surprise!

I got occasional arcane updates about the progress of J’s birth certificate: an email from Juvenile Court saying they sent a form to the state, a letter from the state saying they did their thing and handed it off to the next state, and then finally a letter saying the birth records have been updated! Awesome, that was like 2-3 months, instead of the year the Court told us it would take.

I ordered 3 copies of the new birth certificate, and they’re gorgeous: too: all I had growing up was notarized copies, but no, this is full color, on heavy paper. And they listed me as the father!

In an unexpected twist, the mother was "Not Stated."

The city clerk said, "It was the natural mother blank? Yeah, I think I know what happened. We have this new system for entering adoptions…". She sent replacements, and an envelope to send the bad ones back—practices you want to see in a city clerk—and now it’s all official, with both parents and everything!

So the preparations to send him off to college now also include changing his name, which would be a lot easier if we had gotten him a state ID with his deadname, but it’s his deadname, so we sort of didn’t want to, and also didn’t get around to it. Now we change the Social Security number so it matches the birth certificate, then comes the state ID, and after that pretty much everything is easy.

It’s a nice feeling. All three of us have worked really hard for this. It’s good.

how to start your weekend.

Most of San Mateo County’s operations are in the county seat, but for departments that don’t have a lot of traffic with the downtown offices—the county library system, the coroner—are up the hill in San Mateo in what I can only describe as a citadel. It’s cleverly set in terrain that offers remarkable privacy, and chunks of it are somewhat fortified, because the biggest occupant is Juvenile Court, including detention, and a variety of things that look like they’re there for the children of juvenile offenders.

When I picked a date for the hearing, they told me all adoption hearings are on Fridays, and it didn’t occur to me to wonder why until we were there, and the staff was relaxed and happy. There are signals of what a more ordinary day is like: signs like "NO HATS IN COURTROOM" and "GENTLEMEN, TUCK IN THOSE SHIRTS.’ Adoptions are obviously one of the most joy-inducing things they do, so it makes sense to just pick a day of the week where people show up for court and they’re there to make a family.

The courtroom blew my mind. There’s the usual judge…podium? pseudo-throne? pulpit?…arrangement, but when the judge entered, she brought a giant smile down to a floor-level lectern. The walls had two-foot wide emojis, lined up like shields in a medieval great hall: "To acknowledge that all emotions are valid in this room." There was a five-foot tall teddy bear, with dozens of smaller bears surrounding it.

And in a final surprise, by tradition, adoptees pick a bear to take home.

just like that.

I’ve never really looked at the child adoption procedure. In part this is because we’ve had no adoptees in the extended family until my cousin adopted her stepson. Normally at this point I would say "Right, suuuure you don’t," except that the genetic variation goes from this:

all the way down to this:

Good luck telling the guys apart on the telephone.

Adoption results in a new birth certificate, which is obvious when you think about it, since the entire purpose of a birth certificate is to legally define the parent-child relationships via the circumstances of birth. I find it weird for a bunch of reasons:

• Rewriting history is not really something my brain will do. I can usually remember what we’re supposed to say about the past (true or false), but I also remember the past.

• I’ve never been a legal parent before, and I always very carefully avoided the word "father." (And still will, really: the birth certificate will list us both as "parent." J’s word for "adult male who shows up with patience and kindness" is just "Chris.")

• A birth certificate will now attest that I had a kid a few years before I met the kid—the form said "Enter your name as of the date of the child’s birth." I remember that year very clearly, and the most I could claim was being uncle or uncle-like to a marvelous trio or two of girls.

In my world growing up, birth certificates were static, authoritative documents, not just because I come from a line of lawyers, but because our genes allow no doubt about where we came from. We look, sound, smile the same. When my grandmother died and I went back to the Rust Belt village my grandfather settled in after leaving Pittsburgh, I went into the one coffee shop, and the owner, Marit, came out from the back and said "You’re a D—, aren’t you." (My cousin tells me Marit loves telling the story as much as I do.) All but one of Generation #4 is through high school. My uncle was on the School Board for a bunch of years. His father was a judge, whose portrait is in the courthouse.

I tell a story, and I hear the more or less uniform voice the men have. I make an expression with my face, and it’s the same smile gifted to a few dozen other people on the planet. 

So in my life to date, a birth certificate is a set-in-concrete record of past events involving biological parents, the ironclad thing you use to sign up for soccer teams or get a passport. It’s wonderful that we can alter the law’s view on our relationship, but it’s also just viscerally odd.