Word of mouth, usually. In his case the person who raised him for the latter part of his childhood knew of a fleshcrafter they thought would be able to do it, and that one couldn't - there are two versions of the modification and he wanted the more difficult one - but told him about someone else further away who could. (He's pretty nostalgic about the whole thing.)

"What are the differences between the two versions? It seems sort of like there should be lots of different variations if fleshcrafting is so unlimited."

He's sure there are variations within the two versions, but if someone's come up with a third entire approach he doesn't know about it, at least. The easier style gives you a full extra set of things externally and the style he got isn't externally visible at all, it's based on bird anatomy that way.

That raises some fascinating questions about his anatomy that Þurvo is not going to ask.

"I can see why that would be more difficult! It sounds like this was one of your earlier trips; was going to seek out the specialist part of what sparked your interest in traveling, or did you already know you wanted to, at that point?"

He already knew he wanted to travel but he hadn't realized how important that was going to be for him, he thought he'd be fine settling down for a while first and doing it later. In retrospect he should have figured out from that trip that that wasn't going to work, but he was a teenager, it's not surprising that he didn't.

She nods. They were all teenagers once.

"If you didn't figure it out until you were an adult, what was it that helped you to figure it out? Or was it a gradual realization?"

Oh, it was much worse than that. (He chuckles at himself, a little darkly.) He had his eldest - of three, all boys, they're great - and figured that was it for anything more than short trips for several years - he's not sure how similar local kids are to Crafter kids, but it's pretty much impossible to travel alone with an infant or toddler, and it's traumatic to young kids to disrupt their lives as much as starting to travel with one would be, that starts being less of an issue when they get to ten or eleven years old. And his eldest's sire really wanted to be involved with the kid in a normal secondary-caretaker way, and didn't want to travel for more than short trips, so it seemed like the sensible thing to do was to settle down until his eldest was old enough for him to be away, and then travel. And that would have been true if he was able to do it, but he just wasn't; by the time his eldest was three his mental health was starting to get scary, and he ended up dropping the kid off with his sire one night and just kind of fleeing. He reconciled with his son later and they have a good relationship now but his son's sire never did forgive him and they still don't see each other.

"I'm sorry; that sounds pretty rough. How were you able to reconcile your need to keep traveling with your desire to bear more children afterwards?"

It was tough, yeah. For his latter two: One of the things he did in the years between when he left his eldest and when he reconciled with him was ask a lot of people for advice and information about childrearing and about raising kids while traveling - that's actually how he got his start writing books; his notes on that never came together into one but he liked writing them. There are a couple of approaches that would have worked for him kidwise, and he's pretty disappointed that he never met anyone who liked the idea of raising a kid with him while traveling, but babies do fine with a primary caretaker who didn't bear them if that starts in the first few months after they're born, so that's how he did it - for his second child he lived in their primary parent's territory part time for most of their first year and a half, which worked really well, and for his youngest he mostly lived nearby and saw them every few days for the first couple years, which was fine.

Þurvo looks thoughtful for a moment.

"Is that something you're still interested in, or have you moved on? Finding someone who wants to raise a kid while traveling, I mean?"

Well he's slowed down too much for primary parenting at this point, but if someone compatible was looking for a secondary that'd be delightful.

"People here sometimes differentiate between parents, but I have the feeling that Crafters might do so more. What's the difference between a primary and secondary parent?"

He has to pause and think about that for a moment.

The role of a primary parent shifts over a kid's childhood, is a thing, but for babies and toddlers the primary parent is the one they live with, who's making basically all the decisions about how their life is going to be because of that. That fades out over time as the kid learns to take on more things for themselves, but kids tend to default to going to their primary parents for help and advice into early teenagerhood, and it's good for them to have that consistent relationship - he can speak to that firsthand a bit; his mother died when he was twelve and he moved in with one of his aloparents, and it was fine in the long run, but he had a really rough couple years first and still has trouble with similar situations sometimes. The role of a secondary parent is less well defined and also more about the adult's experience than the child's; the main difference between a secondary parent and an adult in the community that the child happens to be friends with is that the secondary parent is personally invested in the child in a way the adult friend isn't, but that might not work out to any specific things the secondary parent actually does that other adults wouldn't, depending on the situation. If he was secondarily parenting a baby he'd probably wet nurse sometimes (if that's safe at his age and weight, which he'd want to check first), and watch them regularly during the day, and have them at his house overnight sometimes so that their primary parent was getting enough sleep to handle traveling, and of course make sure they had any things they needed since that's more difficult here, but he'd defer to the primary parent about things like their schedule or whether it was time to introduce them to different things, and he wouldn't expect to have them overnight most nights or to spend most of his time with them.

