The Kid

I am sooo glad to not be in a relationship with someone as funny and smarmy as Dan Savage. I think he doesn’t really have much of a choice to involve his partner’s faults in this. On the other hand, these qualities make for a great writer. This was a very entertaining read and a thoughtful perspective on what an private, open infant adoption can look like.
The Kid was recommended to me by some folks that I met that were beginning this process as the most useful book that they had come across. I laughed out loud sometimes, too…I think it is worth a read just for fun. It is also a real book about experience, based on feelings and individual experience not clinical facts. This is one of the few books that I have read on adoption where you can process and internalize the words, which means a deeper understanding.
As someone interested in adoption, there were a few gems that I took from my reading, as well.
Savage describes his own process of entering the adoption process. For many people, the process of adoption, and maybe particularly infant adoption the events that have led them to this decision are quite complex. Many folks have tried to have children themselves, maybe even had them and lost them. They also may have a sense of entitlement, being parents is a given. If there bodies functioned as they expected, they would have a baby. The process of adopting is a huge hassle that they should NOT have to go through. As Savage says, being gay, he should not even theoretically be able to have a baby and does not have this experience.
Later, Savage describes the panic that he and Terry experienced when reading on the internet about fetal alcohol syndrome. The information out there is pretty much a scare tactic to get mother’s to not drink. The mother of “the kid” was a gutter punk who drank beer regularly in the beginning of her pregnancy. When she found out she was pregnant, she quit.
When he and Terry were first chosen as the family to get her baby, they were so elated that they hadn’t really thought about the potential exposure of the baby. When they realized the kid was at risk for FAS they panicked and overwhelmed themselves with information. A friend calmed them down and gave them some perspective…their advice was don’t read about Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.
The other great thing that I got out of The Kid was that there may be an illusion of control with parenting, but with any kind, there really is none. With adoption, this is particularly true…a mother can change her mind…a family member can appear…there could be undisclosed information. With any parenthood, you will never know everything. There may be more of an illusion that you do, but it is really an exercise in patience and self-control and dancing with others to fill the bumps in the road to the future of this child as smoothly as possible.
My biggest regret about the book was that we don’t know more about The Kid after birth. What is there is a reality check about how one can be marginalized by living as an adoptive parent. Savage describes scenarios of people making assumptions about him and his kid. These include getting looked at or questioned as if he and Terry were kidnappers or people asking The Kid if he was going home to “mommy”.
I would absolutely recommend this book for anyone interested in adoption, humor writing or Dan Savage.