What this former Inquirer columnist learnt from writing 468 parenthood columns over nine years
No matter what legislations are passed Andee Hochman believes “there is no one right or normative way to be a family.”
For nine years, every week, writer Andee Hochman attempted to answer one question.
What does the road to parenthood look like for people who don’t follow the family “norm”?
For her Inquirer column, “Parent Trip,” she profiled different Philadelphia-area families with children, all with atypical experiences creating their family.
This included queer parents, single parents, interracial parents, interfaith parents, and so on. Hochman spoke to parents who adopted children, conceived them through IVF, got pregnant unexpectedly, and more.
Anyone who had a story around parenthood with a less talked-about aspect, they found themselves in Hochman’s column. Forty-two of 468 of those profiles have now been compiled into a new book, Parent Trip: Unexpected Roads to Form a Family, published by Temple University Press.
Hochman, who is queer, started writing about family life in 1990, when she was living in Portland, Ore. After her straight housemates got engaged, she wrote an essay for the now-shuttered LGBTQ publication Just Out, detailing her feelings on the discrepancies between how straight and queer relationships are perceived socially.
The Eighth Mountain Press publisher Ruth Gundle reached out to Hochman, asking if she had more to say on the subject. As it turned out, she had a whole book’s worth. Her first book Everyday Acts and Small Subversions: Women Reinventing Family, Community and Home released on Eight Mountain in 1994.
By 1999, Hochman had moved to Philadelphia and began freelancing for The Inquirer, still writing about family. In 2014, former Inquirer features editor Cathy Rubin asked her if she’d be interested in writing a weekly feature on people becoming parents.
That’s how “Parent Trip,” the column, was born. Hochman began by reaching out to midwives and OB/GYN offices to see if any of their clients would be willing to participate. The column asked readers to submit their stories.
“Becoming a parent and forming a family felt like a messier version of the Wedding column, and that’s exactly what we got,” said Rubin, referring to the column on marital stories that “Parent Trip” replaced. “It was beyond my wildest dreams to witness and experience all of the different ways that families formed and the challenges that people had.”
Hochman, whose daughter with her long-term partner Elissa was born in 2001, was able to use her own experience as a parent to inform the column.
“When I was interviewing families who didn’t fit the norm and I shared my own family configuration with them,” she said, “I felt like I could feel their shoulders relax a little bit, particularly with the queer families.”
“Parent Trip” began nine months before marriage equality for same-sex couples was legalized and concluded just over a year after Roe v. Wade was overturned, reversing a half-century of legalized abortion.
Hochman makes clear with this book that families will always exist beyond the heteronormative structures the society deems “normal.”
The book is categorized into nine chapters, each carrying three to seven profiles. Through these, Hochman covers topics such as infertility, adoption, age gaps in relationships, religious differences, interracial marriages, and other circumstances that make families less “normal” per social mores.
“I wanted the 42 [profiles] that ended up in the book to reflect the same diversity and span as the 468 that comprised nine years worth of columns,” Hochman said. “You will not find a section of stories all about single parents, or a section all about queer parents. I was more interested in the themes that echoed across all kinds of families.”
Through writing this column, Hochman says she learned about situations she never experienced in becoming a parent, including adoption and how common miscarriages are.
A phrase repeated by many of the parents she interviewed was “you just don’t know what’s going to happen.” Whether that be when you try to adopt, conceive, when you’re in the delivery room, once the baby is home, and once they’re 2, 6, or 25, she said.
“There is no one right or normative way to be a family,” Hochman said. “I hope people come away with an expanded sense of what a family can look like and how children can be welcomed into one’s life.”
“Parent Trip: Unexpected Roads to Form a Family” by Anndee Hochman is now available all over the country. $20.