Embracing the responsibility of parenthood

The ocean air smelled putrid. Even their beloved Cavapoo, Willie, had a scent that made Brielle’s stomach clench. Secretly, she ordered some pregnancy tests from Amazon, and after the two returned from Long Beach Island, she ducked into the bathroom and closed the door.

“Then I set up a camera and was holding Willie, pretending I was shooting a video with him,” Brielle says. “I said, ‘Anthony, come be in this video with us.’ He came over and was smiling. I said, ‘Willie, you’re getting a human!’ ”

Anthony thought she meant a stuffed dog toy in the shape of a person. He still didn’t get it when Brielle said, “You’re going to be a dad.”

“I thought: A dad to the stuffed animal?” Finally, it clicked. “Ohhh … a real dad. A dad-dad.”

They wanted to be parents, once all the other pieces were in place: marriage, the dog, a house, a financial cushion. “We always had a vision-board type of thing: the goals we wanted to hit in life,” Anthony says.

They attended the same high school, Moorestown High in South Jersey; he was a popular kid, a football player, and she hung with a quieter crowd. But after high school, both were pursuing music — Brielle sings and plays guitar, and Anthony is a producer and rapper — when a friend shared one of Brielle’s music videos on Facebook.

Anthony watched it, liked it, and reached out to see if she might want to collaborate. She remembered him. “There weren’t a lot of African American students at our school, so I thought: Oh, he’s one of the other Black kids. … I had this really weird feeling when he reached out, like a wave washed over me,” she recalls. “There was just something there.”

That was May 31, 2015. The two started a YouTube page, documenting their lives and making music videos together. Both were looking for long-term mates; both wanted to have kids eventually. On Aug. 8, Anthony asked Brielle to be his girlfriend, and exactly three years later, during a family vacation in Ocean City, he suggested a photo shoot on the beach.

Brielle, who thought the outing was simply a family vacation, had decided impulsively to cut off nearly all her hair just before the beach trip; her mother insisted she go to a salon and have the DIY cut professionally styled. Then suddenly they were oceanside, with Anthony saying sentimental things and dropping to one knee in the sand while Brielle’s sister recorded the moment on video.

They planned a big ceremony — both have large, extended families — for Aug. 8, 2020, but ended up having a small “pandemic wedding” in Anthony’s parents’ backyard, followed by a drive-by; the two stood on a corner, in their wedding outfits with matching masks, as friends and relatives cruised by to offer their greetings.

“It was the opposite of what we had planned,” Brielle says, “but it was really intimate. People all came through. It was the best day ever.”

Then came the jobs, the dog, and one final adults-only trip to Disney World. Last summer, they held an “I Do, Part 2″ — an outdoor celebration with 180 guests — and announced during their thank-you speeches, “Keep us in your prayers; we’re going to be parents in March.”

Physically, the pregnancy was smooth. Brielle remembers the first ultrasound: “We saw her tiny little heart beating; she looked like a little frog.” Later, the baby would move when Anthony crooned, “When You Wish Upon a Star” to Brielle’s belly.

“I was nervous about our lives completely changing,” Brielle recalls. “I knew there was going to be a lack of sleep, and I love my sleep.” Anthony, meanwhile, felt “excited about the pushing part — just seeing the whole process, the whole hospital portion.”

The baby was a few days overdue, and Brielle had been feeling Braxton-Hicks contractions for a week. “It was always a false alarm,” she says, “but that day, I woke up and knew something was different.” At an OB visit, the doctor stripped her membranes and casually said, “Maybe we’ll see the baby today.”

By evening, she was at Virtua Mount Holly Hospital. “We got there just in time. I’d had contractions all day. At first I could handle it. Then, in the birthing room, I’d only have a minute of rest before the contractions would start up again. I said, ‘I’m ready for the epidural.’ ”

Anthony, meantime, eyed the monitor to gauge the strength of Brielle’s contractions; then he watched as a head emerged with swirls of hair. Ellie was born at 3:17 a.m. “I had my eyes really tight because I was pushing,” Brielle remembers. “I opened my eyes, and she was floating in the doctor’s hand.”

Brielle’s mother came to help for a few days; Brielle wept when she left. “By now, we have our routine,” she says — days that include tummy time and finger-grabbing and laughs from Ellie when Anthony starts dancing or singing in a goofy voice.

Both say the logistics of parenting are under control, but their emotional lives feel upended. Anthony wakes to peek at the bassinet every time Ellie makes a sound. “When she’s in her bed, I look over to make sure she’s still breathing,” Brielle says. “And when I’m feeding her at night, I think about her whole future.”

Parenthood, Anthony says, is all-consuming, a constant calculation of plans and risks and hoped-for outcomes, a relentless second-guessing. “I still feel like a kid at heart,” he says, “but I’m responsible for an actual human.”

For Brielle, parental instinct now seems more potent, wider than her own family. “I’ve always loved babies,” she says. “But now, if we’re at the store and I see another baby, I feel like watching out for them, like I have to protect all the babies in the world.”