Building a family during unusual times

THE PARENTS: Christy Cook-Schwartz, 41, and Alex Schwartz, 33, of West Mount Airy

THE KIDS: Miles Meir, 3; Eli Daniel, born March 9, 2023

THEIR NAMES: Miles is named for Alex’s grandfather, Melvin. His middle name means “one who shines.” Eli is named for other great-grandparents: Betty (a derivative of Elizabeth) and Daniel.

Christy was ranting. It wasn’t fair, she grouched, that private-school teachers were paid so much less than those in public schools. If they’d stayed in Chicago, her income would be 50% higher.

Alex looked at her: “I think you should take a pregnancy test.”

It was Oct. 31, 2019. They’d been trying for a month. “The fact that I found out I was pregnant on Halloween set the tone for all the crazy that was to come,” Christy says.

Crazy, as in a pandemic that left her terrified of any stranger who coughed or sneezed. “I was worried that I was going to get sick or I was somehow going to endanger the fetus.”

On the other hand, Alex, a pharmaceutical engineer, stopped traveling for work, and Christy’s virtual school days ended at 2 p.m. “It was probably the most relaxing way to get ready to have a newborn,” he says.

Children were a definite yes for this couple; both remember discussing the topic in a “let’s define the relationship” conversation after their second or third date, in Alex’s apartment, the place they called “Elsie House” because the name of the architect’s wife, Elsie, was set into the tile floor.

They’d known each other for about a year — attending the same Chicago synagogue, moving in overlapping friend-circles. At some point, pals began to ask, “How come you two aren’t together?”

Alex was drawn to Christy’s passion for teaching science. She loved that he was also a science enthusiast and, at the time they met, a foster parent to six 4-week-old kittens. “There’s really no better way to a woman’s heart than to show the softer side of yourself,” she says.

When Alex landed a job in Philadelphia, a place neither of them had lived, that prompted serious reckoning. “It was never in the cards to end the relationship. We knew this was it,” Alex says.

“I knew Alex was my person, but I felt really conflicted about the idea of leaving,” says Christy, who was born and raised in the Midwest. “I said, ‘I can’t move to Philly unless I know what we’re planning for the future.’ We had a lot of intense conversations about what that future would look like.”

Alex moved in early 2017; Christy found a job teaching at a Quaker school and joined him in August. By that time, they were engaged. They married in 2018, back in Chicago, at a speakeasy restaurant. A photograph captures a cherished moment: right after the ceremony, when they were sitting, just the two of them, “with these ridiculous, goofy grins on our faces,” Christy says.

That first pregnancy started smoothly. Then the pandemic began. Christy developed gestational diabetes and was considered, in obstetric parlance, of “advanced maternal age.” Because of a spinal fusion she’d had as a teenager, an epidural was out of the question. But she didn’t learn that until she was at Pennsylvania Hospital, on the verge of an induction.

“I was not going to do ‘natural’ birth without pain management options other than rest and massage,” Christy says. “So we went ahead and scheduled a C-section instead.”

In the operating room, Alex learned that at least one parenting cliché held a nugget of truth: “You don’t know what it’s like until you hear your first child’s cry. It’s a life-changing sound. I remember feeling instantly bonded to him.”

Breastfeeding was difficult; Christy’s milk was slow to come, and Miles lost 10% of his body weight in the first several days. Because of COVID-19, no one could visit them in the hospital, and Alex was not permitted to leave and return. They ordered food via Grubhub.

“I thought, ‘I’ve only been a mom for three days, and I’m already failing,’ ” Christy says. Once they were home with Miles, her anxiety continued. “I’d wake up in the middle of the night and be panicked until I put my hand on his chest to see that he was still breathing.” She feared accidentally dropping the baby over the banister and down the stairs.

Alex was the opposite; he’d worried in advance about how to be a dad, but found much of parenting to be “autopilot and gut instinct.”

They wanted Miles to have a sibling. But conception, this time, was difficult: a miscarriage in the fall of 2021. Then another. Several chemical pregnancies. A fertility consult. Soul-searching conversations about how much intervention they would try.

Just as Christy was starting the blood work for a first round of IVF, she became pregnant, in July 2022. Along the way, both had discovered a community of people who’d experienced pregnancy loss and infertility. “I told people in the workplace and heard, ‘Oh, that happened to me,’ ” Alex says. “They said, ‘It’s tough, but you’ll get through it.’ ”

Christy calls it “the sorority that no one ever wants to pledge.”

Her anxiety during that pregnancy remained at red-alert levels, fueled by a series of minor calamities. She tripped, while holding Miles, on her way into Target. She fell again, in the mud outside his day-care center. A fever landed her in the hospital for monitoring. She had a fender bender.

When she saw her doctor for routine monitoring six days before her scheduled C-section, her amniotic fluid was low. At Jefferson Abington Hospital, the verdict was: “You’re having this baby tonight.”

That was in March. Now, Alex works to modulate his “Dad-voice,” the one that means “Listen to me. Now.” Christy practices patience. She recalls a night when Miles kept chanting, “Take Eli away. I don’t want Eli here.” But there was also the day when he raced into his preschool classroom to announce, “I have a baby brother!”

“We can’t control [the kids’] emotions or how they react,” she says. “All we can do is control our own response to the situation.”