With resiliency, meeting the challenges
Kami needed intensive monitoring — weekly ultrasounds after week 30 — and the couple prepared to have premature babies delivered via induction.
THE PARENTS: Kami Knapp Schechter, 40, and Jonathan Schechter, 42, of Mount Airy
THE KIDS: Tzipporah (Tzippy) Ruth, 2 1/2; Reuven Mendel and Oriel (Ori) Chaim, born Feb. 23, 2023
THEIR NAMES: They liked Tzipporah and its nickname; Ruth is for both the Biblical heroine and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Reuven nods to Jonathan’s father, Reuben, and Kami’s dad, Wayne (Vane, transliterated from Hebrew). Mendel is for her brother, who died just before the twins were born. And Oriel blends the Hebrew words for light (or) and God (El).
Kami knew what a fetal sonogram looked like. She’d seen several of them — solo, because of COVID-19 restrictions, during her first pregnancy — and knew instantly there was something different about the image that flickered across the screen last fall.
“There were two separate jelly beans and two yolk sacs,” she says. The ultrasound tech said, “Did you know you’re having twins?”
The couple looked at each other in disbelief. “Are you sure that’s my uterus?” Kami asked.
Then a doctor came in with an information sheet headlined “Twins are troublemakers.” It detailed the many complications that can accompany twin pregnancies, especially those involving monochorionic-monoamniotic fetuses — that is, those sharing a single placenta and amniotic sac, which is what Kami’s pregnancy seemed to be.
“We left there pretty freaked out,” Kami said. At an 11-week ultrasound, though, a membrane was visible; the twins shared a placenta, but each had his own sac. “That was a shift from deep-seated fear to a little bit of excitement,” she says.
Still, they carried the anxious aftermath of her first pregnancy, which happened quickly and unfolded smoothly until week 36. Then Kami’s blood pressure began to rise; at 38 weeks, it was high enough to signal preeclampsia and prompt an immediate induction.
Gone were her hopes for laboring at home and delivering without an epidural. Instead, her blood pressure climbed “scary high, to a stroke-level number.” She got a magnesium drip, an epidural, and a nap, then woke up fully dilated and ready to push.
Tzipporah was born 11 minutes later. Kami recovered quickly from the birth, but struggled with breast-feeding and postpartum depression that tugged her into an undertow of despair. “It got to the point when my mom asked if I was suicidal, and I said yes,” she recalls.
Medication and intensive outpatient treatment, along with Jonathan’s all-in parenting of Tzipporah, gradually helped. Tzipporah was a mirror image of her father, and the two bonded deeply during those months when Kami was emotionally disengaged. “I knew exactly what Tzippy wanted; I knew what she was thinking,” Jonathan says.
“It took the first six months to get to the point of thinking, ‘This is my baby, I’m her mother and this is amazing,’ ” Kami says. “But it was a long recovery, to the point where I was very unsure about having a second baby.”
Jonathan definitely wanted another, both favored the idea of a sibling for their daughter, and Kami started saying offhandedly, “I want three children, but I don’t want to be pregnant three times.
“That joke manifested.”
The two had talked about kids, life trajectories, and their foundational values early on — during a first date at Ladder 44 in West Philly in 2019. They’d met online almost two years earlier, but after messaging for a few weeks, Jonathan vanished.
Now, he says he just wasn’t ready; he was still reeling from a 2014 divorce, still dating incessantly in an effort to figure out what he wanted. In early 2019, after travel to Poland and Israel that helped him reconnect with his Jewish roots, he reached out again to Kami: “Hey, remember me?”
She’d recently weathered a painful breakup and felt wary of a new entanglement. But that first date, a three-hour, soul-baring lunch, began to change her mind. Both of them had lost their fathers at a relatively young age; both wanted children and Jewish-centered lives.
“He gave me the authority and autonomy to drive the relationship,” Kami says. And for Jonathan, the relationship marked a change of heart. “I had been dating multiple people at once. I decided to go a different route: Let’s slow it down, be in the moment.”
He enlisted his niece to help with the proposal; in a FaceTime conversation purportedly about a birthday present for the child, she told Kami, “You know what I didn’t get? A new aunt. Can I have a new aunt for my birthday?”
They spent the early months of 2020 planning a 125-person wedding; once COVID hit, they downscaled that to a ceremony involving eight people in August of that year. Kami was five weeks pregnant at the time.
With the twins, her pregnancy felt different from the start. “I was super sick right off the bat, very nauseous. And exhausted. Absolutely drained. I had high blood pressure through the entire pregnancy. I barely got off the couch.”
Kami needed intensive monitoring — weekly ultrasounds after week 30 — and the couple prepared to have premature babies delivered via induction. An added stressor was the death of her brother that spring. At week 35, resolved to deliver vaginally, she went to Jefferson Hospital.
“At the last minute — I was 10cm dilated, ready to start pushing — a doctor said, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to have a C-section?’ I vacillated. Finally: Nope, I’m doing this.
“There were 30 people in the room. I remember being on the super small OR table, looking up and seeing really bright lights and having them strap my legs in. I was praying for dear life: Please, God, let everything go well.”
It did, although Baby A (Reuven) needed some breathing assistance in the NICU. Baby B (Oriel) was able to leave the hospital on day three; Reuven came home the next day.
This time, postpartum depression slammed Kami and Jonathan, amping up tension between the two and prompting both to seek help from therapists, family members, and postpartum doulas.
“I’ve learned how resilient I can be, and how much I can handle some very intense stuff,” Kami says. “I have that comfort, knowing anything that we’re given, it can and will be very hard, but we will get through it.”
Jonathan recalls something he told a friend who was considering whether to become a parent: “Having kids is the worst decision you’ll ever make, and the best decision you’ll ever make.”