Savoring life in ‘survival mode’
Micah was surprised at his intense, visceral reaction when he hears Evelyn cry.
THE PARENTS: Angela Kim, 38, and Micah Chan, 32, of Cherry Hill
THE CHILD: Evelyn Ruth, born Feb. 22, 2023
INITIAL ATTRACTION: His dating app profile included photos of puppies; hers indicated an interest in flag football and community engagement. And faith was important to both of them.
In March 2020, just before the world shut down, Micah and Angela went to Wonderspaces, an interactive art installation in Center City. One exhibit invited visitors to write an anonymous note, roll it tightly, then tuck it into a space in the wall.
Micah scribbled, “I’m going to ask her to marry me later this year.”
They’d been dating for six months: an initial swipe on the app CoffeeMeetsBagel, followed by two weeks of texting and a first meet at Bar-Ly, where Angela rushed in late, a frazzled counterpoint to Micah’s more reserved vibe.
“I was going in for a handshake. She went for a hug,” he recalls. She remembers that he tried to order a dark chocolate stout, which the bar did not have, and asked “a thousand questions.” The date lasted eight hours. Micah kept the parking receipt as a souvenir.
And when COVID-19 came, they sequestered, a quarantine pod that included Micah’s parents in New Jersey. Both worked in health care — Angela training as a pediatric emergency physician and Micah in a nursing home — so they were among the frontline employees who could not stay home.
For months, their lives consisted of work, dinners in-house or picnics by the Schuylkill, Netflix binges, occasional visits to their families, and weekend jaunts to Airbnbs in the Poconos or upstate New York.
“The silver lining of COVID was that our relationship was able to grow,” Angela said. “I always said it would be a miracle for me to get married because I never knew I’d want to share the everyday things with someone. But I thought: I can eat dinner with this person every day and watch Netflix and not get tired of that.”
Meantime, Micah was studying proposal videos on the down-low. He asked relatives and friends to create short video messages and even filmed himself at Angela’s grandparents’ grave sites, asking their spirits for permission to marry their granddaughter. In secret, he drove to Palisades Park one night to secure the blessing of her parents, brother, and sister.
Then he lured Angela to a Schuylkill site with the ruse that they would be helping with a friend’s birthday party. She was stunned to see a balloon garland, flower arrangements, photographs, and a laptop playing the compilation of video messages.
Then the twin daughters of a family friend walked up with a poster board: “Will you marry Uncle Micah? Yes or yes?”
They wed on a date memorable for its palindrome — 1/23/21 — and indelible for its COVID precautions. They chose an Airbnb farmhouse in Lancaster, with 33 guests (many of whom were vaccinated health-care workers), air purifiers, and windows open to the winter air. They DJ’d music from their phones.
Initially, they thought they’d wait at least a year before trying to conceive. But in October 2021, Angela said, “How do you feel about having kids?”
“I thought: I’ve been ready,” Micah remembers. “I was just waiting for her to be ready.” They conceived within a few months, but at a nine-week appointment, the doctor couldn’t find a heartbeat.
“I really wanted to be a dad at the time. There was a period of uncertainty, grief, and disappointment,” Micah recalls, along with the sobering knowledge that “now we’re a statistic” among people who experience pregnancy loss.
Angela remembers “going into that spiral” of catastrophic worrying: What if she couldn’t get pregnant again? Or if they had another loss? Could they afford IVF?
But last June, she summoned Micah to the bathroom. There was an infant diaper with words in black Sharpie: “Surprise, you’re on poop duty!” and a handful of pregnancy tests, all unequivocally positive.
For the next nine months, Angela discovered everything she hadn’t learned in medical school: the extremity of exhaustion and nausea. That shortness of breath was normal in pregnancy. That she could tolerate only bagels and crackers for the first trimester. That she’d have to give up kickboxing.
“I was very anxious about every milestone. I had a Doppler at home to check the heart rate every day. It took a while to be emotionally attached and happy about the pregnancy.”
Micah remained calm. “Throughout the journey, I don’t think I was that nervous. I thought: If this is meant to work out, it will work out. We’ve already experienced the worst.”
Their due date was Feb. 26. But on the 21st, daylong Braxton-Hicks contractions became more intense. They arrived at Virtua Voorhees Hospital at 2:30 a.m.: a long wait for a bed, an epidural, a Pitocin drip, an eventual C-section because Angela’s labor wasn’t progressing.
“A C-section wasn’t what we had hoped for. But by that time, I was so tired. I just wanted her to come out. I was holding my breath until I could hear her cry. I didn’t know if I would be really emotional, but I was just sobbing, I was so happy.”
Micah’s first thought: Wow, she has a lot of hair! “I thought I was probably going to cry. But between sleep deprivation, excitement, and adrenaline, it was more a sigh of relief that she was finally here.”
Just weeks after the birth, Angela describes their life as “survival mode” — nightly pillow-chats about their days now a relic of the past; a more authentic appreciation of what their own parents went through.
Micah was surprised at his intense, visceral reaction when he hears Evelyn cry. And Angela, who thought her pediatric training had prepped her for motherhood, often finds herself at a loss.
“I’m a board-certified pediatrician, and I was joking to my colleagues: I feel like I didn’t even do training. [As a parent], you end up questioning everything, looking things up: Is this OK? Is this normal? I was so confident I could reassure parents, but it feels so different, so magnified, when it’s your own child.”