For Jenna and Omar Mosley, a family of their own

THE PARENTS: Jenna-Cherrelle (Jenna) Harris-Mosley, 36, and Omar Mosley, 43, of Montgomery County

THE CHILD: Jemma-Michelle (Jemma) Doreen, born Dec. 31, 2019

HER NAME: Jenna wanted a “J” name, and she likes the way the baby’s name matches the rhythm of her own; “Doreen” is for the middle name of Omar’s mother and one of his sisters, as well as for a cousin of Jenna’s who had that as a first name.

Jenna likes to say that Omar was a housewarming gift.

It was November 2014, and she’d just bought her own place in Germantown; to celebrate, she invited relatives, colleagues, and Facebook pals to an open house. One friend asked if she could bring someone, a man named Omar.

“She walked in with this tall, beautiful man. He had to duck a little bit to get into the house,” Jenna recalls.

As for Omar, he remembers glimpsing the party’s host, straight ahead, standing in the kitchen. The two chatted, and Jenna was struck by his helpfulness — offering to tote chairs from the basement and to help carry a guest in a wheelchair up the front porch steps.

When Omar left, they hugged goodbye. “I wanted to get to know her better, but at the same time, I was trying to stay away from dating. I was conflicted,” he recalls.

Jenna was clear. She asked their mutual friend for Omar’s number, and the two went out for karaoke in Chinatown, where she sang Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass.” There were phone calls, texting marathons, dates to watch movies and cook together.

“I thought he was trying to be a confirmed bachelor. But I felt like he was going to be my person,” she says. “I let him catch up with me.”

After a season of dating, on a trip to Washington, Omar had a moment of self-reckoning. “I was trying not to emotionally invest in relationships. I had this wall. On that trip, I allowed myself to become vulnerable. That’s when I started to let her in.”

They traveled together — the Bahamas, Jamaica, Aruba, Bermuda — with Jenna in the role of “cruise director,” planning every detail in advance so that, once on vacation, the two could ease into the flow.

On Mother’s Day 2017, during a gathering at Jenna’s house, Omar thanked their guests — his mother, Jenna’s mom, their sisters, some friends — then turned to Jenna’s mother and asked, “What would you think if I married your daughter?”

In moments, he was on one knee; Jenna knelt with him, in tears as he slipped a ring onto her finger. They were married the following May.

When Jenna was in her late 20s, she’d had a moment of self-interrogation: Do I really want to have kids, or is that just what I’m socialized to think I want? “I realized: Yes, this is something I’ve always wanted. I have three biological siblings I grew up with, raised by a single mom. We had our little core family, and I always wanted a family of my own.”

She knew conception might not be easy: “I have polycystic ovarian syndrome, as well as being a plus-size woman.” So she sought counsel from a fertility specialist — tests and a procedure to flush her fallopian tubes — even before she and Omar started trying.

On his side, there were other obstacles. He’d never especially yearned for children, and 10 years earlier, a doctor had diagnosed a condition called varicocele, in which blood backs up in the veins along the spermatic cord. That, he said, could affect Omar’s fertility.

Jenna refused to take “unlikely” for an answer. Together, they saw a urologist, who recommended a varicocelectomy to redirect blood flow to healthy veins and, hopefully, boost the couple’s chances of conceiving. He had that procedure on the last day of 2018.

But when they went for a follow-up appointment in April, the surgeon said their chances of conception were still slim. What none of them knew was that Jenna was already pregnant.

They felt crushed by the doctor’s grim report, Jenna remembers. But a few weeks later, when her period was late, she took a pregnancy test at midnight, then showed the result to her husband. “Why is Clearblue playing games with my emotions?” she wanted to know. The next morning, another test seconded the first. Then a third.

The pregnancy, she says, was “beautiful.” No morning sickness. No heartburn. Just the usual pendulum of mood swings, along with cravings for cuddle time and apple juice. Jenna tried to keep a lid on her anxiety about miscarriage, though she whispered to the baby: “Please stay in there. It’s not time for you to come out.”

They gave the results of her 10-week blood work to Jenna’s sister, who bought a huge ballon and had it filled with pink confetti. At a July 4 cookout, they popped the balloon in a gender reveal. Each week, Jenna would snap a selfie in the supermarket, holding a fruit or vegetable that, according to her pregnancy app, approximated the baby’s size.

They settled on a name, but kept it to themselves. Out loud, they called her “Beanie.”

She was born on New Year’s Eve at Lankenau Medical Center, a scheduled induction that ended in a C-section when labor stalled at 8 centimeters. “My body didn’t want to cooperate, and she wanted to hang out where she was,” Jenna says. After a brief scare — the baby cried initially, then stopped, and doctors were about to intubate her — Jemma-Michelle began to breathe on her own.

Still, she needed a day in the NICU. When her parents first saw their daughter there, she had tubes in her nose, an IV snaking into a tiny vein. “A nurse said, ‘Oh, you’re Jemma-Michelle’s mom,’ and a feeling washed over me: Yes. I am.”

It was an equally surreal moment for Omar, like the first time he’d called Jenna his “fiancee.” Suddenly, the baby wasn’t Beanie. “She was a real person. We were meeting her for the first time — the beginning of what would be Jemma, forever.”

Parenthood, Omar knows now, doesn’t land in that instant. It’s an accrual of moments and actions: lowering their voices in Jemma’s presence; realizing they can’t just dash out to the movies; tending to her when she cries. “Now she’s part of our life,” he says. “That’s when you start to become a parent.”