The Parent Trip: Sonia Rosen and Samer Abboud of Mount Airy
To U.S. Customs agents in a post-9/11 world, Samer looked like trouble: a young, goateed Arab Canadian with a one-way airline ticket.
What they didn't know was the backstory: that Samer was headed to Philadelphia to meet a woman he'd encountered on a dating website for people of Arab descent, a woman whose candor and progressive politics already had him hooked.
"It was jarring," Samer recalls of his eight-hour detention in a windowless room. "I was thinking the whole time, 'This person better be awesome.'"
His exchange with Sonia, through messages on the dating site, then e-mail and transcontinental phone calls, had already revealed a shared thirst for activism: Sonia, about to start a doctoral program in Philadelphia, had worked on antiwar and antiglobalization campaigns, and Samer was doing similar work in Canada before starting a doctoral program in England.
"We were about to go on these separate life journeys," Sonia says. "But we were falling in love."
Politics wasn't all that bound them. Each had recently lost a sibling: Samer's sister died of leukemia at 19; Sonia's younger brother had committed suicide when he was 20. "It was a very deep loss, not like the loss of a parent or grandparent," Samer says. "And there was this moment of: 'Oh, here's this other person who actually understands what that's like.' "
What followed were several years of long-distance romance as Samer traveled to the Middle East for fieldwork and Sonia visited China and France. Staying connected meant dashing to convenience stores for calling cards, calculating the difference between bedtime in Paris and a work break in Syria, shouting into a phone booth in a Lebanon internet cafe.
Even when they could be in the same time zone -- winter weeks together in Canada or summer visits in Philadelphia -- it was always with a sense of flux. "I was living out of a hockey bag," Samer says. "We were always in transit." Finally, he landed a teaching job in central Pennsylvania. "We could wake up together," he says. "We could decide together where the towels would go."
Marriage was not a priority -- "we didn't feel like the state needed to regulate our love," Sonia says -- but the realities of immigration law pushed them to tie the knot with casual, Quaker-style weddings, one here and one in Ottawa, where Samer was raised.
Neither will forget the deal-breaker conversation that preceded their marriage. Sonia had been clear about her desire to have children, but Samer loved their freewheeling, globe-hopping life, and feared parenthood would crimp that sense of possibility.
It was a Friday afternoon. Sonia said, "If you don't want kids, there's the door. I still love you, and I won't have any regrets, but I want kids." He said, "Yes. OK. Let's do it."
About six months after their marriage, during a trip to the Middle East, Sonia began to feel so queasy the smell of meat being cooked for Christmas sent her fleeing to an opposite corner of the house. A 25-cent pregnancy test from a pharmacy in Jordan confirmed her hunch. More transoceanic phone calls: Sonia blurted the news to Samer's parents, and he told hers.
After a pregnancy eased by regular acupuncture treatments, the baby was five days late -- or, perhaps, right on time, arriving just after Sonia sent her dissertation proposal to her adviser. Samer recalls the moment when a Lifecycle WomanCare midwife placed a birth-bloodied baby on Sonia's belly, parted the tiny legs, and said, "OK, Dad, are you ready to tell us what it is?"
"I couldn't even see. I can't think of another moment in my life when I was that empty-brained, and that focused."
Even through the zombie blur of early parenthood -- "hours and hours of sitting with her, a buzz of people around us," Sonia remembers -- they knew they wanted more children. "We had the space in our hearts for three," Samer says, and number two came quickly, after just a month of trying.
Meanwhile, Kalila became potty-trained. Sonia wrote her dissertation. And when the time came to deliver -- a harrowing ride down City Avenue during rush hour on a Friday afternoon -- Samer overcame his usual reticence and flagged down a police escort.
"I said, 'Excuse me.' I said, 'I hate to bother you,' and then, very quietly, 'My wife is in labor.' The cop in the passenger seat said, 'Are you serious?' "
With two children less than three years apart, life became so hectic that Samer sometimes made the "vasectomy sign" -- a scissorslike gesture in the air -- as a joke with Sonia. But three still felt like the right number, especially when each recalled the jolting sorrow of becoming an only child after their siblings died.
The third pregnancy was the worst -- morning sickness that hit harder and lasted longer, followed by an "insanely fast" labor. Sonia was so certain this baby would be a boy that she stared in shock between the infant's legs. "Is this a girl?" she asked the midwife.
Friends and relatives used to tell the couple that marriage was tremendous work. But nothing about their relationship -- its effort-filled connections and long-distance logistics -- had ever been easy. Parenthood, they find, is just another sort of circus.
"There are moments when the baby's crying, the other two are fighting, we're trying to make dinner, and it's crazy," Sonia says.
"It's what we signed up for," says her husband, a life that deepens their gratitude and sharpens their commitment to remain engaged with the world.
Both still remember that song -- the one Sonia sent to Samer, years ago, to heal a long-distance argument, the one he pulled up on his iPod when she was in labor with Kalila, "The Only Promise That Remains," by Justin Timberlake:
When you're lost and looking for a way home … I'll come out and find you. And then there she was: the squalling, mind-scraping, soul-filling moment when their trajectories merged.