Bringing a clarity to their lives

THE PARENTS: Hannah Datz, 33, and Sam Scavuzzo, 34, of Mount Airy

THE KIDS: Margaret Madeline (Maggie), 3; Clara Genevieve, born Sept. 28, 2020

BREAKING TRADITION: Though Sam wanted to proceed in the conventional order — engagement, wedding, house, baby — he also split the check on their first date and wanted the girls to bear Hannah’s last name. “It’s indicative of our life, living as equals,” Hannah says.

Audience members said it was the most awkward stage kiss they’d ever seen.

Hannah was a first-year and Sam a sophomore at La Salle University when both were cast in a production of The Philadelphia Story — she in the Katharine Hepburn part, he in the Jimmy Stewart role.

But Sam was in a relationship at the time. It wasn’t until later in the spring — and with an explicit thumbs-up from members of their comedy improv troupe — that the two began dating.

“He didn’t want our potential relationship to break up the team,” Hannah recalls. “He went around to all the members before he decided to kiss me and made sure they were OK with it.”

In some ways, they were foils for one another: Onstage, Hannah excels in silly voices and character accents, while Sam finds hilarity in just being himself. He was quick to say, “I love you,” while she wanted more time to come to that conclusion.

At the same time, “we were drawn together by outrage at minor things, like the politics of our theater organization — a certain moral indignation,” Sam says. “We had a lot of fun together, and I felt like we were equals. We were able to challenge each other.”

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After Sam graduated, their relationship continued short-distance (Philadelphia to New York), then long-distance when Hannah’s job in software sales jumped to Arizona for a year.

When she came back, they moved in together and got a rescue dog, Webster, who looked like an Ewok and behaved like a grumpy old man. In June 2013, Sam told Hannah to meet him at a pocket park in Chestnut Hill, near the site of their first date. When she arrived — running late, wearing sweats — and saw him standing on Germantown Avenue in a suit, she had a hunch that a proposal was imminent.

They married on 7/11/15 — ”free Slurpee day at 7-Eleven,” Hannah notes — at St. Luke Greek Orthodox Church in Broomall, with the reception at the National Museum of American Jewish History. Sam stunned Hannah by inviting neo-pop recording artist Chad D and organizing their friends to do a choreographed dance to his song, “Life Is a Ride.”

Sam wanted kids — a lot of them, and right away. “I was really career-driven, so there was no rush,” Hannah says. But in April 2017, she was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. That changed their timeline.

“Some doctors recommended that we have kids sooner rather than later,” Hannah says. She returned from a “girls’ trip” to Sonoma feeling a little off, took a drugstore test while traveling for work, and realized she was five weeks pregnant. They’d only been trying for a month.

Hannah’s schedule never eased: She flew frequently for work, toting slippers on the plane because her feet swelled so much. “It was hard to be an executive, on the road, pregnant with her. I was so busy during her pregnancy, I didn’t have time to stop and think: This is what loving another human is going to feel like.”

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Seventeen days before Maggie’s due date, their dog died. “We were so devastated,” Sam says. “He was the guy we’d had together, for six years.” And then the baby came early; Hannah was on a conference call when her water broke at 37½ weeks.

At Bryn Mawr Hospital, she recalls writhing in pain and desperately wanting an epidural, but the anesthesiologist believed it was unsafe for someone with her health condition. “At the end of the day, it was me and that baby, and I just had to get through it.”

Sam recalls the postpartum weeks as “a beautiful nightmare. … You develop this synchronicity — the sleeping, the handing off, charting all the poops, this weird routine that’s filled with delirium.”

“I was such a baby about being pregnant,” Hannah says, “but as soon as she was there, nothing bothered me. It was so much easier when she was on the outside and I could look in her eyes and love her.”

Maggie was a baby who liked the spotlight. Her parents figured she ought to learn to share. “She needed a sibling,” Hannah says. She learned she was pregnant in January 2020 — just before a work trip to Hawaii, and just before a return flight on which another passenger was obsessively dabbing her seat with a Clorox wipe.

The two became COVID-cautious, ordering groceries online, working at home, pulling Maggie from day care, barely leaving the house for the first trimester. And as the due date approached, Hannah was determined to have a different kind of birth.

“I let birth happen to me the first time around. I wanted to be along for the ride.” She developed a visualization, a story she repeated in her head again and again: Instead of being abandoned at the bottom of a well, as she’d felt during her labor with Maggie, she imagined being lifted from that well by a group of women and ancestors. Her daughter would be waiting at the top.

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They delivered at Bryn Mawr Hospital again. But everything was different: a sun-filled afternoon, not a rainy night; the epidural she requested; 15 minutes of pushing instead of three hours. “It’s our redemption story, the yin to Maggie’s yang,” Hannah says.

The postpartum period was easier, too, especially because Hannah’s mother, Elaine, lived with the family starting just after Clara’s birth; she left in late May. A virtual moms’ group, its members scattered across the country, provided more intimacy and support.

New circumstances have brought clarity to their lives. During the early months of quarantine, Sam was with Maggie every day. “It kind of rekindled the magic of life a little.” For Hannah, “the diagnosis and the children have reframed the rest of my life. I didn’t know what I was here to do. And now I know.”