'A baby needed a family': how a same-sex couple became one of the first to adopt in Germany

My childhood fantasy, every time there was an unexpected knock on the door, it was that Charles and Diana had a breakdown on Route A which ran past our house and needed a bed for the night. Afterwards, I was always mortified when the door opened to a smiling friend of my parents or a pre-GPS driver lost in the black countryside of Oxfordshire. This huge discrepancy between reality and grandiose expectations that I was able to evoke in a few milliseconds has never left me.

The call for this Wednesday afternoon was a rare exception. I had just finished my weekly English course at the University of Potsdam and saw a missed call on my phone with a Berlin number. I'm still waiting for the call, the one that will change my life, so it's impossible for me to ignore an unidentified number. I always call back.

"Frau Schw[mumble]", said the voice.

"It's Ben Fergusson. I got a missed call from this number."

"Ah, Herr Fergusson. It's Frau Schwenk. Our social worker, I understand now. "Thank you to come back to me. I'm calling because we have a four week old baby boy who needs a family."

A woman from our adoption preparation course told us that she had seen stars when she got the call. To me, it was more like hitting the pause button on an old VHS. Everything stopped, quiet, shook a little bit. I started taking notes in red pen on the back of a vocabulary card, the ballpoint pen scratching loudly in my ears, "Boy," I scribbled, "four weeks." But that was the sum information she could give me over the phone.

"You will have to come to the Senate tonight or first thing tomorrow." In Berlin, it's more of an office of the Land Senate which organizes the adoptions." Then, assuming you agree with the details, you will have to meet him tomorrow afternoon. And then if it goes well, you should be ready to take him home Friday morning. A day and a half to prepare for the rest of our lives.

I knew that my husband, Tom, was in his psychotherapy office until 6 p.m. I left her a shaky voicemail in the empty fluorescent-lit classroom. I wasn't quite in tears, because I wasn't sure it was going to work yet. Our social workers had made it clear that we needed to be open-minded when meeting our future child, in case we weren't related. Back home, pursing my bottom lip at the kitchen table, an undrunk cup of tea at my elbow, I watched the gray ticks in my WhatsApp voicemail to Tom turn blue. Seconds later, he called back, desperate for details.

"How old is he?"

"Four weeks."

"Where is he now?"

"I don't know They'll tell us tomorrow, I think."

"Is he okay?"

"She said a baby."

I could hear the creak of his office floor as he moved.

"Maybe that's it."

"Maybe," I say.

Tom's practice is outside of Berlin, and it would be another two hours before he got home. I tried to read, but found myself staring into the night sky, the paperback to my chest. I poured myself a Scotch and played an insane strategy game on my computer for two hours as night set in.

After many rounds of hugs, Tom and I went through the schedule for the next few days. We had the first Senate meeting in the morning and were meeting our potential son in the afternoon of the same day. Everything was going well, we would pick him up Friday at 11am. That, we calculated, left us with a four-hour window on Thursday to buy everything a baby might need for their first night at home.

During Tom was riding around the corner drugstore in the trolley - buying several bottles and pacifiers when he wasn't sure which type was right for him - I walked into the nearest baby clothes store and said, "I need all the clothes for a four-week-old baby boy. The friendly but puzzled seller said, "How big is it?"

"I don't know."

"Is this your baby?" " she asked. Once the confusion cleared up, we began to pile socks, hats, rompers and sleeping bags on the counter, our searches punctuated by the sudden reminder of the essential: “You need hundreds of muslins! - and offering sound advice - "Too big is always better than just fits!" most of the sizes were wrong, and in my amazement after arriving, I had washed all the woolens in boiling water.

To be clear, we weren't not just incompetent...