Playground Pioneers (continued)

Viru Gupte, 40 years old, grew up in India, where most marriages are still arranged by parents and communal life remains very strong, even in the country's dense urban areas. "In Indian cities, the people around you become your family," says Viru, who was raised in Delhi. "The kids practically grow up in their neighbors' apartments. You just walked in whenever you wanted, and they fed you. There's a lot of intergenerational mix."

After Viru came to the United States to attend college, he met Beth Saiki, who grew up in New Mexico. For nearly 15 years, they maintained a long–distance relationship (for three of those years, they lived in different countries while Beth served in the Peace Corps), and their plans and social lives were driven by their respective careers.

Then Anna Priya came along. "The hardest part of becoming a parent for me was figuring out what to drop at work so that I could be home," says Viru, who is the self–employed co–founder of a small information technology firm. He was also shocked at how alone they became.

"You have to really ask for help here in the United States," he says. "And I'm not talking about friends; I'm talking about family. If something goes wrong, you can't just expect help."

In the first trimester of Beth's second pregnancy, something did go wrong. Beth grew very sick and could hardly leave the bedroom. In India, says Viru, his family members would have dropped everything to help, but in America—with both sets of relatives far away—Viru was forced by their isolation to assume a new caregiving role. He virtually quit working for three months while he took care of both his daughter and his wife.

Even without health complications, living so far from family and friends can exacerbate the typical strains of becoming a new parent. Jackie Adams, 42, grew up in a mountain town east of Lake Tahoe that always felt too small and conservative for her. She left a month after she turned 18 and ultimately settled in San Francisco. Ten years ago, she met 37–year–old Jessica Mass, and from the beginning the couple talked about having a child together.

After Ezra ("the only name we could agree on") was born in 2005, Jackie says that "he felt like the missing piece of the puzzle." But with no family in town to help, no friends with children, and her partner at work after just two weeks of parental leave, Jackie faced the transition to parenthood alone—an isolated condition which, note the Cowans, "poses a risk to [mothers] and their babies' well–being."

"I don't think I slept for literally a month after Ezra was born," recalls Jackie. "I remember being with him 24–7, and I don't remember sleeping. I remember actually hitting my head against the wall at one point, because I just couldn't control it at all."

But this was only one source of stress for Jackie and Jessica. While Jackie was learning how to take care of a baby at home alone, Jessica struggled to craft a new role as a breadwinning, nonbiological mom—one for which she had few role models.

"I definitely didn't feel like a father, because I'd grown up learning to be a mother," says Jessica, whose extended family lives in New York. "Jackie was doing the mother's role, but I wasn't going to do the father's role. To call myself the father felt like that was a further step away from being the parent."

I know something of how Jessica feels, as unlikely as that might sound. Women cast into the traditional fathering roles—as she was—and men who embrace the mothering role—as I did—often find themselves struggling to match their newfound identities against models they see in society at large. As the Cowans point out, pioneers in new family forms, like pioneers throughout history, often find themselves alone in places for which there are no maps. When nontraditional parents—who today are the majority of parents—step onto the playground, they're not sure where they stand in relation to other parents. Their fear of not belonging can keep them isolated from potential friends and role models.

Looking for help

While Viru was taking care of Beth and Anna Priya, and Jackie was pounding her head against a wall, I was pushing a stroller up and down the hills of our San Francisco neighborhood—in the early days when I took care of him, this was the only way I could get Liko to sleep. On these foggy afternoons, time slowed, and with every minute I'd feel more and more isolated.