Welcoming a baby after four years of hoping and waiting

THE PARENTS: Diane Billas, 37, and Matt Billas, 32, of Upper Dublin

THE CHILD: Luke Anthony, born Dec. 23, 2022

FIRST CONVERSATIONS: She was second chair in the Ambler Symphony’s French horn section; he was fourth chair. The musician who had third chair was absent for a while, so Diane and Matt talked between measures.

Diane finally tossed the sticker charts — the ones she’d used to log four years of attempting to get pregnant, with different colors marking ovulation, fertile days, and don’t-even-bother times of the month.

They’d tried at first on their own, then with the counsel of a fertility specialist. Diane blamed herself with every negative pregnancy test. “People kept saying, ‘It’ll happen when it needs to.’ But after six months, I thought: There’s something wrong.” She tried taking supplements and being even more vigilant about tracking her cycle.

“I was ashamed. Then I realized: There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she says. “There would be times when people would ask, ‘When are you going to have kids?’ At the beginning, I’d say, ‘Not sure yet. Hopefully, soon.’ Then I started saying, ‘We’re trying.’ ”

Conception was starting to feel like machine-work, stressful and joyless. Still, they kept going, through the pandemic, not fully aware of the toll it was taking on both of them. Matt developed an eating disorder; he overexercised, obsessively lifting weights in their basement. “There was so much that felt beyond my control,” he remembers.

At the same time, Diane was wrestling with her sexuality. She’d told Matt early in their courtship that she was pansexual — at the time, he wasn’t even sure what that meant — but she hadn’t come out to her family. Also, she was shopping a queer YA manuscript — ”the book I wish I’d had in high school,” she says — and accumulating more and more rejections.

By the time they marked the four-year anniversary of trying to conceive, in December 2021, “I was numb,” Diane says. “I couldn’t even feel disappointment anymore. There were many times we thought we might not have kids. We were at the point where we were OK if it was just us. We had each other.”

She continued taking fertility-boosting supplements, but stopped the obsessive testing to pinpoint fertile days. Matt sought outpatient therapy for his eating disorder. Diane got a new job, as a development writer for Penn Medicine.

And in March 2022, someone from Creative James Media called; they wanted to publish her book. A news release would certainly out her, so she opted to tell her family preemptively, and in person. “They were great,” she says. “I want to be able to be authentic, to be comfortable in my own skin.”

A month later, Diane felt odd after going for a run; she scurried down to the basement in her bathrobe, hair dripping wet, to show Matt the positive test. Both of them wept.

“The thing we both realized in hindsight was how much stress we were going through and how that impacted fertility,” he says.

When they first met in 2014 — both played French horn in the Ambler Symphony, and Diane asked Matt out because he was too shy to initiate — she felt certain that she did not want kids. That was her resolve starting in high school, when students had to care for a baby doll for several days, carting it everywhere and tending to it as if it were a real infant.

After a first date at El Limon, Matt and Diane bonded deeply. When she went on a two-week trip to Australia, she talked about him nonstop; back home, he says, “She was all I could think about. She was the piece that was missing.”

He proposed in December 2015; they were married the following summer, on a sticky-hot day punctuated with a thunderstorm. The church, St. Martin in the Fields, lacked air-conditioning; Matt and the groomsmen were sweating in their tuxes. Diane calls it “the best day of my life.” Both were in tears when she walked down the aisle.

“I didn’t want to give up my career, my writing, or traveling for a kid,” Diane says. “But the more I was with Matt, I realized: Oh, we would do this together, and I wouldn’t have to lose myself.”

In retrospect, they say, the pregnancy happened at a perfect time. Diane’s new job was remote, so she wouldn’t have to commute to Center City while pregnant. Matt’s health and outlook were stable. “All of a sudden, things shifted. It all clicked,” he says.

Diane never had morning sickness; she continued running until her third trimester. It was 5 a.m. on a Friday, just before winter break, when her water broke in a slow trickle. At Jefferson Abington Hospital, doctors gave her medication to induce labor. First, she had some fierce contractions. Some relief from an epidural. Ninety minutes of pushing.

Then Luke was there. “After everything we’d gone through, the years of waiting and hoping, we both just broke down,” Matt says.

It was 10 degrees outside the day they brought Luke home. “Now what?” Diane recalls thinking. “I don’t want to break him. I didn’t want to carry him up and down stairs. He was so tiny.”

The lack of sleep and the constancy of breast-feeding stunned them; Luke would nurse for 90 minutes, then need to eat again half an hour later. “I’d have to wake him at night to feed him,” Diane says. “He was 6 pounds, 12 ounces at birth, and 6 pounds, 6 ounces when we left the hospital. We had to get him back up to weight. It was difficult, trying to watch him and pump and learn breast-feeding.”

The long road to parenthood taught them resilience, Diane says. And after worrying that she would have to give up writing in order to have kids, she managed to birth a baby and a book — Does Love Always Win? will be published in June — in rapid succession.

“Everything that happened to us has made us better and positioned us in a better place,” Matt says. “If we’d had Luke two years ago, we wouldn’t have been the people we are now, better able to deal with the challenges of parenthood.”