I think that these challenges Lorrie and I faced together made me better able to accept the cards I’ve been dealt —and to play them with all the resources at my disposal. Early in our marriage, Lorrie and I were dealt the challenge of infertility.
A year or so after we got married, Lorrie and I began planning to have a family. We spent a year trying to conceive, without success, and then went to a fertility specialist. For six months, Lorrie took Clomid to induce ovulation. Like many women on that drug, she gained weight, and that was troubling for her. She’d been in good shape before starting on the medication, and here, for reasons beyond her control, she just kept getting heavier. She put on thirty-five pounds.
One day she and I were in the car and she turned to me and said, “You never make a comment about how I look or about my weight.” My reply came naturally to me—I just said what I felt—but it meant a lot to Lorrie. I told her: “You don’t get it, do you? I love you for what’s on the inside.”
“That’s what every woman wants to hear,” she said, and she meant it.
Sometimes I get things right.
We kept trying to conceive, but I was off on trips a lot, which made it hard for Lorrie and me to connect at the appropriate moment. A couple of times, she flew to the city where I was staying on a layover so we wouldn’t “waste” a thirty-day cycle. It wasn’t exactly romantic. We were focused and a bit tense. We were on a mission.
The Clomid didn’t work, so eventually we turned to in vitro fertilization. The cost was $15,000—not covered by insurance—and we were told the success rate was about 15 percent. Lorrie needed to endure shots at 2 A.M. and 2 P.M., and when I was home, I’d give them to her. When I wasn’t home, she gave them to herself.
These were not easy times for Lorrie. “I feel like my body has betrayed me,” she’d say. “My body won’t do the one thing it was designed to do, the one thing that separates one gender from the other.” We’d been raising guide dogs for the blind, and a couple of the dogs were pregnant at the time. “It seems like everyone and every animal I meet is pregnant,” Lorrie would tell me. “Everyone except me.” I knew she felt deeply wounded, but I didn’t fully know how to help her.
I was the one who had to tell Lorrie that the in vitro effort hadn’t worked. She took one look at me and she knew. I had what she later described as a completely flat expression on my face.
I felt devastated for myself, but even more so for Lorrie. All I could say to her was: “Honey, I’m so sorry.” We hugged each other and she cried for a while. I tried to be stoic for her, but I was hurting, too.
We went back to the doctor, who told us we were both still relatively young—I was thirty-nine and Lorrie was thirty-one—and we should consider trying again.
Lorrie had gotten to know another woman who was a patient at the clinic, and on the day Lorrie learned she wasn’t pregnant, that woman was thrilled to learn she was. But then, a few days later, the woman was told that actually her pregnancy hadn’t taken. It was possibly more devastating to have such high hopes dashed. When Lorrie heard this news, she decided she’d had enough.
“What’s our main goal?” she asked me, and then she answered. “Our goal isn’t for me to be pregnant. Our goal is to have a family. And there are other ways we can do that.”
Before she met me, Lorrie had been a longtime Big Brothers Big Sisters volunteer. She saw that as both a duty and a labor of love. She began mentoring her “little sister” when she was twenty-six and the girl was five. Now Lorrie is fifty and her little sister, Sara Diskin, is twenty-nine, and they’re still close. And so when Lorrie was unable to get pregnant, she was able to frame our predicament very clearly. “I’ve known for a long time,” she told me, “that the beauty of a relationship is not biology. I’m ready to move on.”
And so we decided we’d adopt.
Trying to adopt a baby was also an arduous journey—a long, difficult, emotional, expensive roller coaster— and we learned a lot about ourselves in the process.
Lorrie vowed to approach the adoption search as a full-time job. It took effort to educate ourselves about a process that was not well defined. There were many avenues. Which ones would pay off? Lorrie tried to have a business plan, but adoptions don’t always proceed logically.
The fortunes of adoptive parents vary according to the wishes of birth parents. Their names are buried deep on waiting lists, while their files get dissected at agencies by people who don’t really know them. There’s no clear order to the process.
Lorrie was very emotional through all of it, and my attempts at a workmanlike approach didn’t always help. “You don’t know how to console me,” she told me at one point. “It’s outside your parameters. You’re unable to feel things the way I feel them.”
Lorrie struggled with all the paperwork we had to file, and the fact that we had to “qualify” to be adoptive parents. It was hard for her. Throughout her infertility treatments, she was poked and prodded. She had surrendered her body in an effort to find her way to parenthood. She had shown her commitment. Now she was being asked to find friends who’d vouch for whether or not she could handle being a parent. It felt almost like an insult.
Lorrie and I handled all the paperwork very differently. One day we exchanged our answers to a set of questions. I had to tell Lorrie: “You’re overthinking this. Just answer the simple question with a direct answer.” She was grateful when I told her that. It allowed her to temper some of her anxiety about the process. She didn’t owe them her life story. She owed them basic answers to their questions.
We met with several sets of birth parents over the months that followed, hoping they’d select us. That was a hard process, too. Lorrie would often be excited after a meeting, certain that we’d get the nod. I tried to be logical and analytical. “Yes, that birth mother said a lot of nice things about us,” I’d tell Lorrie, “but think about what she didn’t say.” Lorrie said I was raining on her parade, but I felt we had to look at everything realistically or we’d set ourselves up for wave upon wave of disappointments.
We met with a variety of birth parents during our search. And then, on December 1, 1992, we flew down to San Diego to meet a woman who was seven months pregnant. The birth father was there, too.
The couple asked us about our lives, our dreams for the child we hoped to someday raise, my schedule as a pilot, everything. They were honest and clear-eyed as we spoke, and so were we. Not long after that, we got word: They had selected us to be the adoptive parents.
At 2 A.M. on January 19, 1993, we got a call that the birth mother was in the delivery room, and we should prepare to fly down to San Diego to pick up our new baby. Lorrie was too excited to sleep. As for me, the realist, I knew that I’d be a better father in the morning if I got some sleep. So I went back to bed. Lorrie couldn’t believe how I could sleep at a time like this. She stayed up, sitting by the phone, waiting.
Kate was born at 4 A.M., and we flew to San Diego just after sunrise. We brought a car seat with us because we’d need it in the rental car once we picked up the baby. Lorrie and I felt a little self-conscious walking through the airport with that empty car seat. Were people looking at us, wondering where our baby was?
When we arrived at the hospital, we went straight to the nursery and saw Kate for the first time; it was an overwhelming moment. I fell in love with her the second I saw her.
Later, a nurse was holding Kate. “Would the mother like to hold the baby?” the nurse asked. The birth mother pointed to Lorrie and said, “She’s the mother.” Lorrie was handed Kate.
Eventually, Lorrie had to use the bathroom, and while she was gone, Kate needed to have her diaper changed. I was proud to be the first of us to get to do that.
Early that afternoon, hospital staffers told us we were free to take Kate and go. Lorrie wanted to say good- bye to the birth mother. “What can you say to a woman who has given you this kind of gift?” she wondered. “I don’t think there are any words.”
Both of us considered the birth parents to be incredibly courageous people. They knew that for whatever reason—their age, circumstances, finances—they couldn’t raise their child. And so they had made a very hard yet loving choice. They had turned their wrenching dilemma into a gift.
Lorrie left the baby with me in the nursery—she thought it would be too hard for the birth mother to see Kate one last time—and she went into the birth mother’s hospital room. As she offered a simple thank-you, she saw a single tear running down the birth mother’s face.
“Just be good to her,” the birth mother said.
It was an overwhelming moment for both of them.
Hospital protocol requires new mothers to leave the hospital in a wheelchair. Lorrie tried to explain that she
