Negotiating the roller-coaster ride of parenting
They worried about Trey being jealous of his new sibling. “But it was instant love. They are obsessed with each other,” Chrissy says.
THE PARENTS: Christina Corona, 35, and Anthony Corona Jr., 31, of Point Breeze
THE KIDS: Anthony (Trey) Corona III, 2; Theodore (Teddy) Corona, born June 22, 2022
WHEN THEY KNEW: A date at Morgan’s Pier beer garden in summer 2014. “He thought it was a friendship kind of thing, but then I kissed him and everything changed,” Chrissy says.
For Anthony — his friends call him “Ant” — having buddies who became parents in their early 20s was a persuasive form of birth control.
“You see some of your friends, they have kids young and you see how their life changes and I’d think: I’m not ready for that.”
But Chrissy, who babysat as a teen and nannied her way through nursing school, wanted kids — ”a thousand if I could afford them” — and made that clear from the start. Still, she figured on waiting a year after their May 2019 wedding.
But it was more like six months. Chrissy traveled often for her work as a pharmaceutical educator; in hotel rooms, she’d watch episodes of Call the Midwife. One night she phoned Ant, sobbing hysterically. “I want a baby. I want one now!”
“He said, ‘OK, let’s have a baby,’ ” she recalls. “We got pregnant on the first shot.”
They’d been together for more than five years, ever since meeting as coworkers at Eagleville Hospital. Chrissy was a nurse then, and Ant was a CNA, still searching for a clear career track.
He made her laugh. She impressed him with her intelligence and independence. “She was a motivator in that sense, to help me find my own path,” Ant says. He attended the Montgomery County Municipal Police Academy, worked security gigs, and eventually became a Philadelphia sheriff.
“Once I felt comfortable in my career in law enforcement, I was ready to start taking those next steps: engagement, marriage, family.”
He proposed in December 2018, in Chrissy’s best friend’s loft apartment decked out with twinkling lights — and with a passel of friends hiding upstairs. They began to plan a destination wedding in Mexico, then realized their own vision for the ceremony was becoming upstaged by everyone else’s wishes.
They got a self-uniting marriage license and eloped. “I think of that Frank Sinatra song, ‘My Way,’ ” Ant says. “We tried to make everybody happy and realized that wasn’t going to happen. So we got to focus on each other. We exchanged our vows on a beach and zip-lined across a jungle. It was perfect.”
And then, half a year later, was the day he came home from work, jamming to music through his earbuds, and barely noticed the display on the kitchen island: a poinsettia plant. A toy vintage truck with a wreath on the front. Fresh flowers. A positive pregnancy test.
For the first trimester, Chrissy says, her pregnancy breezed by. “I craved steak and Caesar salad. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t gain much weight.” Then the pandemic came. Ant could no longer attend prenatal appointments. Each day after work, he stripped in the foyer and tossed his clothes into the washing machine. Chrissy worked from home.
“We couldn’t have a baby shower. It was really just me in this house by myself. My pregnancy was very sad, very alone,” she recalls.
And at the end, it turned dramatic: abrupt weight gain in her final month, an induction at Pennsylvania Hospital and five hours of tolerable labor until, she says, “My whole world fell apart. Crushing pain. An epidural, which didn’t work. My blood pressure kept rising.” At 9.5 cm, her labor stalled and doctors ordered a C-section.
Trey was large — nine-and-a-half pounds — and needed a NICU stay because his sugar levels were fluctuating. Chrissy gave the infant a kiss on the forehead. “They put him in the little glass box and I walked with him to the NICU,” Ant remembers. “I didn’t want to leave him.”
But they had to. After five days, the couple left the hospital while their son remained in the NICU. “I was sobbing through the hospital, out the door, into the parking lot,” Chrissy recalls. “That was the saddest day of my life.”
And when Trey was discharged the following day, her anxiety and loneliness continued. “The world was shut down. I was afraid to have our family even come here. Ant had to go back to work after two weeks. It was blissful joy, but also, I was stuck to a pump, pumping every two hours. I was so afraid that his sugar would drop.”
Still, she was certain that she wanted another. This time, it took three months to conceive; the pregnancy, Chrissy says, was “brutal. I was nauseous all the time.” She hoped for a VBAC — vaginal birth after caesarean — hired a doula, and planned to deliver at Chester County Hospital, known for its VBAC success rate.
But after going into labor on her June 21 due date and continuing, through wild pain, to 7 cm dilation, the baby’s heart rate kept decelerating, and the couple opted for a nonemergency C-section.
“It didn’t feel defeating. I didn’t feel powerless,” Chrissy says. “I was happy and OK with it.” She also felt momentarily surprised when she saw Teddy for the first time: a brown-skinned baby who looked so different from his big brother.
“My first words were, ‘OMG, he’s so brown!’ ” Chrissy says with a laugh. “He was this big, brown, snotty, cute thing. We were going to call him Theo, but then I saw him and thought: He’s a Teddy.”
They worried about Trey being jealous of his new sibling. “But it was instant love. They are obsessed with each other,” Chrissy says. What was hard, especially at first, was the utter lack of downtime. “There’s no ‘rest when the baby rests’ because you have a toddler who’s up from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., and then he naps, but the baby’s up.”
The two have flipped roles: Chrissy, typically type-A, has become the more patient and relaxed parent, while Ant finds himself hypervigilant about his sons’ safety and well-being. “I get concerned about the real world coming at them too fast. I try to be the barrier for that. I just want them to be kids.”