My theoretical water had better break soon or I’m going to Best Buy.
We are overdue. Long overdue. Three weeks overdue, in the biological sense. If one of us actually were pregnant, she’d be homicidal by now. It feels like the informational foster-to-adopt meeting we attended in early February happened before the fall of the Berlin wall. At this point, it’s completely out of our hands. We aced the interviews and home visits. Our references were top brass. Our fingerprints failed to unearth the one Bellatrix Lestrange moment in either of our pasts (a detention in middle school for talking out of turn, but I won’t say whose). We’ve been assured that we’re inching ever-closer to

Opening doors, come what may.
The server walked briskly away from our table having scribbled our orders onto his pad. The restaurant was airy, bright, filled with the kinds of people who wear rectangle glasses to read alternative newspapers. The friend across the table from me wasn’t one of my closest friends, but we had taken a few honors seminars together in college and liked similar music and dining atmospheres. I had a lot of these dinners in my early twenties, with hip entrees and conversations guided more by imagination than by anything we actually knew. Because this particular friend held none of my secrets, I thought her reaction, whatever it turned out to be, would impact me fa

The story of how love overcame fear: Ellen & Portia on Oprah.
In 2003, I found myself back in the closet. I had come out to my family and close friends in April 2002 (following years of tortured soul-searching), but at some point it became too overwhelming to identify as lesbian without being in a relationship. Maybe I’d heard one too many  anti-gay jokes on my dad’s side or something. I felt that if I were going to be the black sheep in the family, I’d better have some arm candy to prove it.           (As if who I am wasn’t enough to be who I am.) A cousin on that side of the family was getting married that August and I couldn’t attend one more wedding w

Maine.
They appeared in a single, crisp frame. Two moms, one a brunette with a tennis player ponytail, the other in a royal blue parka. Their buoyant little girl, gap-toothed and freckled, wiggled and fidgeted between them. They were in a polling place, or so I gathered from the small, curtained carrels and long tables with short pencils where small, permed ladies poured over lists. They had just heard the news. The light around them was palpable, thick like fabric. Love filled the space, the people — me. Then I woke up. I rubbed my eyes and made my way to the computer. My hand trembled as I shook the mouse awake. I contemplated which website woul

Mixed message at midnight.
One of the books I read recently about adoption describes the long period preceding adoption as an “emotional and administrative pregnancy”. Being in the middle of such a pregnancy now, replete with its forest of paperwork and psychosocial autopsies, it can be disorienting to expect a child without the typical gestational signposts, like inflated knockers or cravings for chocolate-covered pickles. Sometimes, in fact, there are entire days when I deny forget that we will soon be parents to