When do you decide to become a father? Is it the moment you hold your child in your arms for the first time? Is it when you sign the dotted line on adoption papers? Or are you a father the moment you try to decide if you even should be a father? As more and more gay couples begin the adventure of having children, struggles of how and when become more and more difficult. The Everyday Gay is honored to share Michael Van Kerckhove’s stunning essay on the trials and tribulations on deciding if parenting is in his cards.
“An Ernie Yes or No”
It’s summer 1994. I am 19 years old and home from college with my family. We are in the middle of watching Philadelphia. This is my first time seeing it since going to the theater with members of Triangle Chat, the Western Michigan University GLBT online forum. While watching, my twelve-year-old brother, David, calls from a friend’s house needing to be picked up. Mom makes me do it. I’m pissed at being yanked from reliving the uplifting emotion and absolute devastation of the film. I do not care about David. I care about Philadelphia. I stomp up the stairs to get my keys. Mom yells, “Someday, when you have kids….” And I scream back, “I don’t WANT kids!”
I’ve been out to my parents for less than a year, and to myself for less than two. While everyone’s cool, accepting, and loving and all, no one has said out loud that I would never have children. I say it now for the first time but realize I’ve known this since my middle brother, Steve, age 17, was in a car accident last summer. While his head’s all together, he’s in a wheelchair, probably for life. My parents have had to seriously readapt, and Mom especially has given up a lot. I so would not have the strength to deal with something like this. I’m too selfish.
* * * *
It’s February 1999. I am 24 years old and back on campus nearly two years after graduation. I am with my dear friend, Thea, seeing the Theatre Department’s production of Angels in America. In discussing life before the show, I say, “But if I ever did want a kid, I’d want you to be the mom.” And she tells me I could be the dad if she ever wanted one.
In June, Thea will email me with the news that she’s pregnant. I’ll be cool and all, but also jealous. I’ll feel cheated from something that was never really going to happen anyway. She will have Elliot, making her my first good friend with a kid. She will marry his father, another college friend. I will first meet Elliot when returning to Chicago from Christmas when he’s just starting to walk. I will bounce him on my knee, my initiation into uncle-hood, a destiny I am completely at peace with.
* * * *
It’s 1974, and I am fresh and new. Mom and Dad are really excited about me—and realize just how much a child changes their lives. Up until now, they could pick up and go as they pleased. But after a short while, only Dad picks up and goes as he pleases—and Mom stays home. I am supposed to be the ultimate thing in Mom’s life, but am a royal pain. I cry and fuss and I never give her a minute to herself.
Mom wishes I didn’t exist.
Later, Dad will tell her that he knows he should never have been the father of another child after me. But that he knew she could never accept that. So they try again, hoping for the girl Mom wants. Enter my brother Steve.
I’m probably not supposed to know all this. But, well, Mom left her words behind—and I found them.
* * * *
It’s 2007. I am 33 years old, and my husband, Ernie, and I watch The Learning Channel’s John & Kate Plus Eight about a family with twin girls and sextuplets—three girls and three boys, the end result of fertility treatment. John is Asian and Kate Caucasian and the children are adorable. Our favorite is Aaden, the inquisitive one with glasses. In this particular episode, John must decide whether he will work over the weekend, or go camping with his brother-in-law. Either way, Kate will be home alone with the kids. Ernie turns to me and says, “You would do that! You would leave me all alone with eight kids!” He twaps me on the shoulder and we laugh. I love when he blames me for things that will never happen. Even if there is a part of me that would want to leave him with the kids. Maybe a part that comes from my dad, even though it’s not really fair to blame him.
Later, we will go online to look up Indiana foster programs and find 9-year-old Christopher, who wears thin framed glasses like mine and likes reading Harry Potter. We mentally redecorate the guest room upstairs.
* * * *
It’s August 1981. I am 6 years old. My brother David and his twin are born. After an easy labor, David arrives with some difficulty via natural childbirth. But things go wrong for the second delivery. The doctor starts to put my mother out, her last thought being, “Will I feel the scalpel?” The next thing she remembers is coming out of the anesthesia and my dad saying, “It’s a boy! It’s a boy!” Mom doesn’t understand at first—then realizes she is the mother of four boys. “I don’t have a daughter,” she thinks. “And I never will. But I don’t feel bad.” Mark is underweight, breech, and not breathing when he is born—his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. The joke is that David wrapped it around him on his way out.
My mother marvels at Mark’s fight to live and feels he has a special role to play
on this earth. She looks forward to watching him grow.
