An Unlikely, but Loving, Father-Daughter Bond

It surfaced, he says, as a “physical yearning,” the year after his lover died of AIDS. He needed to parent someone, to raise a child, to create a family. His gay friends “thought I’d gone crazy” when he began exploring adoption options. After all, he’d been diagnosed four years earlier with HIV, and early death was then considered a certainty.

But he felt “like I just had to be a father,” he says. So he brushed off accusations of selfishness and concerns about longevity and signed on as a foster parent with Los Angeles County.

“I didn’t care about gender or ethnicity or degree of health,” says Robert, who is white and, at 52, still has the healthy good looks of a man who is winning his battle with HIV. “I knew there was no way I was going to be stealing a kid who was behind a white picket fence with two parents, two cars, a dog and cat. I knew the odds were I’d get a child that a lot of people didn’t want.” Two years later, in 1995, Tina arrived.

It’s hard to imagine her today as a child that “a lot of people wouldn’t want.” At 7, she is lively and beautiful, a rambunctious girl with cocoa-colored skin, big dark eyes, a gentle manner and incandescent smile. At her birth -- to a drug-addicted mother -- she weighed less than 3 pounds and required a month in an incubator. When she came to live with Robert as a foster child, she was 5 months old, unsmiling, listless and withdrawn. He fell immediately in love.

“There was never any agonizing,” he recalls. “It was ‘OK, great, I’ve got a baby.’” He read baby books, went to parenting classes, relied on his instincts for nurturing and on all he’d learned during years spent caring for friends rendered helpless by AIDS. When he applied to adopt Tina, officials marveled at how much progress she had made.

But the adoption was challenged by Tina’s family, who objected, Robert said, “to this white man raising their black child.” Yet, her mother had visited just one time in two years and none of her relatives was able to take her; some because they were already raising her siblings. So after months of hearings, home visits and psychological tests, a judge ruled--just before Tina’s third birthday--that she should remain with Robert, and the adoption was finalized.

“By that time, there was no way I could have given her up,” Robert says now, as we watch Tina turn somersaults on his bed. “I was her father. This was my child.”

Robert knows that their relationship is a sort of Rorschach test for observers, one that breaks almost every taboo about parent and child. He’s a single, older, white, gay man who is HIV-positive; his daughter is unmistakably black.

For some, their pairing is an endorsement of gay adoption, and Robert is the hero who rescued Tina from dysfunction and poverty. For others, it is an indictment of a welfare system that parcels kids out to suit political agendas, and Tina is being set up for a life of confusion and grief.

But the reality of their life is much simpler. “There’s really nothing exotic about us,” Robert says, as Tina grabs a photo album from his dresser and plops down on his lap to leaf through it.

He drives carpool and makes macaroni and cheese for dinner. He worries about the violence in Tina’s favorite cartoons. He’s learned to braid hair and dress dolls. And when their cat needed stomach surgery, to remove the remnants of a Barbie’s chewed-off hand, Robert spent $1,000 he couldn’t afford “because I couldn’t stand Tina’s tears when she asked ‘Daddy, is the kitten going to die?’”

In some ways, Tina is the quintessential, much-indulged, only child of a doting single parent. The walls of their comfortable apartment are covered with her drawings. The shelves in her bedroom are lined with books, games and stuffed animals. Her bed has a frilly comforter with matching pillows and pictures of pretty brown girls on the walls. She has traveled around the country with her father, an actor. At home, she takes gymnastics and swimming lessons.

She does well in school, though her teachers say she sometimes has trouble paying attention. Is that because of exposure to her mother’s drugs or the influence of her hyperactive dad? Robert smiles and shrugs.

“She’s extremely strong-willed, controlling and restless. But then so am I,” he says. “She’s loud, I’m loud. She’s opinionated, I’m opinionated. She’s funny, I’m funny. We’re cut from the same cloth. And ultimately, we understand each other.”

There is something captivating about his obvious affection for this child, and something endearing about the simplicity of her love for him. And yet it is hard not to ask the question: Is this really the best life Tina could have, with a single man whose lifestyle draws disapproval in some quarters, a father with an illness that may take his life?

Robert wrestles with that question himself, as he struggles to answer questions most fathers never face: Why can’t I have a mom? Why do you take all those medicines every day? If you’re my dad, why aren’t I half white?

“Do I think it would be better if Tina was in a family where there was a mother and a father? Probably yes,” he says. “But what was the likelihood of that? ... And what constitutes the perfect family?”

Tina understands that her dad is gay, that there is no mommy in their future, that her mother was sick because of drugs and wasn’t able to care for her. Robert, who is in good health, has not yet explained about adoption or HIV. And yes, he worries about dying, about leaving Tina, about complicating his daughter’s already-unconventional life. “I think about it every single day. I’m not guilt-free. I agonize.”

But he does not apologize. “I guess people will just have to say I’m selfish. I’ll cop to that,” he says. “But she had a huge question mark hanging over her when she came into the world. Many worse scenarios could have confronted her than the possibility that we don’t get as long [together] as we wish we had. No parent knows how long they’ll be here. I could get hit by a car tomorrow. So could you.”

He has made provisions for her in the event of his death, but life right now is his main concern. “I know I’m not perfect, but I think I’m a pretty good parent. And I know she’s a wonderful kid,” he says, as Tina lies in bed watching Pokemon cartoons, sucking her thumb, twisting a strand of hair. “The ultimate thing is I keep her safe, I love her, I feed her, I don’t let her down, I teach her right from wrong, good from bad.

“I don’t know how she’ll feel when she’s older. I’m sure there’ll be a period, 10 years or so from now, when she resents me, when she says ‘Why’d you do this to me?’ I know that because I did that to my parents.

“By the time she comes through that, I probably won’t be alive. But I think she’ll go ‘Wow, look at the life we had, how interesting it was.’ And eventually she’ll reconcile it....That’s the part of me that believes this was a good thing.”

That like him, she’ll have no regrets.

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Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@ latimes.com.