A little overwhelmed at first by parenting, they’re learning as they go

THE PARENTS: Allie Beer, 32, and Bill Beisley, 34, of Roxborough

THE CHILD: Eli Ray, born Dec. 20, 2022

A PARENTAL WORRY: That their cats, Roland and Junebug, would swipe at the baby. But the couple indulged them with wet food and treats when Eli came home. “They’ve been wonderful — curious, but keeping their distance,” Allie says.

They did their homework: classes at Blossoming Bellies; a hypnobirthing series; meetings, even before the baby arrived, with a lactation consultant. The birth, despite a two-day induction, was beautiful.

But nothing prepared Allie for the onslaught that came after Eli was born.

“The postpartum experience has been the wildest part,” she says. “No one talked to me about how, when the milk comes in, that can be painful. And your pelvic floor: My whole body felt like a war zone. Wild surges in my hormones. Depressive feelings, anxious feelings.”

Her breasts throbbed from engorgement; it was difficult for Eli to latch. At one point, Allie phoned the lactation consultant nearly every hour. “The first few days, I thought: Can I even do this? I created this human; I’d better be able to do it.”

Bill remembers similar feelings, even as the two left Lankenau Medical Center with Eli in the car seat. “We joked about: I can’t believe no one is monitoring us. We’re in the wilderness here. We’re expected to keep a child alive, with no experience at all.”

On day three, Allie called her mom and her sister in desperation. They rushed over and cleaned the house, organized a meal train, told Allie and Bill it would get easier.

“I don’t know how people have babies without support systems,” Allie says now. “It does take a village, which is such a cheesy thing to say, but true.”

She’d always wanted to be a mom — to experience the changes pregnancy would bring to her body; to raise a compassionate and curious child.

Bill was less sure. “I didn’t expect to have kids,” he says. “You have a string of relationships that don’t really make sense to you, and you doubt that something will be stable and vibrant enough to warrant having a kid. Then you meet someone who inspires those sorts of feelings and convinces you it would be a pretty good idea.”

What they were sure about was each other — nearly from the first date, at American Sardine Bar in South Philly, after meeting on OkCupid. Maybe it was Allie’s huge smile as she walked in, or Bill’s goofy humor and eloquence with words. “I definitely knew I wanted to see him again,” she remembers.

He began spending most nights at her place in West Philly; gradually, more and more of his belongings migrated there. While on a day trip to Solebury Orchards in fall 2019, Bill knelt down and said, “How about this one?” It was a ring, not an apple, in his hand.

They began to plan a wedding for June 2021 — perhaps 50 to 80 friends and relatives. “But when the pandemic started, we hit pause and decided to have a much lower-key wedding,” Allie says. The 20-person gathering in the side yard of their West Philly house turned out to be “the wedding we wanted to have all along.”

They served Venezuelan food from a favorite local spot. The ceremony was Quaker, unscripted. Bill rocked the karaoke hour with a rendition of Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road.”

They waited to conceive until both were in stable jobs — Allie as a social worker at Jefferson Health, Bill as a web developer, also at Jefferson — with access to Family Medical Leave. It was after one month of trying that Allie woke up early, took a pregnancy test, and hopped back into bed to wake Bill.

“I felt surprised and blessed and also … conflicted about sharing that news, since [conception] can be a challenge for so many folks,” she says.

The first trimester brought fatigue — Allie sometimes fell asleep at her desk and, at one point, fainted at work when her blood sugar dipped too low — but the remainder of her pregnancy was healthy, uneventful.

“The 20-week scan was a particular watermark,” Bill remembers. “You get these bizarre, humanoid images of what sort of looks like a child.” At one point, he spotted a telltale part of the anatomy and blurted, “I see a wiener!”

“Such a dumb word to come out,” he says with a laugh. “Allie didn’t see it, but the nurse-practitioner wrote on a printout — ‘it’s a boy’ — and we happened to see it when she left the room.”

Both felt astonished by watching Allie’s belly ripple after a dinner out, when the baby was active. “I loved thinking about how there was a human growing inside me,” she says. She hoped to honor the baby’s timetable, so when she passed her due date, she tried every strategy to bring on labor.

“I ate dates and pineapple, went on long walks. I was living on one of those birth balls, constantly bouncing up and down. Raspberry-leaf tea. Spicy food. Sex. Pumping. But he was not moving an inch.”

Her doctors recommended an induction, which began on a Sunday evening. It wasn’t until Tuesday afternoon that Allie was fully dilated and ready to push. Bill recalls standing at her left leg, with a nurse at Allie’s right and her sister nearby, “seeing Allie have these inexplicable sensations: after each push, a few steady breaths, confidence, a smile.”

Suddenly their son was there: 7 pounds, 3 ounces, his head squeezed from the birth canal so that he looked “like a xenomorph from the Alien movies,” Bill says. “But you keep up appearances, look back at your wife, and say, ‘He’s beautiful.’ ”

They envision the time when Eli will play in mud, stomp in puddles, go camping with them. Breastfeeding has become easier. Some days, the baby almost smiles.

Recently, Bill’s mom reminded him of a time in childhood when he inked life-size drawings of the Ninja Turtles in ballpoint pen on his bedroom wall. “She was so pissed off at me, but so impressed that she didn’t want to discipline me,” he says. “I’m looking forward to being impressed by how creatively a child can irritate you — frustration being outweighed by pride.”