Determined to be a mom, she achieves dream with help and inspiration

THE PARENT: Johanna DeRogatis, 45, of Havertown

THE CHILD: Brynn Noelle, born Oct. 24, 2022

HER NAME: Johanna had been amassing baby-name possibilities for years, and loved the sound of “Brynn” paired with “Noelle” and her multisyllabic last name.

In childhood photos of Johanna, she’s usually clutching a doll.

“I always did expect to have children,” she says. “I loved babysitting. I couldn’t wait to be a mom.”

But as a peripatetic childhood — including four years in St. Thomas, where her father worked in a hotel, and where Johanna and her twin sister snacked on shrimp cocktail after school — cartwheeled into her 20s, Johanna figured there was no rush.

She worked two jobs, studied finance online at the University of Phoenix, did beer promotions for Rolling Rock, traveled to Fort Lauderdale with friends. “I thought I had all the time in the world,” she says. “Even 35 seemed like 100 years away.”

Suddenly she was 38, and a long-term relationship had just imploded. After the heartbreak, Johanna began dating, scrutinizing every prospect for his potential as a father. “I had to know right away: Does this person want kids? That was my first question, which I’m pretty sure scared people off.”

Then a friend, a woman who’d used a sperm donor to conceive two children — told Johanna her story. Johanna read a few books on single motherhood and talked to other women who were parenting solo.

“I went through the typical fears: Could I do it?” she recalls. “My fear was that I would be cheating [the child] out of a family, somehow. Then I realized: You know what? There are so many different families. I thought: If I don’t do this, I will always regret not being a mom.”

She found a donor through the California Cryobank; seeing the man’s photos and hearing a recorded interview helped convince her that he was the one. “He looked like someone I would date,” she says. “I felt like I clicked with him.”

Two intrauterine inseminations failed; Johanna switched fertility clinics and upped the ante to IVF. “I remember the first time I had to do an intramuscular injection. My sister was here, and I cried and had ice on me for a half-hour. But after two weeks, I was just sticking myself. You get used to it.”

After a disappointing egg retrieval — not one of the embryos survived past the fifth day — Johanna embarked on a 90-day plan, outlined in a fertility book, to boost her egg quality. She swapped out her plastic containers for glass; she gulped wheatgrass juice.

On day 87, Johanna learned her mother had had a massive stroke and needed full-time rehab. Johanna became her power of attorney and took on much of the responsibility for her care. Then the pandemic started and her fertility clinic closed its doors.

“I thought: Am I ever going to be able to do this? I put it on hold for almost a year.”

Meantime, an ex-boyfriend had moved back to the area, and the two began dating. Johanna was in the midst of an IVF cycle in August 2021 when clinic staff called and said, “ ‘Stop all your medication. You’re pregnant.’ It had happened naturally with the person I was dating.”

But a few weeks later, she miscarried.

The third IVF cycle was the charm. Johanna had been meditating and reading books like The Universe Has Your Back: Transform Fear to Faith. She walked out of the fertility clinic on the day of her transfer, Feb. 10, certain that she was pregnant with a girl.

There was morning sickness. Then the onset of gestational diabetes. Then Johanna’s beloved 15-year-old Chihuahua, Meeko, died suddenly. Still, her pregnancy included redemptive moments, including the woman in line at Anthropologie who gushed, “Is this your first? You’re too young for this to be your second!” Johanna was 44 at the time.

Because of the gestational diabetes, doctors at Paoli Hospital recommended an induction one week before her due date. Once her water broke, the pain became excruciating. “I was throwing up. I asked for an epidural right way and fell back asleep.” Four hours later, she was nearly fully dilated. Johanna pushed for an hour, her stepmom and twin sister by her side.

She’d developed mild preeclampsia and needed a magnesium drip, which meant she couldn’t hold the baby right away. “You can’t eat, they give you a catheter, you can’t move for 24 hours. I was watching everyone else hold her. It was very emotional. I felt so awful.”

She recalls the first time she was alone with Brynn at home, sitting across the room from the infant who was hers … and a complete stranger. “I said, ‘OK, don’t make any sudden moves. I won’t, either. Let’s just be nice to each other.’ ”

While the postpartum period wasn’t easy — she was on medication for high blood pressure for 12 weeks, and she still felt guilt and grief over Meeko’s death — Johanna also notes the luck that made parenthood possible for her.

“I was lucky to be able to pay for this, to take money from my 401(k).” She also lobbied her employer, an investment firm, to cover infertility treatments; in January 2022, the company finally agreed.

And there is boundless help: from her father and stepmother, neighbors and coworkers, the sister who lives just a few blocks away. Johanna recalls asking her friend, the single mother whose journey first inspired her, “ ‘What if I can’t do it alone?’ She said, ‘You’re never alone. When you need people, they’re there.’ That’s true. It’s not as scary as I thought it would be.”

There was another surprise, an indelible moment just after Brynn was born. “I remember them putting her on top of me. I had a necklace with my dog’s ashes on. She laid on my chest and grabbed right onto the necklace.

“No one tells you this, but when she came out, all these events flew through my memory, from childhood, almost like this tunnel of everything I’d gone through my whole life was coming up to this moment. And there she was.”