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Stories from Adoptive Parents

Dad is Hooked on Baby Ben

Adoptive parent Mark Freeman writes about the outdoors for the Medford Mail Tribune. He wrote this column for his son's first Thanksgiving in 1997.

For years I've been happy celebrating Thanksgiving in the traditionally gluttonous manner.

I go steelhead fishing early, then eat myself into a coma during the second half of one football game. I wake up and stumble back into the kitchen for Round Two, sans steelhead.

There's nothing like banging a few steelhead and then pulling on a pair of very loose pants for an all-day feed to feel good about a Thursday.

Nothing except sharing all this with my new son. The new son has taught the new father how to pay a lot more attention to the thanks part of Thanksgiving.

His name is Ben, he's five months old and he's so young and perfect that I know my wife and I could never have made a better kid ourselves.

I say that that because Ben was adopted. And I say he was adopted and not is adopted because adoption is a one-time event, and not a communicable disease.

But the little guy is definitely infectious. He laughs and spits and drools and looks at me like he thinks I'm the greatest guy in the world. And there's not a steelhead tough enough or a turkey thigh tender enough to match that for a nanosecond today or any day.

Ben became our son at 9:36 a.m. Sept. 12, when a young girl named Sara took the child she gave birth to 11 weeks earlier and slipped him into my wife's arms and said simply, "Here."

It was in the lobby of some dank building in Vancouver, Wash. But at the moment, it felt like a temple.

This is what's called an "open adoption." No secrets. No lies. No garbage. Sara is Ben's birthmother. She lives in Vancouver, where Ben was born.

Sara is a remarkably strong young woman who realized she could or should not be a parent. So she got in touch with the adoption agency, then picked us from a batch of would-be parent profiles.

Then we met Sara and her boyfriend, Jason, the birth father. After they chose us, we chose them.

And we got Ben, then spent the weekend together in Vancouver, hanging out like cousins for some holiday. We'll exchange telephone calls, letters, pictures and visits like other families, forever. Everyone knows we're Ben's parents now, but they were his parents first.

The adoption is no less legal and no weaker than a traditional, no-one-knows-anything-about-anyone-else adoption. This way, Ben knows where he's from, why he's here. No secrets. No lies. No garbage.

Maybe not traditional, but nothing less than incredible.

I have always figured it would be incredible to become a dad when the time was right. We've planned on it since we got married on a day I didn't go steelhead fishing seven years ago.

Even had the names dialed in. Bennett or Margaret. But in my head, it was always Ben.

I'd always picture him as this bushy-eyelashed boy of 5, sitting next to me in my Jeep. I'd imagine these talks as we tow our driftboat upriver: He's choosing where we'll float, how we'll fish and where we'll stop for hot chocolate.

I'd be out on a story about Chinook fishing or releasing pheasants in the hills about Butte Falls and I'd imagine him catching the fish or pitching the birds skyward from their cages.

But after several frustrating years, I though Ben would never come. We'd still have these imaginary talks heading upriver, but he would never actually be. He had become my Pinocchio.

But all that is some fuzzy memory now, as blurry to me today as the fourth grade.

I'm a dad, and my job is to help Ben be the best Ben imaginable.

This is probably easier now than it would have been under a conventional relationship. Easier, maybe, because I think I appreciate and value him more now than if he had come to us as some early marital accident.

And he doesn't have to like everything I like to keep being appreciated. Hell, he can like dolls and math and even boys for all I care - just please, don't come home saying you want to play soccer.

But I'll skip steelheading for a soccer game if he does. Because Ben's my boy, I love him to death and I want to be there for him.

I'm not going to be one of those pathetic parents who tell everyone when he gets his third tooth, when he catches his first steelhead or ties his first fly.

He doesn't need any of that. It will be embarrassing enough being my son, let alone reading in the newspaper how his dirty diaper once had what appeared to be Abe Lincoln's silhouette on it.

But I'm too proud of him not to write about him once, and too thankful that he's here not to do it today.

Today is easily the best Thanksgiving I've ever had, and for all the right reasons.

Instead of pulling on my waders to go steelhead fishing, I'll give Ben his morning bath.

I'll eat lots less turkey than normal, too. It's hard to cut meat and pour gravy with an infant on your knee.

And Ben will take naps today. I'll just hold him and feel good about this Thursday.