The Parent Trip: Rachel and Billy Linstead Goldsmith of Point Breeze

When two people fall in love at summer camp, in the dark ages before Facebook, and one is from Orlando while the other lives in St. Louis, the story is bound to be complicated.

Especially when one person has yet to take the SATs and the other is more than halfway through college.

Rachel and Billy were counselors at twin camps whose staff shuttled between Florida and Missouri locations. He was the kid-magnet, the guy who kept cool amid other counselors' drama, the goofy photo-bomber who engineered end-of-camp slide shows. She was the girl with emotional insight beyond her years.

But those years - 17 of them, to be precise - gave Billy pause. "She was not of age, and I was," he recalls. "I cared a lot about her, but I didn't have any expectation."

During Rachel's last year of high school, she sent care packages to Billy, then in college at the University of Florida - cookies she cut with alphabet cutters and arranged into messages that inevitably crumbled and got garbled in the mail.

But the sentiment was clear: "I knew I wanted him in my life in some way." That remained true through her first year at the University of California, Santa Cruz; through the spring she spent backpacking in Death Valley, when she called Billy from campground pay phones; and after she transferred to Hampshire College in western Massachusetts.

Billy moved there, too, to work for Clean Water Action. "That's when I started thinking about the long haul, that she was really a potential partner forever."

They were together for seven years - they'd relocated to Philadelphia and bought a house in Point Breeze - before he proposed. They were married in a small fishing village in Jamaica. And though both wanted kids, they weren't sure parenting would dovetail with other passions: work in the nonprofit arena, grad school, global travel.

Through Billy's job with Fair Trade USA, the two visited Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Germany, Japan, and Mexico. Rachel earned her master's degree in public administration and started working for Westside Family Healthcare in Delaware.

It was a women-led, family-friendly workplace. And while traveling, the couple had seen plenty of globe-hopping parents and kids: tour guides who'd raised children in Nicaragua; intergenerational clans picnicking in Japan. Maybe, they thought, parenting and their other priorities weren't an either/or.

The boxer mix, a rescue from Operation Ava, was a final test: "If we can keep this dog happy and alive and in good spirits through my time in grad school, we're in a much better position to be parents," Rachel recalls thinking.

The dog, named Abby, thrived. And then, the process unfolded easily. Rachel was pregnant within a few months of trying. Aside from heartburn induced by gulping a glucose drink during a test for gestational diabetes, she felt healthy and strong.

She also found herself suddenly bound to a community - the Point Breeze neighbors who organized a meal train; the strangers who shouted their congratulations across the street. "That's something that surprised me," she says. "How much joy it brings to people that a baby's on the way."

Forty weeks passed. Then 41. Rachel tried acupuncture and spicy eggplant Parmesan; the baby was resolute. Finally, at 42 weeks and three days, they agreed to an induced labor. But the baby's heart rate kept fluctuating, and doctors recommended a cesarean section.

Billy remembers peeking over the drape to see his newborn son: "I choked up immediately, looked down at Rachel, and told her he was beautiful." And Rachel understood the truth of her mother-in-law's words, advising that parenthood is "like nothing else . . . how you can feel, all of a sudden, so much love and joy."

Billy was able to take five weeks off from work, and both sets of grandparents took turns staying with them for the first two weeks of Jack's life. They had solid friendships in Philadelphia and a track record of problem-solving together. So when Jack - named for Billy's parents' favorite uncles - developed a granuloma, a mass of scar tissue at the umbilical site; and when their air-conditioning died the night before the bris was scheduled at their home; and when the baby woke every hour, all night long, they saw each challenge as one more hurdle to ride as a team.

It helps, they say, to have perspective: the broad view that travel and social-justice work have brought them; the instant camaraderie they can find by Googling "infant growth spurts" in the middle of a rough night; the long arc of a relationship that began when they were both so young.

"In nonprofit work, it's hard not to think about what's going to go wrong next," Rachel says. "Here, things are a little bit more about rolling with it. We're all learning; we're going to figure it out together. There's a trust in the life process."

"I feel like parenthood has expanded me," Billy says. "We have friends who tried [to conceive] for a long time, who had difficult pregnancies, or super-fussy babies, or really challenging birth experiences. All day, I just feel fortunate and lucky."

That sense of gratitude and trust followed them home from the hospital, to the first encounter between Jack and Abby. People had advised them to let the dog sniff Jack's newborn hat, and to make sure she didn't jump on Rachel, still wincing from her C-section.

"Abby hadn't seen us in five days, so we choreographed our entrance," Billy remembers. "We gave her the first opportunity to start smelling Jack. We were fairly confident that it would be fine."

The dog sniffed the baby's feet. Then she licked them. When Billy, cuddling Jack, settled down on the couch, Abby jumped up, too, and gave him gentle dog kisses. And for the first few weeks, every time Jack woke and Rachel or Billy rose to change his diaper, Abby trotted along behind, as though to assure them that everything would be all right.

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