For family of five, it’s about empathy, listening, and togetherness

THE PARENTS: Meghan Wells, 38, and Jake Wells, 43, of Roxborough

THE KIDS: Elliott Roe, 4; Maeve Gaffney, 2 1/2; August (Augie) Lee, born Aug. 31, 2022

THE INEVITABLE QUESTION: Yes, they say; their third would have been named August even if he’d arrived a day later.

It was after Meghan had reached 10 centimeters and before she began to push. It was a top-of-the-roller-coaster moment — just the two of them in the labor room at Lankenau Medical Center.

“We had a few moments of quiet,” Meghan recalls. “We got to hold hands, look at each other, and say, ‘This is it. Our lives are going to be different from here out. Are you ready? I’m ready.’ ”

At that point, September 2018, she and Jake had been together for five years, ever since meeting at a Center City SIPS happy hour event. He was the guy with the pheasant tattoo on his arm. She was the woman who would chat enthusiastically with anyone. They talked about empathy and authenticity over a bucket of beers.

“When we walked away from that conversation, I was just captivated by him,” Meghan remembers. “It felt natural,” Jake says. “There was no anxiety about making sure she didn’t get away; it felt like she’d been there the whole time.”

Jake lived in Fishtown, in an apartment nearly devoid of furniture except for the dining room table from his childhood home and a motorcycle he was rehabbing. On snow days — and there were many in the winter of 2014 — Meghan would decamp to his place with her cat. Jake, working remotely, sat at the table while she lounged on an air mattress they called “Fishtown Beach.”

By June of that year, they moved together into an East Falls rowhouse. And the following year, after a terrible diner breakfast and a scotched trip to Smith Playground (the slide was closed), Jake beckoned Meghan to the dining room table and said, “Take my hand.”

“I just knew,” she says. “He reached into his bag and said, ‘Will you marry me?’ I fell onto him; we were laughing and crying.”

They married in a “doubleheader”: a short Catholic service at a Manayunk church, followed by a second, DIY ceremony at Morris Arboretum, on a July day so humid that the bridesmaids hiked their dresses above their knees.

They knew they wanted kids — more than one, fewer than five — and began trying after Valentine’s Day 2017. It took nearly a year to conceive. “It was really lonely to be dealing with that,” Meghan recalls. Some friends advised her to track her body temperature and ovulation more rigorously; others said to just relax.

When she learned she was pregnant, she bought two small chalkboards and invited a photographer pal to come take pictures. “Write what you love most about each other,” the friend said. Jake wrote, “You are my rock.” Meghan wrote, “You’re going to be a daddy.”

The pregnancy had a rough start — Meghan remembers sprinting through Jefferson Station on her morning commute to avoid “tasting the smells.” She worried about the birth: “What if my water breaks on the train? Am I going to know when I’m in labor?”

But the night before Elliott was born, she dreamed that her beloved grandmother had handed her a baby. “My cognitive mind said, ‘It’s time.’ I sat up like a bolt. It was 4:30 in the morning. By the time I got to the bottom of the steps, my contractions started.”

New parenthood was equal parts angst and bliss. Meghan was laid off seven weeks into her maternity leave and felt an unexpected surge of postpartum depression. At the same time, they took Elliott everywhere: in the baby sling to Johnny Brenda’s, to the Shore, trick-or-treating in a Gritty costume.

“We knew we wanted a second,” Meghan says, and they conceived right away. But the pandemic altered her pregnancy experience. “By the time I went for my appointments in March 2020, I went by myself. The hospital looked like a zombie movie, every exit and entrance cordoned off.” This birth was different, too; Meghan arrived at Lankenau already 6 cm dilated, and Maeve, unlike her inconsolable-on-arrival older brother, didn’t cry, but hiccuped for the first 30 minutes of her life.

It was a tumultuous time: in the world, in their lives. Jake lost his job the month before Maeve’s birth; his parents, who had planned a visit to help out, were derailed by their own health concerns. The four of them spent every waking and sleeping moment together.

“There was so much drama, a lot of emotion, a lot of loneliness,” Meghan recalls — so much that she sought help in a 10-day partial hospitalization program at a women’s emotional wellness center. It took medication, therapy, skill building, forgiveness, and time to find stability.

And then came August. “We did know we wanted a third, but Augie was a surprise in terms of timing,” Meghan says. “My pregnancy was beautiful and calm. He is the exclamation point of our family. We call him our eternal summer.” Even his birth was relatively easy: three pushes, two “blissful nights” in the hospital, a sweet reunion at home.

For both, there are so many lessons layered into parenting. “We decided to start having children during the landscape of the 2016 election,” Meghan says. “If there’s a way to make the world better, it’s by raising good people. We teach our children about empathy and self-awareness, the value of listening and kindness. It’s also, for me, about relinquishing control. They teach me that all the time.”

Jake also feels changed. “I got to a place where I felt like I really understood myself; then you have kids and all of that is thrown out the window because you’re tested in so many new ways. It’s opened up a new part of me.”

Each night, the five of them gather at the table — the one from Jake’s childhood, with dings and scratches and doodles from Sharpie markers, the place where Jake proposed and Meghan said yes. They raise their glasses, lift their voices, and shout, “Team Wells!”