became something large and imposing, threatening the fragile bonds that we had established all those months that she had been convinced the choice would be an easy one, but turned out never to be. My son is a gift she gave me, but at what cost to herself? That is the question left unanswered between us.

I did not want to acknowledge the loss. I just wanted the simple celebration that I thought should be my right as a new mother. For a long time, I was so thankful for my son’s birthmother’s decision that every time I heard the word abortion I considered it a slight against the blonde-haired child that I held in my arms, and sang lullabies to against the backdrop of silence, in the nursery with the walls I had painted in blue. I felt abortion was a kick straight to the empty damaged uterus that I carried inside my body. How could a woman be selfish enough to have an abortion when adoption was an alternative, when couples waited years to fill their homes with the pitter patter of little feet, when my son was alive and growing strong because of his birthmother’s choice?