* * * *
It’s winter 2008. I am 33 years old. Steve calls to tell me that Alison, Mark’s pregnant wife, has taken a fall and landed on her stomach. The placenta tore and there are blood clots. But our nephew Will is okay enough it seems. I call Mark. They are at the hospital. Will’s heart rate is fine. The next ten weeks will be crucial. I am scared. Will, like his father, is born by C-Section, but seven weeks early. His first photo is sent to my tiny cell phone. I can barely make him out beneath the tubes. We buy him pajamas that say “Captain Heartbreaker.”
* * * *
It’s April 2011. I am 36 years old. Ernie and I are in Saint Louis for my cousin’s wedding. Will runs toward me, down the wheelchair ramp at the side of the church. He is all smiles and laughter and energy. He hits my open hands and I lift him up, forgetting how so small and fragile he was and how he almost didn’t make it to this moment. I haven’t seen him in over a year. What would it be like to have these moments every day? Are they really worth the meltdowns, worrying, and poop?
At the reception, I will sweep the room and feel at peace with my place in the middle of the our family timeline, with Will on one end and my 88-year-old grandmother on the other.
The next day, Will and I watch highway traffic from the hotel window. I will ask him, “Are you excited about Ben?” “Yeah,” he answers. “Are you excited about being a big brother?” “Yeah.” “Are you going to share your cars with Ben?” “Yeah.” Ben is born five days later far away in North Carolina, also by C-Section like his dad. He goes home three days after that, the same date as Will went home—and also Steve’s daughter, Morgan’s birthday.
* * * *
“So, kids….?” The somewhat loaded question that’s been tossed our way over several of these past ten years together. Well. Ernie would get pregnant if he could—“womb envy.” He would talk to it and play classical music to his belly. Better him than me. We half-joke about adopting an “ethnic baby.” José Nolan for a Hispanic boy with his last name. Tup-Tim Van Kerckhove for an Asian girl with mine. Or for a Royal Wedding theme, Pippa Nolan Van Kerckhove. Our car rides between here and home in Detroit are accompanied by serious or not baby name conversations. Shakespearean women top the list: Rosalind, Phoebe, Celia, Juliet. Greek playwrights do not: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides.
We watch the—now cancelled!—ABC Sunday night family drama, Brothers & Sisters, and like any self-respecting 30-something gay married couple, we follow the stories of gay brother Kevin and his husband Scotty. Their starting-a-family storylines see me looking straight ahead at the TV and Ernie saying, “Don’t think I don’t know you’re not looking at me.” After dealing with failed surrogacy issues and adoption red tape, they bring home their 9-year-old Olivia. While it’s not reality TV, and is accompanied by a feel-good singer-songwriter score, it’s closer to us than anything else we watch while clinking wedding gift wineglasses from our couch.
Spoiler Alert: a twist in the surrogacy plot brings a baby boy to the house of Kevin, Scotty, and Olivia. Scotty is the biological father, but Kevin feels just as much his dad even though he feared he wouldn’t. While my college friend Thea has her own family now, we still have a handful of both straight and gay women who have in varying degrees of seriousness offered to be the mother of our child. So, to adopt or go bio? There is a part of me that’s like If we’re going to do it, then let’s do it. And if we’re going to do it, then I want cede to my natural instinct to be the biological father and watch to see which ancestral quirks and demons it will inherit. But while my brothers have given us a niece and two nephews to carry on my name and bloodline, the Nolans are about at the end of theirs. And while I don’t imagine I’d feel this huge disconnect between myself and the child, I guess I won’t know what gamut of emotions and jealousies I’d feel until we get there.
Will we get there? That is the question. In a moment of pure vulnerability, Ernie asks, “We’re never going to have a baby, are we?” Later, a more practical Ernie will ask, “If we had the means, could we have a kid?” And before I answer, he will say, “I want an ‘Ernie Yes or No’ not a ‘Michael Yes or No.” With its hemming and hawing and modifiers of We can’t afford it, we don’t have the room, would a child replace working toward my art? Do I really want to deal with other parents and all their…opinions? Am I still young enough to be considered a “Hot Dad”?
So. Yes. An Ernie Yes, disregarding all the “I don’t knows” I’ve ever uttered. Knowing that while I may not need a child to fulfill my life, if we do get there, I will embrace and be inspired by the experience. I will wrestle with my demons—and those of the generations before me. I will attempt to help raise the child to not be an asshole, and I will be the kind of parent who I’d want to deal with myself. I too will get over any feelings of wishing the child didn’t exist.
* * * *
What calms all my doubts and fears is this: It’s 2003. I am 28 years old. Night. Lying in bed with Ernie in his studio apartment. He says, “You’d make a great dad.” And I cry—because no one has ever said this out loud either.
Michael Van Kerckhove is a writer and performer living in Chicago. You can find more of his amazing work, here.
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