Going with her gut to expand family alone

THE PARENT: Brianna McLaughlin, 34, of Roxborough

THE KIDS: Bryce Michael, 8; Malcolm David, born March 17, 2023

THEIR NAMES: For the first, “Bryce” was the only name she and her then-boyfriend agreed on. For the second, Brianna was drawn to the Scottish “Malcolm” and how it chimed with her last name. Bryce calls his brother “Mac” or sometimes “Mac-and-Cheese.”

When Brianna saw the positive pregnancy test, she ran into her bedroom, locked the door, and called her mom. Her boyfriend, in the other room, would be the second one to know.

“It was New Year’s Day. I was feeling off, and I told my boyfriend I was going to take a pregnancy test,” Brianna says. She was 24, and though she’d always envisioned motherhood in her future, the timing was a shock. Her mother offered calm reassurance: Everything’s going to be fine.

As the months unfolded, Brianna doubled down on work — she’s a speech language pathologist — to bolster herself financially for parenthood. She took a birth class at Bryn Mawr Hospital; she sought advice from her mother, grandmother, and aunt.

But her boyfriend didn’t seem to be stepping up in the same ways. “I knew, deep down, it was probably going to be best if we weren’t together raising this baby.” They separated a month before her due date.

Her mother’s counsel helped. “She was always reminding me that this baby was going to bring so much happiness and joy to our lives, to our family.”

The birth was unnerving, Brianna recalls — a 10-pound baby, plus the weight of anxiety about how she and her ex were going to cooperate in child-rearing. Still, the moment she saw her son was “a surreal, out-of-body experience, thinking this person came from me, I was growing this person for nine months. It was definitely, at that time, the happiest day of my life.”

Brianna’s boyfriend and her mother were in the delivery room; her grandmother waited just outside. But once home, with her parents two hours away and Bryce’s father working full-time, she often felt alone. “It was crazy,” she recalls. “I was trying to absorb everything and be a good mom and take care of my baby. I was so young; I had no idea what I was doing.”

Fortunately, Bryce was an adaptable infant who slept through the night from the start. “He was an absolute unicorn of a baby. I brought him everywhere with me: to dinner, out with my friends. He was with me all the time.”

Parenthood set Brianna apart from her peers, who were still in the late-night, party-on phase of their lives. “I had to grow up a little bit faster,” she says. She wanted a second child, but she wasn’t interested in another relationship, and she couldn’t figure out how to meld those disparate visions.

As Bryce got older — he spent weekends with his father and with an older brother from his father’s previous relationship — he sometimes asked, “Are you ever going to have a baby?” When Brianna turned 30, she vowed to her mother that if she wasn’t in a serious relationship by 35, she’d find a sperm donor and have a baby on her own.

“I was always feeling this pressure: I have to have a significant other to help me; that’s the only way I’m going to have another kid.”

But last spring, after consulting with a fertility specialist and getting a clean bill of health, she thought: What am I waiting for? “Being a mom and having another child was way more important to me than finding someone else or being in a relationship.”

She researched sperm banks and combed through catalogs of donors until she found one whose story resonated. He grew up in a family of musicians; she listened to a recording of him playing the piano. He was a widower. “He seemed so kind. I definitely felt a connection after reading his profile.”

The second intrauterine insemination was a success. This time, Brianna gleefully shared the news with her mother, her grandmother, and her two best friends. She waited about eight weeks to tell Bryce. His first question: “Is a guy going to move in now?”

“No, no,” Brianna assured him. “I don’t have a boyfriend. It’s still just me and you, but Mommy’s going to have a baby.” She’d bought children’s books about assisted reproduction and all kinds of family types, but “the whole idea of getting pregnant via a sperm donor is still a little confusing to an 8-year-old.”

This pregnancy was more complicated than her first: gestational diabetes that required insulin; twice-weekly scans toward the end; an induction at 37 weeks because her blood pressure was starting to climb.

But the labor, at Lankenau Medical Center, “was so relaxing, the complete opposite of what it was like with Bryce. I pushed for nine minutes; he came right out. I was able to take him and put him on my chest. Another best day of my life.”

Brianna deliberately chose a donor who is willing to be known once any of his offspring reach the age of 18. “It’s important to me to be transparent [with Malcolm] from the get-go. It’s important that he knows his story. I wanted to be able to provide him with as much information as I could.”

She’s a different mother this time around, she says. “I learned so much from Bryce. Patience. Really being present. Now it’s the three of us spending time together and making sure Bryce feels special, too, that he gets one-on-one time with me.”

It helps that her family is so solidly in her corner: Her parents will provide childcare through the end of the year; her 84-year-old grandmother drives down from the Scranton area to visit; her aunt has stepped in to watch the kids for a week.

“I think, for a long time, deep down, I knew I wanted to have more kids, but I was afraid of what that would look like, how people would receive that. Once I went with my gut and what was really important to me, it took all this weight off. I feel like I’m living the life I’m meant to live.”