Two gay men in a loving and committed relationship adopt an unborn child.  They are present at the delivery.  One giggles nervously as he cuts the umbilical cord; the other is thrilled to be the first to hold their beautiful, perfect baby girl in his arms.  The more passive, more nurturing partner, the one who has lightened his work load, earned the least money, cooked the meals, who will get up in the middle of the night to heat the bottle with the simulated real-feel  nipple and who has an irrepressible desire to wear four inch heels with ankle straps will be, for want of a better word, the mother. The more aggressive, more rational, less emotional, higher wage earner who knows exactly how many home runs Roger Maris hit in the 1967 series at  Ebits field is  the Dad   Of course, the opposite may also be true.  Which leads me to pop another alternative life style question: If you have two Daddies what do you call them?   Daddy 1 and Daddy 2?   Daddy and Papa?   Daddy and Mary?  Or perhaps you skirt the issue entirely and call them by their first names.  Larry and Robert.  Paul and Michael.  Antonio and Bruce.     Or do you revert to another language, or a lesser-known term of endearment.  Like Daddy and Pere or Daddy and Abba, or as in the case of Mark and Anthrop, Poppy, Poppy being a Scandinavian endearment for Daddy.  Anthrop was Scandinavian and Mark, the only guy from the old gang on Cabrini boulevard to yearly earn seven figures.  But why have these questions, with their decidedly un-PC and prejudicial bile, come to mind in the first place?   Here’s why   Because for five endlessly miserable years,   I was hopelessly, endlessly and blindly in love with Mark.   Mark Braverman.  The Daddy.

I wanted to grow old with Mark Braverman, marry him, have his children.   The fact that I was already old, 15 years older than Mark, and already married with 2 children never entered my mind.  Or if it did, it didn’t stay.  They talk about hot flashes, depression, and lack of vaginal lubrication accompanying menopause.  But not the fact that you can, and do go stark raving mad.

I feel in love with Mark the day we were cancelled.  We were sit-com writers.  Ha. Ha.   We’d worked so closely together.  He was yin to my yang.  His structure was impeccable, his humor light with depth.     I missed him.   I called.  I didn’t know what to do with myself.    He invited me to the gay film festival.  We’d kill some time together.  After my 4th gay film with Mark, I became totally unaccustomed to seeing men make love to women.   “ Oh my God, Ben Stiller is kissing Cameron Diaz?   What the hell is he thinking?  Forget that there’s  Something About Mary: Ben, don’t you see  that adorable boy with the tight   buns singing with the street band?.  For God’s sake, get a grip.”    So there I was, a 47 year old, unemployed, , married-with- children fag hag.  “Ladies and Gentlemen of the academy, thank-you, from the bottom of my heart for this truly unexpected honor.  I would not be standing here without the support of my loving parents, Michael and Minnie who always assured me that I was one slice short of a sandwich, my tireless agent, Matt Gross, he should only drop dead, and my devoted, husband Roy who everyday shares my deep disappointment in life and the painful, excruciating boredom of our half-dead relationship” Mark and I went to the Opera, I listened to Wagner while my husband stayed home and watched boxing.  Mark and I ordered arrugla and prawn salad at Ivy at the Shore and Osso Bucco at Orso’s while my family got Chow Men and watery egg drops from Wang Sop’s take- out on Venice Boulevard.  Mark and I shopped at William Sonoma for his dream stainless steel pasta maker with a rigatoni attachment, while I bought cheap, pseudo Tupperware for my meatloaf leftovers at Big Lots.   I didn’t care.  I was out of my mind with unrequited love.  I did everything I could to seduce Mark Braverman.   Brought him my home- made, free range chicken soup when he had a sniffle, washed the dirty dishes in his sink, picked up his dry cleaning, drove him to the airport, as well as many more mortifying, unmentionable things.  Even I, who will expose myself when given the slightest opportunity, can’t tell you the gory details.  Just let’s say that he was totally immune to cleavage. And then Mark met Anthorp.   He liked Antwerp better than he did me.   Much better.   I knew it. 

