Adoption brings them the job they always wanted

THE PARENTS: Alexander Piazza, 34, and Michael Piazza, 32, of South Philadelphia

THE CHILD: Olivia Shay, 7 months, adopted Oct. 22, 2021

HOW THEY CELEBRATED: For the adoption, which happened on Olivia’s six-month birthday, the men ordered a cake in the shape of a half-circle, with “Officially Family” written in frosting.

A family they spotted on their honeymoon gave Alex and Mike a glimpse of their future.

Both men always knew they wanted children. And both knew they were gay, though each remained closeted until his late 20s. “I had relationships with women,” Alex says, “but that wasn’t really who I was. Family was a dream — more of a fantasy — until I met Mike.”

After meeting in 2016 — Alex’s sister was one of Mike’s clients when he was an auditor, and she’d been talking up her finally single brother — the two bonded quickly over identical values and visions.

“Not everyone is looking for a long-term, monogamous relationship, a family — one day, with kids — and a career,” Mike says. “We had very similar outlooks on life.”

They also had a shared passion for all things Disney; Alex proposed on a 2017 trip to the Magic Kingdom, with the azure-spired Cinderella Castle in the background. And Mike reciprocated with his own proposal at the close of that vacation, following an 11-day Caribbean cruise. They have identical rings in different colors.

On their honeymoon — another Disney cruise, natch — they were leaving the theater after a performance. “We saw a same-sex couple and their child,” Alex recalled. “That resonated with me so much. Seeing that family on the ship reminded us that that was where we were going next.”

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The question was: How? Plan A involved surrogacy — Alex’s cousin had agreed to carry a baby for them — and an egg donor. To save money, the men sold their home on East Passyunk and moved in with Alex’s parents. During the early months of the pandemic, they prepared for the first IVF cycle: psychological testing, sperm analysis, health assessments for the surrogate.

In August, a doctor delivered bad news: Alex’s cousin had complications resulting from an earlier pregnancy; she wouldn’t be a good candidate for surrogacy. “That ended the IVF journey for us,” Alex says. “The next step was adoption.”

Their desire for a child was unwavering, but they approached the new territory of adoption with dozens of questions: When and how were birth parents’ rights terminated? Was an adoption guaranteed? Could it fail? What did the different types of adoption — open, semi-open, closed — actually mean in real life?

They spent hours each weekend plugging away on their home study application and profile book, which included images of their work as educators and a shot of Mike in an outsize Mickey Mouse tie, an effort to show that he would be the goofy one in the family.

The day after they officially entered the adoption network, they learned of a birth mother whose situation checked every box they had: She hadn’t used any drugs or alcohol. She wanted a semi-open adoption: periodic pictures and text updates. She was a full-time single mother to a 12-year-old son. She was 14 weeks pregnant, due on April 10, 2021.

Over the next four months, the men came to think of the birth mother as part of their extended family; they texted every other night, attended her ultrasound appointments, met her son. Then, in early February, they got a call from their case worker: The adoption was off. The birth mother had changed her mind.

“We thought we’d said or done something wrong,” Alex says.

“We were extremely surprised, shocked, and disappointed,” Mike recalls. “It was a rough couple of weeks.”

» READ MORE: A joyful experience with a newborn

But they were determined to grow their family. They submitted their profile book for birth mothers with babies due in six months, or the following week, or whose infants were already born. And they dreaded the approach of April 10, the first birth mother’s due date — ”the day we were supposed to become daddies,” Mike says.

To divert themselves, they escaped to Atlantic City with a cousin and had just checked into their room when Alex’s phone began to buzz. It was their case worker. They’d matched. The men recall a sense of relief … and an affirmation of destiny.

“We all have a path, and everything happens for a reason,” Mike says now. “It’s not a coincidence that it happened on April 10.”

This time, the baby was due in just a few weeks — a blessing, as it turned out, because there wasn’t time to doubt or ruminate. The birth mother wanted a closed adoption, though she did tell the case worker she was drawn by the men’s family-oriented outlook, their love for Disney, and the Broadway shows they’d noted in their profile book — among them, Dear Evan Hansen and Wicked, which were also favorites of hers.

Ten days after matching, the birth mother was scheduled to be induced at a hospital in Camp Hill, Pa. Alex and Mike waited anxiously in a vacant delivery room until a knock came around 2 a.m. Olivia was born at 4:20, and a minute later, nurses wheeled her across the hall. The doctor had left a length of the umbilical attached so the men could be the ones to cut it. They cradled their daughter skin-to-skin.

For nearly all of Alex’s life, he’d been watching other people become parents. “I was 13 when I became an uncle,” he says. As soon as he saw Olivia, he thought, “This is what I was waiting for. This is the job I always wanted.”

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Now, Mike can barely remember life before parenthood. “It’s crazy that that one moment changes your future forever. You make all your decisions based on her. She’s all I think about.”

One measure of that life-shifting instant was his silence when he first glimpsed Olivia, not even wiped down from birth, squirming in her isolette. It wasn’t that he lacked words; he wanted the first words his daughter heard to be exactly the right ones.

“Once she was handed over to us, I said, ‘Daddy loves you,’ ” he remembers. “And Alex did the same.”