Growing as they go

THE PARENTS: Sam Koza, 32, and Marc Koza, 34, of Roxborough

THE CHILD: Lennon Margot, born Oct. 22, 2022

HER NAME: Not for “that” Lennon, though they appreciate the Beatles. Not for the Russian dictator (“We tell people, it’s L-E-N-N-O-N, comrade,” Marc says). But Sam likes gender-neutral names for children as well as the music of Lennon Stella, a Canadian singer.

She knew he was sitting on the ring.

Marc kept shifting uneasily in his chair at the Love; no wonder, Sam thought, because there’s a weird lump in his back pocket. Besides, she’d seen the ring bag — though she restrained herself from peeking inside — in their closet a month earlier.

“I said, ‘I’m going to go wash my hands.’ I got up so he could move the ring. When I came back, he looked much more relaxed.” But it wasn’t until after dinner, during a chilly winter walk in Rittenhouse Square, that Marc dropped to one knee, shaking with nervousness, and said, “I love you. Will you marry me?”

Sam’s response: Yes. About time.

She was typically the more decisive of the two, from the night they met 10 years ago at Tony’s Place, a bar in Warminster where Sam’s dad was the singing bartender. It was karaoke night. “I saw Marc from across the bar and proceeded to hit on him ruthlessly the entire night,” she recalls.

Her opening gambit: “Has anybody ever told you that you look like Prince Harry?”

Marc was nonplussed; he’d heard that one before. But then Sam stepped to the microphone for a rendition of “Hand in My Pocket” by Alanis Morissette. “I heard her sing and thought, ‘Yeah, she’s pretty good.’ That opened up the doors of conversation.”

There was a Facebook reach out, a friendship, then a concert one night that Sam definitely thought of as a date … until the moment Marc confided, “I have a girlfriend.” But the next morning, he called back: “I broke up with my girlfriend. Do you want to come over and watch a movie?”

They moved in together in 2015. And for several years, Sam would occasionally ask, “Are we getting married?” The answer: “Probably.”

His hesitation wasn’t about Sam, he recalls; it was a more existential angst. “[Marriage] is such a big life step, one of those things where you realize you’re getting older and life is flashing by,” he says.

They were planning a wedding for September 2020. But before Sam’s bridal shower in July, she began to get cancellations from friends who didn’t want to be in crowds. A bridesmaid said she wasn’t comfortable being part of a wedding. So they postponed until May 2021 at Tyler Arboretum.

“Walking down the aisle was surreal,” Sam remembers. “I was vibrating from head to toe. My dad said, ‘Stop shaking. Just breathe.’ ” They’d written their own vows and taken lessons to dazzle the crowd with their first dance, to Ben Platt’s “Grow As We Go.”

It’s not a traditional wedding song, Sam notes, but they liked the lyrics’ message that two people can grow and change together.

She definitely wanted children. “I have always been very motherly,” Sam says. “It’s part of the reason I’m a nurse. I like trying to help people. I like giving advice. I wanted to have kids in my younger 30s so I could enjoy them a lot.”

Marc was less sure, but willing to try. They were married; they’d bought a house and renovated it. They had a cat and a puppy. “We worked our way up gradually,” Sam says. “The next step was a baby.”

It was Valentine’s Day when she woke up at 5 a.m., certain that she was pregnant. A test confirmed her hunch, but she didn’t tell Marc until that night, with a shirt that said “Dad” and a “Big Brother” bandanna on their yellow lab, Murphy.

Marc remembers thinking, “This is real,” and, just as quickly, hedging his bets. “A lot can happen between day one and nine months later. You can’t get your hopes up too much.”

The pregnancy was relatively easy, aside from weeks of what Sam describes as “poorly timed throwing up.” She’d seen plenty of hospital births during her training and wasn’t interested in a virtual class; Marc skimmed an intro-to-fatherhood book someone had given him.

They planned on a 39-week induction, but at Sam’s appointment four days beforehand, her blood pressure was borderline and her doctor at Lankenau Medical Center said, “Why don’t you come in tonight?”

A friend had food from Five Guys delivered to the hospital: a burger and fries and a black-and-white milkshake, chased with a cold Diet Pepsi. Doctors started the induction medication. Nothing happened. More medicine. No progress. Finally she was dilated to 5 cm, her water broke, and they headed to labor and delivery.

Sam recalls standing, swaying, trying to move through fierce, Pitocin-fueled contractions. Finally she asked for pain medication: Tylenol or an epidural, doctors said. “I opted for the epidural. I was an anxious, crazy mess during that process.”

But after a nap, she woke a little before 3 a.m. in the quiet, dimly lit room and pushed for 52 minutes. Marc wasn’t planning to look, but he caught a peek of the baby’s head crowning.

“I think I got a little teary-eyed, especially when Sam said, ‘We have a baby girl.’ ”

What they’ve discovered is that parenthood alters life as you know it, but doesn’t end it. “That’s what scares a lot of people about parenthood; they think their life is over,” Sam says.

They take Lennon along for the ride: to Marc’s rugby games, to a neighborhood bar (with a pair of infant ear protectors) for the Eagles championship game. “We cart her around wherever,” Marc says. “The surprising part is how well she adapts to things.”

It’s like their wedding song: growing as they go. “At the beginning, they’re just a blob that doesn’t give anything back emotionally,” Sam says. “Then they start to develop this little personality, all these curiosities. She started screaming yesterday, in a cute way. Life’s been pretty normal, except that I’m up at 1 and 4 in the morning. But even that’s become less hard than it was before.”