Clockwise: Jill, Allison, Elsie

Joyful at the news she was pregnant, Allison Dykes—vice president of the Emory Alumni Association—told her family, a few close friends, and then the president of Emory. If the briefing process seems confoundingly direct, consider the “daunting, deliberate decision making,” as Allison terms it, that led to the arrival of her baby. As a lesbian parent who wanted her partner to have full parental rights through adoption, the steps were many—certainly, far more than heterosexual couples usually experience. With a gorgeous, healthy baby girl as the payoff for the years of contemplation, planning, and research, one could easily write off the extra steps with a “who’s counting?” But someone really should.
 
Step One: Agreement

Allison—who is thirty-eight and has been with her partner, Jill, for six years—speaks of coming “late” to a decision about motherhood. As Allison relates, “I’ve always had a calling to be a mother. I have an amazing relationship with my own mother and wanted the same experience.” Yet when Allison and Jill first got together, she notes, “we were at opposite ends of the spectrum. She did not want to have a child, for a variety of reasons, and I did. Over the course of several years, I was more open to the idea of not having children because Jill was and is my priority. Somehow we met in the middle.” But the wolf at the door still was society writ large, even with all the assurances that loving families on both sides, supportive work environments, and an enlightened community in Atlanta provided. As Allison admits, “While I am confident about who I am, I am not so confident about a society that can make things very difficult. I couldn’t have done it without my family, Jill’s family, Emory, and a city in which there is this amazing network of gay parents.”
 
Step Two: Conception

Forget candles and a Johnny Mathis CD. Picture instead two exhausted women glued to a computer screen. Allison is wont to quote a friend of hers, who often reminded her, “The decision to have a child is not rational. If it were, no one would.” Allison follows fast upon that wisdom by adding, “Yet it must become so when you are thinking about adoption, artificial insemination, a known donor versus an anonymous donor, etc.” She and Jill spent three solid days of reading and study, first to identify a reliable sperm bank with the same core values that they had—namely, that the health of the baby be the overriding consideration—and then to identify a donor. “When you are choosing the biological father of your child, you want it to be perfect,” asserts Allison. To have a shot at perfection meant combing through hundreds of potential donors. And in the sperm banks’ zeal to gain a marketing edge over their competitors, everything but the pickup line is available for a price, including personal essays by the donors, baby photos, and videos. Jill and Allison wanted an anonymous donor, so although they have a “significant profile” on him—including lots of health data and some information on physical attributes and interests—there is no name, no photo.

Next the two had to make way for the bright lights and sterile surroundings of the examining room. Asked whether she at any point resented the clinical nature of making a baby in that way, Allison answers: “At the beginning, yes.” But a fascination with the technology ensued, such that she came to respect the way in which the ultrasounds and blood work could lead to conception in just a few months, sans the Mathis CD. Beyond being “so skilled at what they do,” the doctors won Allison’s respect for also “creating an environment of nurture and care.” The doctors are, she says, agnostic about whether the parents-to-be are gay or straight; they simply want to help put a baby in a household missing one.
 
Step Three: Telling (“yelling” in the case of a hard-of-hearing grandmother)

Grandma Buccilli and baby Elsie

Arguably, the two most important reactions came from Allison’s maternal grandmother, the ninety-one-year-old Grandma Buccilli, and from Emory’s president, Jim Wagner. Age and beauty come first. When Allison’s mother told her own mother about the process that led to the baby’s conception, Grandma Buccilli was heard to ask with characteristic directness, “So Allison got pregnant by her doctors?” Allison’s mother answered, “Yes. I mean, no. I mean, yes.” Still reveling in having her daughter on the telephonic ropes, Grandma delivered the quip-de-grâce, saying: “Allison is pregnant, eh? And I thought Jill was a girl.”

Asked why the president of Emory would be on the short list of people to tell, Allison responds, “As head of the alumni association, I wanted the president to hear it from me—because I respect him and Emory.” She took special pains to involve him, she says, not because of being a gay parent or in a unique situation, but because “I wanted him to know that my commitment to Emory remained as strong as ever.”
 
Step Four: The Slap, the Cry

Elsie Hilton Johnson is born on August 29, 2007.
 
Step Five: Adoption

The moment that Allison and Jill “met in the middle,” Allison reached for a phone. She made the first call several years ago to an attorney specializing in gay adoptions because, as she says, “it was so important to me, as the birth mother, that Jill’s rights would be protected.” Even as Jill and Allison climbed all the steps and swatted all the red tape in which gay parents going down their path are often wrapped, there was no genuine fear until they got to the point of adoption. Allison states, “If I felt any anxiety at any point in the process, it was living in the state of Georgia and knowing that gay adoptions are on the conservative agenda. I wanted to make sure that this went through without any difficulty.” Letters were solicited from friends and family to support their case. To those asked to write, it seemed an easy case to make, and a home date was scheduled for an adoption official to visit. An energetic maid was hired to make their home sparkle, and Allison asked her mother to “just happen to be making homemade spaghetti sauce at their house” on the day the official came. Allison recalls, “The morning of our hearing, I was on edge. I was struggling with it and very emotional. Jill said to me in the calmest voice, ‘No one has to tell me that I am the mother of this child. If they don’t approve our petition, it means nothing to me.’ ” To Allison, that statement “was further proof of our relationship and of Jill’s relationship with Elsie.” Although the warm-up to the adoption had taken years of preparation, the smell of homemade sauce prevailed: the hearing lasted a mere ten minutes, during which time the judge, according to Allison, “expressed deep appreciation for what we were doing.”
 
Step Six: Hard Work

If the hard work is ahead, it is not as if the previous five steps were, well, child’s play. Still, Allison and Jill are confirmed pragmatists. Notes Allison, “I’m sure that we will have challenges down the road. For instance, we are believers in the public school system. When Elsie is surrounded by children who likely are from heterosexual families, that might be an issue. We are not naïve.”

And who knows what this opinionated young lass, who apparently speaks with real authority into her baby monitor, will have to say about these arrangements. Allison and Jill are following a system that a friend in similar circumstances devised, with Allison calling herself “mommy” and Jill being “momma.” Asked when the discussion about Elsie’s father will take place, Allison replies that it will be whenever Elsie initiates it. Their approach, Allison says, clear-eyed as ever, “will be to talk about how many families there are in the world. Some children have a mommy and daddy, some have two mommies or two daddies, some have only one mommy or daddy, and some have no parents and live in foster homes. At the end of the day, it’s what makes this world such an incredible place. We fit in because families can be represented in so many ways.”
 
Susan Carini 04G is executive director of Emory Creative Group and chair of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. All of the little that she knows about parenting has been practiced on a series of three increasingly stubborn Siberian huskies. Privileged to be an aunt to Elsie, she is looking forward to learning parenting from the pros.