"Does a kid normally have exactly one primary parent and secondary parent? I ask because that sounds like a structure that a family here might have, but I think it's more common for a kid to have one or two primary parents and between zero and three secondary ones."

Kids pretty much always have exactly one primary parent, yeah; the territoriality instinct doesn't apply to kids or animals the same way it applies to places or things but it does really complicate the logistics of trying to coparent without a clear point person. The number of secondaries is much more variable, kids don't usually start with more than one or two - and often with none, he'll come back to that in a second - but they'll pick up more as they get to know people in a community, and most kids will end up with at least three or four by the time they're teenagers.

"Oh, I see. So the child picks their own secondary parents? Or the secondary parents pick the child?"

After toddlerhood it's mutual, if a kid isn't going to come to you for help or advice it's not exactly easy to give it - the primary parent might introduce the kid to some adult and encourage them to spend time together, but that's not a secondary parent relationship if that's all that's happening. It's different for really little kids because they bond so strongly with their caretakers, it's not really possible to just be friends with a baby if you're helping take care of them.

"That makes sense; are there any other kinds of formal roles in a child's life like that, or just the parents?"

Some people think of extended family like grandparents as a separate category, and that's arguably true, he hasn't been very involved with his grandkids in a day-to-day way but if he got a letter saying that one of them needed something he'd want to help.

"Do you think you'd want closer contact with your grandchildren if traveling didn't make that more difficult?"

Yeah, definitely. That's been one of the highlights of his visits with his kids, getting to spend time with the grandkids.

Þurvo asks a few more questions about his family, and then brings the topic back around to something he said earlier.

"You mentioned a while ago that children often don't start out with a secondary parent. There definitely are people here who raise their children as a solitary primary parent, but they often find that pretty challenging even with support from the community. What about Crafters makes raising a child like that more common, do you think?"

Well, he doesn't know enough about the locals to have a confident guess at the difference, yet, but crafting and the territoriality instinct both push in that direction - especially with a new baby the crafting is vital, he has no idea how to make that work without having everything prepared so that you can give them as much attention as they need; it's still a little rough with that - sleeping on a baby's schedule is kind of awful - but not too bad.

There's also a biological component to the solo parenting; Crafters who can bear children don't need recent contact with someone to sire them, that's basically unheard of in mammals but it looks like someone genecrafted that capability in at some point. It's not especially uncommon for a Crafter to get up to whatever teenage nonsense they get up to as a teenager and then go off and claim a territory and never interact with another adult Crafter and still have three or four children over eight or twelve years.

Þurvo blinks. Right. He's an alien.

... it's really amazingly coincidental that he looks so human. It's easy to forget; the telepathy just seems natural after a while.

"Huh. Yeah, we don't have that, although I can see why people would want it. It would be nice to become pregnant only once you'd been able to prepare for it. Do people often wait for specific times to have a baby? We've found that babies born in the spring are slightly healthier, although I couldn't guess if the same is true of Crafter babies."

He hasn't heard of time of year making a difference to the baby's health but that might just be that nobody has noticed yet. There are some trends - lots of Crafters do try to avoid timing things to give birth in the summer and early fall, just because being heavily pregnant when it's hot out is pretty miserable - but it's basically just personal preference and when someone feels ready. They have noticed that babies with younger bearers tend to be healthier, up to a point, so Crafters who want kids do often try to get on that sooner rather than later - it was a factor in why he started when he did, though not a major one.