A baby much wanted and loved

THE PARENT: Angela Hou, 38, of Bella Vista

THE CHILD: Alyssa Naomi, born March 28, 2022

STILL MARVELING: “Even now,” Angela says, “there are times when I wake up and can’t believe she’s real, that she’s really here, that I have a daughter.”

There were hundreds of needles. Small ones, for subcutaneous injections prior to the egg retrieval process, then serious, inch-and-a-half-long points for stabbing herself in the gluteal muscle after the embryo transfer.

Angela hadn’t planned to become a mother on her own. As a child of Taiwanese immigrant parents — the family moved here when Angela was 4 — she assumed that she’d follow the traditional path toward marriage and children.

She grew up in Northern Virginia and attended college and medical school in that area but did her residency at Jefferson Hospital and stayed to practice internal medicine.

“I’ve been in a couple of serious relationships in the past. For whatever reason, they didn’t work out,” she says. “I really wanted to have a family of my own. I started looking at different options and found this whole community of single moms by choice. It really resonated with me. I’ve always liked the idea of strong, independent women making the way for themselves and fulfilling their own dreams.”

She began by freezing her eggs at age 35 — initially, to buy herself more time to meet a potential partner. But then the pandemic hit, making it harder to meet anyone. She considered a matchmaking service and went on a couple of dates. Nothing sparked.

She began searching for a donor — ideally, a man who shared her ethnic background. “I wanted the child to have a strong sense of herself and her identity,” Angela says. “I ended up choosing a donor who was half-Taiwanese.” The man was a college student pursuing marine biology; he was also open-identity, meaning any future offspring could contact him once they turned 18.

She was nervous about telling her family. “I know my mom had been wanting to be a grandma for a long time. [My family] occasionally asked, ‘Have you met anyone? Is there anyone you’re seeing?’ It took them a little while to warm up to the idea [of single parenthood] at first; they imagined the traditional route for me.”

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Surprisingly, the most supportive relative was Angela’s maternal grandmother. “She said: Go for it. If you can have a kid on your own, that’s even better; you don’t need a man.”

Last year, the process sped up: Angela had sperm from her chosen donor shipped to the clinic here; about half a dozen of her eggs were thawed and fertilized, and five looked viable after genetic testing. Three of the embryos had XY chromosomes, indicating a boy. Two were XX.

“I chose to have a girl,” she says. “I felt more comfortable raising a girl since I was doing this on my own. It seemed like it would be an easier path.”

The first embryo transfer was last June. When it failed, “that was definitely disappointing and nerve-wracking. I only had two good embryos that were female.” For the second transfer, in July, Angela had acupuncture treatments leading up to the procedure. She also had a broken foot at the time; one nurse said that was good luck.

An at-home pregnancy test was faintly positive; a few days later, the clinic confirmed the good news. “It was exciting. It was surreal,” Angela says. And it was a relatively easy pregnancy, at least for the first two trimesters. In the last three months, she felt exhausted; she also required extra monitoring — ultrasounds and fetal dopplers — because of her age and because the baby was measuring small.

One night, in bed, three weeks before her due date, Angela heard a pop and felt a gush of fluid. That’s how labor had begun for her mother, with both Angela and her sister, and for her aunts: Their water broke before contractions even started.

At Jefferson Hospital, Angela says, “it was such a blur. They gave me some pain meds, and everything was a haze after that.” She labored for 25 hours, with an epidural, some bleeding that required a blood transfusion, and finally a vacuum-assisted delivery.

“They whisked her away to get monitored at first. When they brought her back, she was this little miracle. I couldn’t believe I was actually holding my baby, and that this little human was inside of me just a few hours ago.”

It took Angela a week to feel certain of the baby’s name; she wanted names that would be easy for her parents to pronounce, names that were “not too common, but not too rare, either.” Finally, she settled on “Alyssa Naomi,” which seemed to fit her newborn daughter.

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Though Angela’s parents still live in Northern Virginia, her mother comes to Philadelphia every few weeks to help. Angela’s job as a physician is flexible — she’s an independent contractor — so when her mother isn’t in town, she’s on full-time with the baby.

She plans to speak Mandarin with Alyssa. They’ll celebrate Chinese New Year and make moon cakes; she’ll take the baby to California early next year to visit Angela’s grandmother, the one who was so supportive of Angela becoming a mother on her own.

“I think all my decisions are based on [Alyssa] now,” she says. “She’s my life. She’s my focus. Everything revolves around her. Right now, the question is whether or not I want to have another. That’s something I’ve been debating. Right now, our family just consists of her and me. I just feel like it would be nice for her to have a sibling.”

In the meantime, she sees echoes of her own features, and her mother’s, in Alyssa’s face. She also notes mannerisms — the hiccups, the habit of putting one hand against her cheek — that were evident even in utero. Occasionally, she glimpses the donor’s likeness (she saw his baby pictures as part of the sperm bank’s information packet).

She plans to tell Alyssa the truth about her origins. “I want to be transparent, open, and honest and let her know that she was very much wanted and very much loved.”