My husband, Skylar, and I decided last week to try our hand at gambling. That is, we boarded an airplane with our toddler, West. Our destination was Portland, Oregon, where my in-laws live. We hoped the short journey from Salt Lake City wouldn’t give us much trouble despite the fact that our child has recently reached a new developmental stage we lovingly call “domestic terrorism.”

We can’t complain too much. Until now, he’s been a model citizen. We sometimes say it was so difficult and expensive to become parents that when God picked which baby to send us, she chose the infant that would give us the least trouble to make up for having forgotten to give one of us a uterus. But we fear that goodwill may have been only a promotional thing, like getting the first 18 months free on a subscription to Disney+.

When we boarded the plane, I turned to the woman sitting next to me to deliver my opening monologue — a speech I’ve given so often I sometimes accidentally answer the phone this way. The address started with an apology that she had to sit next to us, transitioned to a history lesson on how our baby is quite a good traveler, and concluded with a second apology in case he chose this flight to break that track record.

Skylar typically elbows me during the unsolicited oration, telling me it’s unnecessary to apologize for generally existing before we’ve even done anything wrong. That’s because Skylar wasn’t brought up in the Cathie McCann School of Not Wanting to Inconvenience Anyone, like I was. (This was during the 1980s and ’90s, meaning mild corporal punishment was used, but the tuition was free so why should I complain?)

The woman assured me she wasn’t worried and then took the one step a person can take to permanently win me over: She complimented our kid.

As the plane taxied, we summoned a bottle of milk and called up West’s most responsible babysitter on the in-flight entertainment screen: Disney’s “Cinderella.”

West settled into Skylar, kicked up his feet, giggled at the mice and generally suggested to us this flight was going to go fine. He’d fall into a nap that would last until we disembarked in triumph. The best part of these flights is the victory lap we take at the end past all the passengers with whom we had imaginary tension when we pictured them doubting us at the start of our travels.

The flight seemed to be going without a hitch. I spent most of it peeking through the seats in front of me to watch the film chosen by a man around my age with eyes so rested it was clear he had no clue what it’s like to have to say to his spouse “can you see teeth marks on my neck” after a hug with his son went south.

Next to that man was a woman dressed as if she had the power to fire someone important. She spent the journey typing emails in a font that’s probably named something like “Corporate” or “Board Meeting.”

Goodbye, happy landing

It was around the time the captain came on the intercom (to explain how flights work and that ours would be ending) that our harrowing experience, which caused my entire family ultimately to experience varying states of airport nudity, truly began.

Our toddler looked us both in the eyes before proceeding to vomit everything we have ever fed him in his entire 21 months of mortal existence. Nay, not just everything we’ve ever fed him. I believe I saw him throw up things I myself had eaten before he was even born. It was as if he was attempting to do genealogy, reaching into the shallow ends of his ancestry to summon his bilious roots.

I can’t prove it, but I think his head spun around his neck for at least four minutes. He looked like the girl from “The Exorcist.” And believe me, I’m a proud card-carrying, raging homosexual, but if a priest had been aboard that flight, I would have absolutely disavowed my gay marriage on the spot and converted to Catholicism — if required — to get a cleric to compel the power of Christ to cast out Pazuzu.

We had brought with us our child’s favorite blanket and that served as our puke bag throughout the ordeal.

The poor baby was unhappy while it was happening, but the moment the plane touched the ground, he offered his final burp, and then something of a giggle as if even he knew this would make for a funny story in a newspaper.

I turned to the woman seated next to me, who had already attempted to retrieve from her purse a number of sanitizing wipes to offer us, like the proffer of a Windex spray bottle in the face of a forest fire.

“I am so sorry,” I whispered. As vomit caked the front of my shirt, she said, “Honey, everyone in this vicinity is feeling sorry for you. You don’t need to be apologizing to me.”

I then held up the vomit-drenched blanket and asked her, “Do you want this as a souvenir?”

“Yes,” she joked, holding out her hands. “I’m really cold and was looking for something to warm me up.”

‘Just go’

This sense of humor didn’t seem to be shared by the man and woman in the row in front of us. At this point, they were sitting forward so far in their seats they were technically standing, both of them holding their shirts over their noses.

Skylar suggested I leave the plane with the masses while he hung back, waiting for the passengers to evacuate. He had suffered the brunt of it. I went out to claim our stroller that we had gate-checked.

I waited in the terminal to witness Skylar’s and West’s joint walk of shame, both of them half naked as they entered the airport. “I was trying to clean everything,” Skylar said, “but the flight attendants looked at us with such pity and whispered ‘just go.’”

We had made a decision that day that I can now only describe as arrogant to not pack inside our carry-on bags a single thread of alternate clothing for any of us. This meant we had to empty our bank account for a full family wardrobe change in an overpriced airport boutique clothing store, like we were hosting the Oscars and money was no object.

We were a party of three, forged in a fire that will forever bond us, bouncing out of baggage claim, even our toddler with enough self-awareness to avoid the gaze of our former fellow passengers who were giving us a 15-foot buffer.

We sped away from the terminal, windows down, having discarded a number of items of clothing in an airport garbage bin. We had thought about trying to bag them up and wash them later, but, hey, this is gambling, after all.

And when it comes to parenting, you got to know when to hold ’em. Know when to fold ’em. Know when to walk away.

Know when to run.

Note to readers • Eli McCann is an attorney, writer and podcaster in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his husband, child and their two naughty (yet worshipped) dogs. His new book is “We’re Thankful for the Moisture: A Gay Guy’s Guide to Mormon Faith, Family, and Fruit Preservation.”