Finding their rhythm as a family

THE PARENTS: Brian Andersen, 40, and Anton Andersen, 57, of Media

THE CHILD: Sebastian Hunter, born July 3, 2022, adopted April 14, 2023

TALKING THE TALK: Anton speaks to the baby mostly in Indonesian; their nanny speaks Spanish. The couple hope Sebastian will be multilingual.

Age is only a number, Brian insisted to Anton after their first few dates.

But that was before he knew the actual number. Anton said he was 35, just seven years older than Brian. In fact, he was 45.

“I can do math and figured some things out,” Brian says with a laugh. He wasn’t daunted by learning Anton’s true age. “I was getting to a point where I was looking for something a little bit more mature. There was a seriousness about him; he wasn’t just out playing around.”

Anton felt the same: “It seemed like Brian was a deeper person, really into a commitment.” After meeting online, they began having nightly dinners at Anton’s place in South Philly. Then came a moment of reckoning, in the form of a letter of deportation ordering Anton, who is from Indonesia, to leave the United States by Feb. 14, 2011.

“That was a defining moment for us: Are we going to do this or not?” Brian recalls. “We talked about it and said, ‘We want to be in this together.’ ”

It was a harrowing few months: a stay on the deportation order, the reopening of Anton’s case for asylum, and, in June 2011, a marriage in Lafayette Park, in full view of the White House. At the time, gay/lesbian marriage wasn’t legal in Pennsylvania, but it was permitted in Washington.

“I was crying. I’d found my soul mate,” Anton says. The ceremony, attended by a few friends and with its political-statement optics, felt right, Brian says. “We’re not showy people. It was a small, intimate time.”

Anton, the youngest of 10 siblings, was certain that he wanted children. By 2015 they were discussing the prospect in earnest. They broached the idea of surrogacy with a female friend of Anton’s who is also Indonesian, but felt wary of the legal and emotional complications that could ensue.

“We did a little research about surrogacy and felt that wasn’t the right way to go, for us,” Brian says. “There are so many children out there who don’t have homes, that are in need of a family.”

One of Anton’s customers — he does bookkeeping for the Coventry Deli — worked at Open Arms Adoption Network, and the agency’s approach felt in sync with their values. “They were very centered on the children and birth mother first. We also liked their philosophy of open adoption,” Brian says.

They spent fall 2019 plowing through stacks of paperwork, securing clearances, creating a profile book. “We finished all that in January 2020. Then, of course, the pandemic hit and there was nothing for, basically, months,” Brian says.

That summer a massive tree fell on their house. “It had to be completely gutted, down to the studs, and rebuilt,” Brian says. The couple lived in an apartment for 13 months; meantime, they waited for someone from Open Arms to call with good news.

“We thought: It will happen when it’s supposed to happen,” Brian says. “We’ll get placed with the right baby.”

It was 2022, a Tuesday in July, when the adoption worker called: “We have an opportunity for you.” That was agency-speak for a baby, born two days earlier in a Delaware hospital. Were they interested?

After months on the wait list, Anton felt a sudden panic. “I thought, ‘I’m not ready today, but when am I going to be ready?’ ” he recalls. Brian was sure. They said yes the next day, and on Friday, they drove to the hospital.

Now it was Brian’s turn to feel tremulous. “I’d held babies before, but prior to Sebastian, I’d never cared for a child overnight. He was so little: 5 pounds, 4 ounces. I worried: Am I hurting him? You find quickly that they’re not as fragile as they look.”

They’d had names in mind — Luna if they adopted a girl, Marco for a boy — but one look at their son indicated that they needed something different. They wanted to honor the birth mother’s choice with his middle name, Hunter, and they liked how Sebastian sounded with that.

The nurses coached them. “They taught us how to hold the baby, how to change the diaper, how to take a bath,” Anton recalls. “Everyone welcomed us to stay with the baby — Brian and me sleeping in one hospital bed.”

At home, on their own for the first several weeks — an intentional choice so they could bond and find their rhythm as a family — parenting felt like a dizzying array of choices: Where to put the swing, the pack-and-play? Should Sebastian sleep with them, in his crib, or in the bassinet? Would their cat, Kucing, learn to accommodate his new sibling?

Early on, “we had him in his pack-and-play in the living room. The cat goes up on the back of the couch, staring at the baby like, ‘What is this?’ Then he walked away and left him alone,” Brian says. Now Kucing tolerates Sebastian grabbing his tail; he pads after the men when they go to wake the baby each morning.

They had help; Brian’s mother, whom Anton also calls “Mom,” stayed with them for a few weeks. Neighbors delivered a small pharmacy of items — baby aspirin, a snot-sucker — with instructions on how to use everything.

Anton works just part-time now, two days a week, Brian has Wednesdays off, and they’ve hired a nanny to cover Fridays. Sebastian sleeps through most nights from 11:30 p.m. until 8 a.m., but the couple’s cadence is irrevocably changed.

“I’ve always been a little bit of a workaholic,” Brian says. “But I find myself wanting not to be at work all the time.”

“When I’m at work,” Anton says, “I’m thinking about Sebastian. When I’m at home and he does something funny, I take a picture and send it to Brian. Our relationship is getting stronger. We have more responsibility. We are focused on this little baby.”