 |
 |
John Petersen and his partner, William Kinnane, enjoy spending time with friends’ children as they wait to become parents themselves. (Courtesy photo)
|
|
|
| | |
| |
|
|
| | |
HOME > SOVO SCENE > FEATURE
By: MATT SCHAFER
COMMENTS |
| 
After seeing a sonogram of the baby they thought they would raise, William Kinnane and John Petersen are preparing for this year's Father's Day with an empty nursery.
“Our agency tells you not to go ahead and put together a full nursery, and it’s a good thing they did because it would be so entirely depressing to have this fully stocked nursery and no baby to put in it,” Kinnane said. “We picked out a room and put up some child-friendly wallpaper and we have stroller a friend gave us, but that’s it.”
June 15, Father’s Day, will mark two years to the day since the Atlanta couple officially decided to adopt a child. After several close calls and one near miss, they have a library full of children's books waiting for a child.
“It’s definitely hard to see the stroller, but again, William is beyond the most positive person you could meet, and it’s absolutely going to happen,” Peterson said. “It might take a while, but eventually the right child will come into our lives.”
After four trips to Illinois to attend prenatal exams with their prospective birthmother, she stopped returning calls and emails. Neither Kinnane and Petersen nor their adoption agency know why she stopped talking, only that she did.
“Three of the appointments included sonograms, which she insisted that we take [copies of],” Kinnane said. “We actually ended up sending the sonogram printouts back to her after we officially 'unmatched.'”
The couple agrees that finding the right child will just take some time, which they fill by helping their families and friends.
“We definitely get our fair share of babysitting, or flying back to Omaha [to stay with family] or babysitting a friend’s baby,” Petersen said. “We’ve definitely been given the handoff on a lot of 2-year-olds, 3-year-olds and 4-years olds. We absolutely love it.”
There is no precise count of gay fathers in Atlanta, but anecdotal evidence suggests their ranks are growing. The 2000 Census counted 10,251 male same-sex partner households in Georgia, with 21.1 percent raising children. But those now-dated numbers omitted single fathers and those who don't live with their children.
Meanwhile, same-sex parenting groups in Atlanta report an increase in gay fathers seeking membership, especially gay men who became parents after coming out, rather than through a previous heterosexual relationship.
“In the last two years, it’s really kind of skyrocketed,” said Kathy Kelly, executive director of MEGA Family Project, a group for gay and lesbian families that now hosts some events specifically for gay dads.
She credits increased acceptance, as well as increased visibility.
“I think what’s happened is that gay men started seeing other men with children," Kelly said. "In the past, they didn’t see that for themselves because they didn’t see any men with children. Now when you go through Piedmont Park, you see men with babies.”
Increased visibility is what led Atlanta attorneys Robert J. Waddell Jr. and Skip Smith to adopt their now 7-month-old son.
“We’d been together 15 years, and we wanted to be parents for a long time of that, and as the world opened up, we became aware that we could become parents,” Waddell said. “Just seeing two dads walking with a baby in Lennox Mall … that really made it seem like an option for us,”
Waddell and Smith went through an open adoption agency, but their son found them through friends of friends.
“Our adoption came through word of mouth,” Waddell said. “We put our name out there as being interested in becoming parents, and it came to the attention of this young woman.”
Kinnane and Petersen hope similar networking will be the key to success for them. They have posted parts of their story on a blog, Myspace and Facebook in the hopes someone will know someone who needs to find a home for a child.
An estimated 10 percent of all open adoptions occur through word of mouth. During the process, a couple or single person essentially markets themselves to women with unwanted pregnancies. The birthmother decides with whom to place the child, and how much contact she would like with the family in the coming years.
Both Atlanta couples did exhaustive research before trying open adoptions, one of the most common ways that gay men are forming families.
Kelly would like to cut down ...
|
