A double payoff for doing the hard things

THE PARENTS: Emily Fridberg, 35, and Jonathan Fridberg, 33, of Mount Airy

THE KIDS: Miriam Allyn and Benjamin Edwin, born Dec. 28, 2020

THEIR NAMES: Miriam is named for Jonathan’s grandmother and Emily’s maternal grandfather, who died shortly before their wedding. Benjamin’s names come from Emily’s great-grandmother and her other grandfather.

The day Emily contacted the fertility specialist was a marker of mixed feelings: pride that she’d taken a decisive step toward making a family, and sadness that she and Jonathan needed to reach out for help.

She’d assumed pregnancy would be easy: Stop taking birth control, and it would happen, just as it had for her mother and all of her aunts. But they’d been trying for six months without success.

“I was 34. Once we decided that we wanted to have kids, I wanted to get going,” Emily says.

The doctor was pragmatic: Fertility treatment is not a guarantee, he said. There would be bloodwork and biopsies, complete health screenings for both of them. And in the end, the conclusion was “unexplained infertility.” The next step would be Clomid to boost ovulation.

“It was a very complicated feeling,” Jonathan remembers. “On one hand: Good, there’s nothing wrong with us. However, there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s not something to fix. It just is.”

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The first try with Clomid yielded initial bloodwork that indicated pregnancy, but the next round showed Emily’s hormone levels back to a not-pregnant baseline. Then they conceived on their own; again, her hormone levels briefly rose, then fell.

In March 2020, they did their first intrauterine insemination. “Two weeks later, I went in for bloodwork and it was negative. That was, again, very crushing,” Emily says. “I had a temper tantrum, thinking, ‘It’s not fair.’ ”

Her second IUI happened in May. “I was trying to be guarded because of all the months of heartbreak,” Emily says. This time, though, the numbers just kept rising.

Because of COVID-19, Jonathan could drive Emily to the doctor’s office for the first ultrasound but had to wait in the car. She saw the two pulsing dots on the screen at the same time the tech noted them.

“Initially, it was complete shock. Disbelief. And I was very excited. The fear came in the next day,” when she lay on their deck, looking up at the sky and voicing every anxiety that crossed her mind: What would a pregnancy with twins do to her body? Would she still be able to play Ultimate Frisbee competitively? How would twins affect their relationship? Could they afford two babies at once?

“True to form for our relationship, I was calm,” Jonathan says. “I said, ‘We’ll be fine; we’ll figure it out.’ ”

It was that reciprocity — passing the baton of stress back and forth — that helped cement their partnership from the start. They’d met on JDate while both were living in St. Louis — Emily in graduate school to become an occupational therapist, and Jonathan studying architecture.

Her first message opened with “Salutations!” Their first date was to a beer bar; later, they met to bike around the city, with Jonathan outfitted in basketball shorts while Emily showed up fully prepared in spandex bike shorts and a helmet.

“He was different than anyone I’d dated before,” Emily says. “It felt like a connection: familiar, but in a good way.”

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They moved from St. Louis to Chicago, then became engaged in Vermont in the summer of 2015, near the general store where Emily had just stocked up on Jujyfruits candy.

“He told me to come outside and look at the creek. I was very nervous, shoveling candy in my mouth. He came back with a beautiful bouquet of flowers and said, ‘I love you and want to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me?’ Of course I said yes.”

They wanted to marry close to Philadelphia, where most of Emily’s family lives. Downtown hotels felt too stuffy, and country sites too far away. They settled on the Phoenixville Foundry, a steel fabrication factory turned wedding venue.

With a future family in mind, they moved back to Philadelphia in summer 2017, living with Emily’s parents for a short stay that turned into nearly two years as they waited for a house to be built in Mount Airy.

Once they were finally pregnant, they still felt shaken by their history of failed attempts. “We waited a while to tell people,” Jonathan says. “There was that hangover and shock wave of going through what we went through.” When they began sharing the news, he loved saying, “We’re pregnant!” then pausing for a cliff-hanger moment before saying, “With twins!”

Emily felt healthy until the third trimester, when she developed gestational diabetes, gestational hypertension, and blood pressure readings that finally landed her at Bryn Mawr Hospital in her 33rd week. It was preeclampsia.

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Jonathan joined her at the hospital with a few changes of clothes and his computer; they stayed as doctors monitored Emily’s condition and the calendar ticked toward a scheduled C-section.

“There’s a math the OBs do, about whether the babies are better in or out. By that point, they decided they would be better out,” Jonathan says.

A NICU team assembled in the operating room. Jonathan sat by Emily’s head and tried not to look at what was going on below. “I remember feeling numb from the medication,” Emily says. “I thought they were just moving my body around. Next thing: Here’s a baby!”

Miriam, the older sibling by a minute, was whisked to the NICU; Emily was able to kiss Benjamin on the head before nurses took him to join his sister. When she finally saw the twins the next day, they were tiny and tethered to IV lines and feeding tubes.

Since then — actually, since they learned there would be two — parenthood has been a matter of stamina. “It’s survival, having multiples,” Jonathan says. “We have to be good to ourselves and good to them.”

Emily thinks about the mantra that powered her through 13 days in the hospital, through giving birth to 34-week twins in the midst of a pandemic. She kept telling herself, “I can do hard things.”