Shifting perspective from mourning to gratitude

THE PARENTS: Janelle Cannon, 40, and Matt Cannon, 39, of Bucks County

THE CHILD: Gabriel Michael, born Oct. 27, 2021

THEIR TAKE ON LABOR: “It was easy until you could feel that the baby was in a small space,” Janelle says. “He came out looking a little alien,” says Matt. “Oh, my God, that’s him? That’s wild.”

It was like a gynecological exam: flimsy gown, hospital socks, feet in stirrups. While Matt waited in the parking lot, the embryologist flashed Janelle an ultrasound photo of the cells donated by an anonymous couple, the cells he was about to transfer into her uterus.

“He showed me the embryo in a petri dish,” she recalls. “It was a little, bumpy-looking clump. He said, ‘Now I’m going to suck it up into this tube.’ I watched him do that on the monitor. ‘I’m going to put it in; you’re going to be pregnant until proven otherwise.’ ”

They’d been waiting for years to hear those words.

At first, Janelle wanted children; Matt didn’t feel quite ready. But they knew, from their first date at a Barnes & Noble cafe in 2013, that they’d each found their person. They shared a love of ‘80s horror films and synthesized music; they went to the movies, to the mall, to Peddler’s Village.

Janelle began hanging out at Matt’s house — he lived with his parents in Bensalem then — on weekends. Then it was every night after work. “It felt like we’d known each other forever,” she says.

Even when he accidentally introduced her to his mother as Janette, even when her mother was nervous to welcome a man her daughter had initially met online, the two felt certain, utterly at ease with each other.

They began living together in 2014. Matt collected rare VHS tapes, and on Christmas Eve 2016, he told Janelle that one had arrived with her name on it. Inside the plastic slip case was a note telling her to go upstairs; under the pillow was a second note: “Go back downstairs.”

“When I came back down, he was on his knee, with the ring,” she says.

They chose April 15, 2017, as a wedding date because the venue was available and the Farmers’ Almanac predicted sunny weather. Janelle put Matt’s ring on the wrong finger, and they made guests chuckle when he started to remove her garter, but first pulled out a long chain of knotted handkerchiefs. Both recall choking up when Janelle walked down the aisle.

They tried to conceive. Six months went by. “I thought something must be wrong with me,” Janelle remembers. “My mom would always be like, don’t give up hope. Say your prayers. You’ll have a kid someday.”

“When we were trying and nothing was working, I felt terrible for Janelle,” Matt says. “This was something she really wanted, and I wanted to give it to her.”

Consultation with a fertility specialist yielded grim news: a perfect storm of low sperm count for Matt and weak egg quality for Janelle. Though they tried four rounds of timed intercourse using Clomid, which exacerbated Janelle’s usual bouts of anxiety and depression, the endocrinologist was frank from the start: Your best bet, he said, will be egg or embryo donation.

They talked about both options and agreed that using a donated embryo felt more equitable; that way, neither of them would be genetically related to their offspring. The next step was to join a waitlist for embryos donated by other couples who had used that fertility practice.

That took more than a year. “It gave me time to grieve the loss,” Janelle recalls, and to shift perspective from mourning to gratitude. “We’re getting this embryo; we’re giving this baby a chance to live.”

They also learned of grants to help with the costs of embryo transfer; an application to Baby Quest for $2,500, plus $500 for medication, came through just as they reached the top of the waitlist. “They send you a write-up of the [genetic] parents’ medical history, their background,” Janelle says. “We both decided yes, we’ll take that embryo.”

That meant more medical appointments, intensive monitoring, and nightly injections with hormones to prepare Janelle’s uterine lining for the transfer. And when she walked out of the clinic that day in February 2021, Matt was struck by the ordinariness of the moment: “It was like she walked into a grocery store and came back out: OK. It happened.”

For the next two weeks, they tried not to think about what might be transpiring in Janelle’s womb. But every ripple of indigestion, every twinge of a cramp, made her wonder: Do you think that means something?

They returned to the clinic for a blood test, then headed for King of Prussia mall for distraction until the results came back. “Eventually, we got a call: ‘Good news. The numbers are good. You’re pregnant. Congratulations.’ I couldn’t believe it.”

The pregnancy was smooth until the third trimester, when Janelle — along with her family members and her medical team — began to feel concerned about her blood pressure and foot swelling, pronounced enough that she’d had to buy bigger shoes.

At a routine appointment on Oct. 25 — the due date was early November — a nurse took Janelle’s blood pressure and didn’t like the numbers she saw. First, she was sent to St. Mary Medical Center for monitoring; soon the messaging changed. “You’re going to be having a baby!” the doctor announced. “Call your husband and tell him to come over.”

By the time Matt arrived, the hospital’s front doors were locked. “Go around,” called a voice from inside. “I had to walk through this labyrinth of a hospital to find her.” And that’s where the two remained, through a two-day induction, an epidural, and 90 minutes of pushing. What they remember is Gabriel’s first gasp.

The birth was “amazing, terrifying, and beautiful all at once,” Matt says.

When they first learned about embryo donation, they worried that, someday, their child might challenge them, saying, “You’re not my mom.”

Now they feel sanguine about their choice. “If and when he comes up to us and says, ‘Who are my parents?’ we’ll say, ‘We’re your parents. You’re a gift to us,’ ” Matt says. “And we will explain everything.”