I spent my days crying and writing my morning pages for the Artist’s Way. “  The freeways, spread like huge vericose veins across Los Angeles as a thick smog of darkness seeped into my  heart."   My husband, the gentle father of my own dear, minimally-medicated children, kept asking me what was wrong.  I told him.  He didn’t even flinch.   He loved me.  He knew me.   It would pass.   It didn’t.
Mark stopped calling.  He and Anthrop moved in together.   Mark became an executive producer, my agent dropped me.   Mark and Anthrop bought a Henry Moorish architectural house in the Hollywood Hills, smartly appointed with massive double pain windows in muted designer colors.  Mauve and Celery.  They invited me to dinner.   Anthorp could not only take it in the ass, he could cook.  Whoops.  Sorry.   They held hands; they kissed across the table.   I had to look the other way.  We had rigatoni tossed with pine nuts and guess what? …A wonderful surprise! .  A birth mother who had chosen them over all other applicants, they were going to adopt.   It was their dream come true   Would I be the godmother?   Fuck them.   They were having my dream baby.   Mine and Mark’s.

Kate was beautiful.  Perfect.  The best dressed little baby girl ever with hand made Mongolian angora  booties to die for.   Two nannies, a day and night one.  Her own suite. Baby Einstein everything,   Okay.  She didn’t have a Mommy. But she had Consuela and Inez. She was learning, Dutch, Spanish and English.   Anthorp and Mark changed her diapers, wiped her little pudendum clean with recycled hypo allergenic handy-wipes, sang her soft lullabies, worried that even a little sneeze might mean she was getting sick and took off early from work when she did. They loved her mightily.   But I knew.  Knew that that someday, somehow, she’d look at them with those enormous, innocent brown eyes and ask,” How come I have a snatch and you don’t? .”  What’s wrong with my wee wee?    And Popie, where, where  are your titties? ”    I had a wicked desire to nurse her.  I really might have had I not long since gone dry.  Revenge of the real XX chromosomes. 

And who was going to tell Kate that a woman’s body was amazingly beautiful and precious, sacred and made for deep pleasure? .    That she was a goddess, a heady and fecund mix of earth and spirit.   Who would kiss when she got her first period and say, “ Congratulations my darling, now you are a woman.”   And how on God’s earth would she ever know that there was a difference between a vaginal and clitoral organism, and that given the proper and considerate manipulation, she could look forward to both?.  Well, maybe they’d send her to an All Girls’ High School.   Yeah.  That could work. 

Two years pass.  Kate’s first real sentence?  “ Girls can do anything” Right, sweetie.  Look again.   Kate is taking ballet,  Anthorp converts and takes her to Mommy and Me Hebrew School,  She knows her Aleph from her Bate and Gimmel and Dalled and so does Anthorp.   They cover red velvet squares with sprinkles and stars and Voila!  Placemats for Passover.    Surely they would pay.   Surely somehow, sometime, they’d find that no matter how much love and time and care they gave, a Daddy could not be a Mommy.   Not the earth’s nurturer, not the great compromiser whose cycles coincided with the pace of the moon.  By Hera, no!

But Kate and I had something in common; she was utterly and totally Daddy’s girl.  She loved Mark furiously and markedly more than Anthorp.  When Mark was in the room, Anthorp did not exist.   Anthorp grew glum, haggard.   He was the disciplinarian, the bad cop, Kate had to go to bed on time, not eat cookies before dinner and pick up her toys.   Mark spoiled her.  Gave into her every wish.   Laughed with her at old Roadrunner cartoons.     “That big Silly is  falling off the ledge, oh no! !”   Read her “Run Away Bunny” and” Where the Night Things Are.”   They had quality time together.  Anthorp was the workhorse, Mark the thoroughbred.    The two Daddies fought.   They started couples therapy.     Anthorp cut his workload, and only went into the office twice a week:  then his kitchen-designing firm had to let him go.   Mark’s pilot got picked up for thirteen episodes; they were on the fall schedule.  A hit.   Anthorp started to drink too much expensive wine with diner and developed a daily passion for apple Martinis.   Mark stayed at the studio well into the night.    Antwerp stopped talking and started whining, “ When are you coming home honey, I can’t do everything/” The worm had turned. Popie was a desperate housewife.

