A journey to parenthood, with lots of love and support

THE PARENT: Rosa W. Goldberg, 42, of West Philadelphia

THE CHILD: Zuriel (Zuri) Louis, born March 3, 2023

THE NAME: Zuriel in Hebrew means “God is my rock,” which Rosa, an atheist, translates as “nature is my rock.” And Louis, a family name, Naftali in Hebrew, means “struggling or wrestling.”

The oat milk made Rosa weep.

It was summer 2022, after her second IVF transfer, nearly two years into a pursuit of parenthood that included six months of at-home inseminations, several IUIs, a switch from a known donor to one from a sperm bank, and a miscarriage after the first embryo transfer.

“I remember going to a coffee shop and crying because I was very moved by how oat milk has transformed our world,” says Rosa, who uses she/they pronouns. “I thought, ‘This is ridiculous.’ Then I thought: Ohhh … I had done so many two-week waits. I had given up hope at that point; I didn’t think it was going to happen for me.”

Rosa always knew they wanted to be a parent. They also wanted adventures: backpacking trips; providing humanitarian aid to migrants in the Arizona borderlands with an organization called No More Deaths; doing international work as a nurse.

“Off and on in my 30s, I considered having a kid. But it wasn’t until I was 39 and working as a labor and delivery nurse in Tucson, talking with friends, and they really encouraged me to consider doing it on my own.”

That prospect unnerved her: How would she handle sleep-starved nights? Would she be a good-enough parent? “I had a lot of fear about doing it on my own.” She also had a tight community of friends who helped her at each stage of the journey.

When Rosa first tried to inseminate, using the sperm of a friend, a pal would sometimes zip across town on their motorcycle to collect the sample. During the pandemic, friends came over, masked, to play music and hang out after each insemination.

And when her first IVF attempt ended with a miscarriage at six weeks, friends helped her mourn: a hike in Sabino Canyon, a letting-go ritual, a reading of Jewish poems about fertility and loss.

When Rosa moved to Seattle for a traveling-nurse position, the clinic there wouldn’t accept sperm from her donor friend because it hadn’t been quarantined for six months. So — again, with the weigh-in of friends — she chose a sperm-bank donor whose profile struck an emotional chord.

“He said something about really loving his own family and wanting to help people who wanted to have a family. It was a gut feeling. It felt right to me and all of my friends.”

Even before she was pregnant, Rosa lined up friends for six weeks of one-week-long postpartum visits. She also planned a move back to Philadelphia — she was raised in Melrose Park and Chestnut Hill — to be closer to her parents.

During the first trimester, she worked as a nurse at a summer camp in Vermont, living in a three-sided cabin, with all her meals provided and stunning nature walks near at hand. “I got to talk to the fetus and have them listen to the rain,” she recalls.

To Rosa’s surprise, she loved being pregnant. “I assumed it would be a worst-case scenario, but I was actually calmer and less anxious than I’d been for years.”

And despite her professional training as a labor and delivery nurse, she prepared for her own labor, taking a mindfulness-based birthing class, working with a doula, going on retreat with a close friend to talk through her fears about delivery and parenthood.

Rosa hoped for a home birth with support from the Philadelphia Midwife Collective. But after 30 hours at home, with rapid contractions but little dilation, she went to Einstein Medical Center Montgomery, along with her midwife, doula, and one close friend.

During the long slog — 57 hours in all — Rosa found steadiness in tracing wall tiles with her hands, singing Indigo Girls songs, taking a bath. “I had tons of support and love around me,” she says.

Once Zuri was born, it took a moment to shift out of nurse-mode — helping dry the baby off, asking about their Apgar scores. “They put Zuri on my chest, and I felt their eyelashes on my face, giving me butterfly kisses, and I thought: You’re my baby.”

The early days of parenthood weren’t easy: Zuri (for whom Rosa uses any and all pronouns) had a tongue-tie, and she wasn’t producing enough milk, so she syringe-fed the baby for the first four days, then began using donor milk gathered from nursing people across town.

“The beginning part of life was: How do we get them enough food? Nothing could have prepared me for that. I really relied on everybody. I’d never felt so vulnerable and so loved in my life.”

Struggling to latch successfully and to produce sufficient milk made Rosa feel inadequate. But the network of helpers — the milk donors, the friends and family who buzzed all over the city to collect the donations — were an ongoing source of ballast.

Rosa says she feels cradled by a community of queer parents in West Philadelphia, bolstered by friends across the country and closer to her own parents, who provide childcare one day a week.

She held two baby-namings. One was an intimate ceremony at home on the eighth day of Zuri’s life. Rosa’s dad taught everyone a lullaby he’d written, and her mother talked about her grandfather, Louis, from whom the baby gets their middle name.

Later, in a ritual at Rosa’s synagogue, Kol Tzedek, she held Zuri inside the Torah scroll as a symbol of attachment to the Jewish people. Then she read a letter she’d written to the baby:

Zuri, you are surrounded by love. May you feel the love you are given and learn to love others deeply. May you feel grounded by stones and be a grounding force in people’s lives. May you struggle with the infinite questions of our universe. I love you, Zuri Lou.

In the sanctuary, and on Zoom, relatives and friends from Philadelphia, Seattle, and Tucson cried.