An evolving family flourishes

THE PARENTS: Adam Podowitz-Thomas, 36, and Stephen Podowitz-Thomas, 38, of Wynnewood

THE KIDS: Edith (Edie), 5; Emory Jules (EJ), born May 6, 2020; adopted Feb. 9, 2022

THE HARDEST THING ABOUT HAVING TWO: The times when they need to ask Edie, a spirited child who loves dancing and singing, to be quiet so her baby brother can sleep.

They had a wedding planned, in wine country, in August. But during San Francisco’s Pride weekend in 2013, Adam and Stephen made a spontaneous decision to hop off a BART train at city hall and get married alongside hundreds of other queer couples.

A week earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in Windsor v. United States that a portion of the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional — in short, that the federal government could not discriminate against married gay and lesbian couples.

Same-sex marriages in California, which had been in legal limbo since a 2008 ballot measure banned them and a series of appeals dragged through district and federal courts, resumed just two days before Pride.

That weekend, Adam and Stephen recall, the vibe was jubilance laced with anxiety: Yes, it was legal to marry now, but could that right be reversed in the future?

“We were passing city hall, and we thought: We don’t know what [a future] court is going to do. Maybe in August, we won’t be able to get married. It was borne out of joy, but also angst,” Stephen says.

Even now, recalling the day makes the men choke up: the rippling rainbow banners, the phone calls to their mothers announcing, “We’re going to get our marriage license!”, the bus driver who was hastily deputized to officiate, the longtime friend of Adam’s who raced downtown to be their witness.

“There was an electricity in the air — so much life and so much joy because of the [Supreme Court] decision,” he says.

Though they’d met at Stanford University when both were in graduate school, San Francisco was the place where their relationship took a turn for the serious; they remember walking the city’s hills while talking about the future and their feelings for one another.

After graduate school, they lived together, managing to navigate Adam’s “everything in its place” brand of housekeeping with Stephen’s “organized chaos.” They married. And they began to talk about kids.

“I had a fraught relationship with my father, some really tough times — particularly around coming out — and I think I foreclosed the possibility of being a dad,” Adam says. Later, as he watched other gay men become fathers, he grew more open to the prospect.

Stephen figured kids would be in his future — ”the heteronormative vision of things,” he says now. They thought about surrogacy: too expensive. They thought about foster care: too uncertain. Ultimately, they decided on an open adoption through an agency that welcomed same-sex couples.

For two and a half years — which included a move from California to North Carolina — the men fielded emails and phone calls from birth mothers; some ultimately chose different adoptive parents, while others opted to parent their babies.

Then an email came from a woman in her first trimester; she had a lesbian sister and was hoping for a gay couple to adopt her baby. More emails followed, then phone calls, and finally a meeting at a cafe on the North Carolina coast.

“I don’t remember a lot of the conversation,” Adam says. “What I do remember is going to the beach afterward and picking up shells to give to the baby — a physical token of our first meeting with her birth mom.”

The next six months felt endless, Stephen recalls. “There was excitement about getting to know her, having the opportunity to form a really strong relationship, but also the uncertainty. Because you just don’t know.”

As the due date drew closer, the couple jumped each time their phones rang. “I went on tons of walks. I could not sit still,” Adam recalls. It was on one of those anxious jaunts when he got a call from the birth grandmother: She’s in labor. Get down here if you can.

They did. Both men were in the delivery room when Edie arrived. Adam cut the umbilical, and the couple traded the baby back and forth with her birth mom: nursing alternated with bottle-feeding.

“I remember the first time I put my finger in her hand and she gripped it — that spark of connection: Oh, this is my kid,” Adam says.

They wanted another. After moving to the Philly area in 2016, they checked out local agencies and began, just before the pandemic, to work with Adoptions From the Heart. The phone call came a year later, on May 6: “There’s a boy, slightly premature, in York County. The birth mother picked you.”

They’d already converted their office space to a nursery, and they had plenty of baby gear left from Edie’s infancy. Were they ready? “I don’t know if I really had time to think about that,” Stephen says. “It was happening. He needed us in that moment.” The baby remained in the NICU for nine days, a harrowing stretch of every-other-day trips to York while still working full-time and fielding Edie’s questions: “Why aren’t you bringing him home?”

When they finally did, the encounter was indelible. “We walked in the house,” Adam remembers, “and when Edie walked around the corner, she got the biggest grin on her face when she saw her brother for the first time.”

Their family keeps evolving. With Edie’s birth mom, they initially agreed to once-a-year visits and periodic photo-sharing. But the open adoption has flourished into much more: Skype calls; a Facebook group that includes members of the extended birth family, pictures of Edie’s mom on their “photo wall” at home. Their relationship with EJ’s birth mother is newer; they text back and forth and are planning a visit.

Recently, Edie seemed to have an “aha” experience while reading And Tango Makes Three, a book about a baby penguin with two dads.

“She got that her family was a little different, and that there were other families like hers,” Adam says. “I imagine it will be similar with EJ when he gets older.”