Did their not so unique form of alternative suffering make me happy?  You bet it did.  But not for long.  Why?  Because I’d fallen out of love with Mark.  It left me as suddenly as it came.  Just like that.  His every move no longer charmed.   His natural grace no longer left me aching.   His enormous vocabulary and computer chip brain stopped filling me with nostalgia for all things New York. His giggle was high, his nose pinched and angular, and he was terrified of spoiled milk.  Mark Braverman was downright faggy.    My own husband started to look good me, even though he was overloaded with testosterone and would never know a Sonya Rikel from a Betsey Johnson.  My man, and I use that word proudly, was strong, silent, supportive and a loving father to my two children who were beginning to wonder why Mommy hadn’t cooked dinner for the last two years.   And then Anthorp and Kate dropped in for a visit.

Something was terribly terribly  wrong.

Anthrop was so not the drop- in type.  He scheduled.  “ How are you on Thursday, the 26th ad 6:43?”   So you can imagine my surprise when I opened the back door to my kitchen and there they were, looking very sheepish and a little lost.  They JUST happened to be in my neighborhood and Kate asked if she could stop by and play with Charlie, our doggie    Kate loved doggies and they couldn’t have one because bamboo flooring tends to retain urine stains.   Could she also dig in our garden for a while and maybe plant a sunflower seed?   She’d brought her pail and shovel.  

Kate and Charlie bounded out into our fully fenced backyard  while Anthorp sat down at my dining room table, but not before he asked for a paper towel to wipe off a thin patina of oatmeal that someone had deposited during breakfast, and started to cry.   Kate didn’t love him.  When he tried to hug her , she’d  push him off.  She refused to let him give her a bath, or to even kiss her goodnight.  When he sang her his favorite lullaby, she covered her head with her pillow and screamed.   She wouldn’t wear the clothes he had chosen, or the meals he had cooked.   All she ever wanted was her Daddy.  Her Daddy, her Daddy, her Daddy! .Anthorp had given up everything that had made him the man he was and he didn’t know himself anymore.  He no longer had a career, only a household allowance.   Mark’s daily suggestions for “ better bonding with Kate” made him feel more inadequate and useless.    What was a Popie to do?    I knew.  I knew.  But there are secrets Mr. Gay Daddy, there are secrets. 

I told him, Not because I wanted to but because I had to.   We were, in our way, sisters.   “Lighten up” Anthorp.   “ Let loose, “ wallow in the mud,  play.”    “ What mud?  “We don’t have any mud”  “Then make some Anthorp, get funky, and forget everything, everything in the world except being together.  Only you, your daughter and the primordial ooze.  Let loose. Love is messy.  You can do it Anthorp.

Did it work?   I think it helped.   I do.  Last time I saw Anthorp and Kate together, they were playing hide and seek.  Anthorp running after Kate and Kate screaming with delight, trying to get away.  He caught her, pinned her down as she flayed her arms and legs, let her escape.  She howled.

And then I got to thinking.   What if the great creative intelligence has changed its infinite mind?    What if a mother could become a father and a father a mother?    What if a few thousand years down the line, the XX and XY’s would join together and become a Z.   It could happen.  Biology could form a new destiny.   Maybe we are just seeing the tip, and I use that word loosely, of the evolutionary iceberg.   And maybe some of us have come to know and understand that all you need is love, and others won’t or can’t and never will.   Only time would decide.    And who really knows how or why those Neanderthals disappeared so very long ago .  “ Hey Guys, now that we’re standing upright and know how to light a fire, why don’t we stop throwing stones at each other and just use our words.?”    “ Ugh!  No way!  Forgettabout it!  Take that!    I like to grunt!

Synonyms for father according to J.I.  Rodale, “over 1 million copies sold:” 
“Procreator, begetter, maker, creator, author, originator, generator,  prime mover, founder, inventor, forerunner, model, exemplar, to care for, look after, support.

Hey. I can do that.