An isolating pregnancy ends with celebrations in the streets

THE PARENTS: Angela Nace, 29, and Kenny Luu, 32, of Roxborough

THE CHILD: Zoë Jane, born Nov, 7, 2020

AN UNEXPECTED PANDEMIC PRESENT: Spending much of the first several months of the pregnancy in a small house in the Poconos, teleworking, and taking after-work hikes to a waterfall.

On Feb. 21, 2020, a faint line on the pregnancy stick spliced their lives into “before” and “after.”

“I calmly got in the shower,” Angela remembers. “I was trying not to freak out. I tried very calmly to walk into the room while Kenny was still sleeping. I said, ‘I have something to show you.’ He jolted out of bed. I felt so relieved, and euphoric.”

And, they say, looking back: oblivious. Even though Kenny’s father, who lives in China, had been telling him about the encroaching virus, nothing about COVID-19 seemed real until the first cases emerged in Washington state, followed swiftly by a canceled conference for Angela and a work-from-home order for Kenny.

“We found out we were pregnant two weeks before the shutdown,” he says. “And that was hard: the isolation. It felt like we were really alone.”

Being pregnant during a pandemic meant no in-person baby shower. It meant Zoom prenatal yoga classes and YouTube videos on labor and birth. It meant attending midwife appointments alone.

“We saw our moms a few times, but outside of that immediate family, there was no one,” Angela says. She kept a journal to help sift through her feelings during those nine months. “I can’t read it without getting emotional. I really felt like I could use a community — people to ask questions — and I didn’t have much of that. I felt like I grew a whole person and gave birth to that person with no one to witness it.”

It was the opposite of the circumstances — a proverbial village — that brought them together in the first place. Both attended Masterman, a public academic magnet school, for middle and high school; though two years apart, they shared some of the same beloved teachers and had overlapping friend groups.

Kenny played guitar, and Angela attended his senior project concert at the Franklin Institute’s planetarium. But it wasn’t until Kenny took a junior year abroad at Oxford, and Angela visited over winter break, that the friendship sparked into something more.

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They talked constantly on Skype, and when Kenny returned in the summer of 2010, they had a classic “non-date that was very much a date” — a day in New York that included riding the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island and eating hot dogs from Nathan’s.

Angela loved that Kenny could answer any sort of question with encyclopedic detail, then shift easily into the “goofy, down-to-earth” side of his personality. He admired her passion for art history and her curiosity about the world.

After another stint abroad — Kenny moved back to England for graduate school, and Angela joined him after a study-abroad semester in Rome — the two rented a tiny apartment in Chinatown and adopted a cat. The living together was easy, they say. “We mesh together really well,” Angela says. “We’ve been on a cross-country road trip for five weeks in a two-door hatchback, with not one argument.”

In August 2015, Angela returned from a week working at a girls’ leadership camp to a cryptic invitation from Kenny: “Don’t make any plans for next weekend. We’re going to Mystic to get pizza.”

But a trip to the legendary Connecticut town wasn’t all he had in mind. Despite the fact that he came down with the flu — exacerbated by nerves over the box cached in his pocket — he proposed while the two sat on a rocky pier overlooking the Atlantic.

They married a year later at Fleisher Art Memorial: a Philly-centric reception with food trucks and a Federal Donuts cake. A Masterman teacher officiated their Quaker self-uniting wedding ceremony, which included a reading from Plato.

“It was never a question of ‘Will we have kids?’ ” Angela recalls. She was the girl who always played with her toddler cousins; Kenny had worked with youths at Big Brother Big Sister. “It was a question of trying to figure out the right timing.”

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Once both felt solid in their careers — she’s an arts grant manager, while he works for the Mayor’s Office of Civic Engagement and Volunteer Service — they agreed the moment was right.

Physically, Angela felt fine until near the end of her pregnancy. Because all her meetings for work were on Zoom, she didn’t even share the news with colleagues for months. Meanwhile, she crafted a thoughtful birth plan for her delivery at Jefferson University Hospital.

What actually happened, Angela says, was a one-week-past-due-date induction, ferocious contractions, decelerations in the baby’s heart rate, and, finally, a moment when the doctor said, “‘I’m sorry; this is going to be a C-section.’ Within 10 minutes, everyone was in scrubs and I was being wheeled into the OR.”

Kenny remembers looking at the faces of the labor and delivery team, watching them watch numbers on the monitor and thinking, “This is really serious.”

Angela recalls a commotion on the far side of the blue sheet, then hands holding up an infant who seemed to be dancing in midair. Zoë was born at 1:34 a.m. on Nov. 7. Less than 12 hours later, Pennsylvania’s general electionvotes were finally counted: The state had gone for Joe Biden, and the presidential election was called in his favor.

Downtown, outside their hospital windows, the streets erupted in jubilant dancing, singing, and horn tooting.

“I had a rule that the TV could not be on during labor unless they were saying that Biden won,” Angela says. And once the news broke, “there was this big weight lifted,” Kenny says. “One election does not change everything. But it felt like a new start for us.”

There were silver linings to the pandemic, they say: more time together throughout the pregnancy and postpartum; a chance to savor every moment of Zoë's growth.

“This last COVID year has felt like an entire lifetime,” Kenny says.

“And,” Angela adds, “like Zoë helped usher in a new day.”