When we learned that I was pregnant again, we knew we wanted to keep the baby at home. But we had no idea how we could pull it off. My partner could add the kids, whom she adopted, to her health-insurance plan at work. But she couldn’t cover me. We didn’t know how we could afford to pay all our current expenses on one income and absorb the additional cost of health insurance for me. Then there was the concern that I wouldn’t be making any money; any expenses of mine that exceeded $11,000 and were paid by my partner would be subject to gift taxes. That was a sum we’d easily blow through thanks to our mortgage, which was in both our names, and our car payment, which was in mine. Of lesser concern was the fact that I wouldn’t be saving any money. Although Linda and I were each the legal parent of the same child, had a joint banking account and joint brokerage account, and owned a home together, we had to plan for our retirement as if we were each single. Neither one of us would be able to inherit the other’s retirement savings without huge tax penalties. Oh, yes: if I left the workforce, it would be a serious setback for us.
Getting married would end these worries. A simple, three-minute ceremony with a justice of the peace would eliminate the health-insurance problem, the gift-tax problem, and even the retirement-planning problem. The bulk of my partner’s income in retirement will come through her teacher’s pension. If we were married, I would have access to it. Miraculously, the SJC ruling, with its six-month delay in implementation, came at just the exact time we’d need it. May 17, 2004, which marked the day same-sex couples would be able to marry, came just days before our second baby’s due date.
A wrinkle in time
On the day the Goodridge decision came down, I put these personal concerns aside — not an easy task — as I tried to make sense of the ruling. We had about 25 hours before we had to go to press. All our stories for the week were done. Could we tear up the paper and start from scratch? More important, if we scrambled to put together a package, would it be worth it? We wouldn’t be published until Thursday — two days after the ruling. Would we be able to come up with material that would offer readers anything more than what they’d get in Wednesday’s daily papers? It took about 10 seconds to process those questions and come up with an answer: of course we should — and could.
The next task was to get all the writers and editors on board. Not everyone was convinced we should cover the story for that week’s issue. The benefit of waiting would help us figure out what the ruling said. And we wouldn’t have to chuck all the work we’d already done. As I pushed to cover the story immediately, it was the first time I felt as if I were under extra scrutiny because of my sexual orientation.
