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Stories from Adoptive Parents

Fathering Adopted Children or Wrestling Ernest Hemingway

Erik Bergman, adoptive father of two daughters wrote this article for the Open Page, the newsletter of Open Adoption & Family Services.

Ernest Hemingway is reputed to have said that a man becomes a man once he does four things: plant a tree, fight a bull, write a novel and father a son. (He probably proclaimed this after he'd accomplished all four.) He sure penned some tough rules for others to follow, especially for men who fathered girls.

Not to mention those of us who adopted girls.

Men who put off having children as long as I did must face the macho assumptions of the Hemingways among us. At age 43 I had to admit that I'd never father any child, biologically speaking. My mid-life reproductive efforts were doomed to failure. My wife, Susan, and I had eagerly attended one reproductive seminar for "older couples," and were shocked to learn that older meant over 30. We were already a decade beyond that and counting. And we couldn't count backward.

Black humor helped: I joked that my sperm needed lifeguards to swim.

Infertility treatment held the promise, however faint, of helping me live up to the Hemingway standard. Is there any word that sounds worse than infertility, echoing as it does with the hollow fear of dying childless, unloved and full of regret? We were advised to do everything medically possible as soon as possible by one of the city's top fertility doctors. Nonsense. We weren't about to be injected, invaded and indebted for what amounted to a 7 percent chance of pregnancy.

We were ready for children, we were curious about adoption, and we finally become convinced by Open Adoption & Family Services.

For a guy like me, the keeper of my family's archives and genealogy, adopting wasn't easy to reconcile with my lifelong assumption of full-blood heirs. Adoption sounded a bit like grafting pinecones onto a cherry tree. I needed to rethink my past assumptions, even my prejudices. I needed to restate my desire: What I really wanted was to raise children--and bearing children and raising them are two separate things. The ability to do the first doesn't guarantee the desire to do the second.

I also had to get rid of my fantasies about some dream child who would never be and prepare for the realities of a specific child who might already be born.

When we had been trying to conceive, I'd resolved not to wish for a child of one gender over the other. I would raise a boy as I would raise a girl, teaching them the things my parents taught me to do: pitch a tent, sail a dinghy, look up a bird in the field guide. Families, I remembered, are about more than blood, they are about passing on stories and skills and memories. We pass on what we know and feel, not through our genes alone, but through our passions. A child's face, no matter how different from your own, can mirror a perfect reflection of your soul back to you.

At age 47, I can say I am fully at ease with the path my wife and I now travel with the two young sisters, Chrissy and Jamie, who became our daughters. I know there's something manly in that choice.

When 2 year-old Chrissy ran across her foster family's living room and threw her arms around me for the first time, I could not imagine loving any child more than I loved her. She called us "new mommydad," and we were overcome with the beauty of her accepting us. Eight months later, when her baby sister stared up at me, eyes and mouth round with questions that quickly stretched into laughter, that loving feeling hit me even more intensely.

To become a father through adoption is to open yourself to possibilities far beyond those laid down in anyone else's rule book.

Back to me vs. Hemingway. Tree, yes; bull, never; novel, some day; son, never. I'll settle for the two that I can achieve, plus my two daughters.