From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(36)

“That is the stupidest answer. It says nothing. Actually, it says more than nothing. It says you value ‘perfect.’ Whatever that is.”

“Can you just let me do this? I love you. If I want to say you’re perfect, I’ll say perfect.” He reached for a pen to start writing. “We’ll be picked because the mother will see we are in love.”

“Okay, yes, we’re in love. But can you also be specific?” I liked that we could still fall into married banter. It was the marker of normalcy in the wake of illness, and I never wanted it to end.

“What have you said about me?” He put the pen down and reached for my application form.

“That you’re one of the most intelligent people I know, that you write poetry, that you are generous, that your cooking brings people together, that you play blues on electric guitar, that you speak three languages, read five.” I played footsie with him under the table. “However, I did not write that you used to confuse Kevin Bacon with Val Kilmer.”

“You’ll never let that go.”

“Not as long as I have breath to talk.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to try to get pregnant? I don’t want you to miss that, if you really want that.” He momentarily put the papers aside, waiting to see what I would say.

It was possible; we had frozen sperm. The day he had been diagnosed, somehow this husband of mine had had the emotional and mental wherewithal required to leave an oncologist’s office, drive two miles toward the Pacific Ocean, and walk through the doors of a sperm bank. Neither of us had said a word on the drive, nor had we considered turning back. Instead, we had arrived unannounced at the reception desk; he handed the woman the doctor’s note and soon after he disappeared into the back rooms of the clinic. He was someone who was able to somehow keep an eye toward the future even in the face of a diagnosis, protecting what might be. When he emerged a half hour later, he said, “I don’t know if what just happened gives us a future, but I did the best I could.” And then we left. We had been paying a monthly fee on the possibility of conceiving biological offspring ever since.

“I don’t really want to be pregnant. Trust me. The only thing I don’t want to miss is being a mom.”

I had no interest in retrieving the sperm. And neither of us was interested in returning to examination rooms and lab tests. I didn’t want doctors in white coats to be the way we started a family. Plus Saro had gently confided to me one night that he wasn’t thrilled about the idea of rolling the dice on his own genetics, given the unknown nature of his cancer.

For the next few weeks, we filled out what felt like reams of forms, we got fingerprinted, we did the FBI background check, got police clearances, got interviewed, turned over our financial records. We crafted a “Dear Birth Mother” letter, promising “It is our commitment to raise our child in an open-minded home with all the warmth, compassion and love that is his or her birthright to have.”

We got letters of recommendations from friends. We wrote dossiers about each other, answering questions such as “Explain why you’re so excited to become parents” and “Describe your home.” We wrote about our dogs, our extended family, the local elementary school nearby. We acknowledged that this was a difficult decision for her to make, and we thanked the birth mother for giving us a chance to share who we were. And, most important, we got a letter from Saro’s doctors stating that his illness was in remission.

When that was done, there was more. I finished working on The Bernie Mac Show and went straight to the airport to travel to a workshop for preadoptive parents on caring for the needs of a newborn. In the class, I diapered and burped dolls with a focus on eye contact and the need for attachment. They told a room full of prospective parents that the beauty of adoption is that dads get to hold and feed the baby equally and that this increases the parent-child bond with the father. Then I got back onto a plane and returned to set to work on a show starring Andy Richter about a family with teenage quintuplets.

Saro and I even attended a workshop in L.A. on transracial adoption where we were given a certificate for challenging our thinking on “the issues of race,” “white privilege,” and “differences in the transracial experience for children of different races and ethnicities.” Though neither of us had direct experience with knowing how those issues intertwined with adoption, we left the workshop confident that as an interracial, intercultural couple, we were cool on the potential of the cross-cultural aspects of parenting—despite the fact that we had parents in two different countries who couldn’t even talk to each other.

We cleared out the small office at home in the hope that one day it would be filled with a crib, a rocker, and a changing table. Naturally, we tried out names for our future son or daughter. Boy, girl, it didn’t matter. Race didn’t matter. Combinations of races didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that we asked not to be shown to birth mothers known to carry twins. That was our one stipulation. I knew we could handle a lot, but I knew we couldn’t handle two kids at once. Then we waited.



* * *



I was in the middle of a pull-up on the Reformer in a Pilates class when I looked out the window of the studio near our house and saw Saro. His face was lit up and beaming with excitement.

“What the hell is that guy doing?” the instructor asked, releasing me from the rings on the machine as she watched Saro move hurriedly across the parking lot.