Before Four Passports, We Just Wanted to Be Parents

People find this blog because of the leaving — the countries, the slow travel, the family of four with the matching passports. But there’s a whole chapter that came before any of it, and it’s the one I’m most careful about telling, because it was the hardest. Before we could dream about a life abroad, we just wanted to be parents. And that did not come easy.

The years before the babies

When Brian and I first got together and then got married, we traveled. A lot. Once we were in a good financial position — and that took work; the first year and a half in our first home, we were honestly in the negative, both of us grinding, both of us getting promoted, building the foundation — we started really seeing the world together. Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, Iceland, Ireland, Egypt, Dubai, the islands. We soaked it up, because we knew kids weren’t on the radar yet.

Then we decided we were ready to try for a family. And the world got very small, very fast.

The part I don’t usually say out loud

Trying to have our kids was a long, hard road. We went through the IUI process, and it failed — five or six times. Five or six. If you’ve been through anything like that, you know it isn’t five or six tries. It’s five or six rounds of hope, and then five or six versions of the same grief, stacked on top of each other.

Eventually we moved on to IVF. And in the middle of all of it, the world shut down. I was pregnant during COVID. I was doing fertility treatment during parts of COVID. We weren’t traveling, weren’t going anywhere, couldn’t have. Our daughter arrived right in the thick of it.

And then — because apparently we don’t do anything slowly — not long after, I was pregnant again with our son. So we did the whole thing over: another baby, another stretch of lockdown, another season of staying very, very still.

What that did to the travel dream

Here’s the honest truth about that time. The wanting-to-travel feeling never actually went away. It just got buried. Buried under fertility appointments and newborns and a locked-down world and the sheer survival mode of two babies close together during a pandemic.

You don’t have the energy to dream about Uruguay when you’re in the baby phase during COVID. You’re just getting through the day. But the dream was down there the whole time, quiet, waiting. I think a lot of parents will recognize that — the version of yourself you put in a drawer when the kids are tiny, and aren’t sure you’ll ever get back.

Why I wanted you to know this first

When people see what our life looks like now, I think it’s easy to assume it came from a place of having everything come easy. It didn’t. We fought to become a family. We failed a lot before it worked. We brought our two kids into a world that was shut down, and we raised them through the strangest, smallest years.

So when we finally came up for air — when the kids got a little older, when a five- or six-hour drive stopped feeling like a mountain, when COVID lifted — and we looked at each other and said we paid our dues, it’s time to get back out there, that wasn’t a whim. It was years in the making. It was the dream we’d put in the drawer, finally allowed back out.

I’ll never take for granted that we got our two kids at all. The whole reason we’re doing this — dragging them to grocery stores in countries where we barely speak the language, putting them in schools where the teacher speaks Spanish — is that we waited so long and tried so hard for them. We’re not going to spend their childhood watching the gray Pennsylvania winters go by. We fought too hard to get them here.

That’s the part of our story that came first. Everything else is built on it.

— Katie