‘Unpredictable’ describes many parents’ journeys

She was the smallest person in the room at Mercer Hospital — 5 pounds, 13 ounces of sticky, squalling, wet-from-the-womb humanity — and already she’d changed the world.

At least, she’d changed our world. In that instant, on a chill January Sunday more than 22 years ago, my partner and I became parents.

Our own parents were suddenly Bubbie and Pop, Grandma and Papa Al. A posse of people, scattered from Philadelphia to Honolulu, stepped into new roles as aunties, uncles, godparents, and cousins. A constellation of relationships snapped into sight.

It was the start of my own parent trip, a journey my partner and I had discussed on one of our first dates nearly a decade earlier. Giddy and limerent in a Portland, Ore., pub, we made a pact: If we ever had kids, Elissa would make the birthday cakes and I would sew the Halloween costumes.

We figured we had it covered.

We had no idea.

If there’s a single word to capture my own parenthood journey, along with the nearly 470 Parent Trip stories I’ve told since this column launched in 2014, it would be “unpredictable.”

I’ve learned that no matter who you are — whether you’re 64 or 17, single or partnered, queer or straight, whether you’re forming your family through adoption, conception, or the merging of two different households — uncertainty is baked into the process.

Will the intrauterine insemination work? Will we need to up the ante to IVF, and how will we afford five-figure medical bills? Is our adoption profile book an authentic, persuasive reflection of who we are and why we want so fiercely to be parents? What if the birth parent changes their mind? Will “your kids” and “my kids” ever come to feel like “our kids”?

Those questions haunt before the child even arrives. Afterward — and always, because this parent trip is an open-jaw ticket, no refunds or returns — there are new ones, questions that keep a parent on edge all night when she isn’t changing diapers or soothing nightmares or trying to cadge enough sleep to be semi-coherent at work the next day.

When I began writing Parent Trip columns nearly nine years ago, my own daughter was an adolescent. On a good night, dinner involved a lot of eye-rolling; on a bad one, a bedroom door slammed loud enough to hurt your teeth.

But her infant days were still so palpable: the warm-toast scent of her newborn scalp; the way she pinched the soft flesh of my upper arm when she was scared or tired. I could still conjure the feelings — weariness, gratitude, amazement — of pacing the kitchen floor at dawn, the damp weight of a sleeping child in my arms.

In the early, fatigue-fogged days, and as she grew, we kept bumping into myths and treacly sentiments about parenthood — ”Pregnancy is bliss! You’ll never know such love! It’s worth every exhausted minute!” — but I was hungry for the gritty truth, for parenthood stories that were intimate, vulnerable, and real.

Those are the stories I chased. And thanks to hundreds of parents who somehow wedged a 90-minute phone interview into their untenable days — often at 8:30 p.m., when the kids were finally (finally!) asleep — I’ve been privileged to hear and tell those tales.

If I was interviewing a couple, I always asked how they met — the origin-point of parenthood stories, after all. For single folks, I asked when and how they began wanting to create a family. I asked how long they waited. I asked about pregnancy tests and adoption paperwork, about their first glimpse of the newest baby or child. I asked how they managed the most harrowing moments of their days.

Sometimes we laughed together on the phone, companions in the absurdity of it all. I recall the parents who learned of a pregnancy just as they were packing their daughter off to college; now they have three kids, with a 19-year age span between oldest and youngest. I heard wild stories: the baby born in a self-driving Tesla; the one birthed at the bottom of the stairs.

In 2020, parenthood stories became threaded with new anxieties. I talked with parents who pushed out their babies while wearing KN95 masks, parents whose birth classes and adoption finalization hearings happened on Zoom. Most striking was the sense of isolation, the need to stay physically distant from relatives and friends just at the time people craved nearness and connection.

Now and then, someone’s voice would quaver; occasionally, there were outright tears. The folks I interviewed revealed aspects of parenthood that don’t often make prime time: their crushed hopes after the 11th negative pregnancy test; the foster child who left just when he was starting to say “Mommy.” I heard about miscarriages, hoped-for adoptions that never happened, monthslong stays in the NICU with a fragile, preterm infant, folks who fixed up nurseries and never got to bring the baby home.

I felt stunned and moved by these strangers’ trust. One woman told me that she believed her diagnosis of bipolar illness would be a deal-breaker for pregnancy until she found a psychiatrist who prescribed medication that was safe for both her and her fetus. A single man, HIV-positive, described his yearslong pursuit of parenthood and his joy at being a father.

Each time someone told me about a plummet into postpartum depression, or a moment of predawn rage at an inconsolable child, or the way grief and gratitude entangle when one infant twin dies and the other one lives, I believed they were helping to shed the stigma from such experiences. I believed they were offering ballast to others: We survived this. You can, too.

I aimed to cast the circle wide, then wider: Clans formed through adoption and conception, with the help of sperm donors or gestational surrogates. Interfaith and interracial families. Grandparents raising grandkids. Parents who are trans. Couples who struggled for years to grow a family; people who never planned to become pregnant. Each week, I wanted readers to see beyond their stereotypes: Yes, a family can look like this. Or this. Or this.

Here’s what I’ve learned from the hundreds of people who shared their stories. There’s truth in the clichés: The years whisk by. It really does take a village. Parenting is humbling, hilarious, beautiful, and confounding. Parenthood will skewer you with terror when it isn’t drenching you with love. It is a burden. It is a privilege. Your kids will change you. No one can predict exactly how.

Parent Trip is ending as a regular Inquirer feature. This column is my last. I will sorely miss telling these stories, connecting with folks across the Philly region about some of the most transformative moments of their lives.

Whoever you are — a new parent, a prospective one, or someone with kids long grown and gone — this remains true: On the parent trip, the road is curved as a question mark. You can’t know what’s around the bend. The journey continues. The good news is that you’re not alone.

For previous Parent Trip columns, go to www.inquirer.com/parenttrip.