Finding the silver lining

THE PARENTS: Hannah Friedland, 32, and Dan Samuels, 32, of Cedar Park

THE CHILD: Rani Bayla, born Aug. 10, 2020

HER NAME: “Rani,” of Sanskrit and Hebrew origin, means “queen” and “song” — the ones expressed both in times of joy and times of struggle. “We thought that was a fantastic name for people who love music, and for the times Rani is being born into,” Dan says.

They brought their own pillows. In fact, they showed up at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania on an August Sunday laden with six bags: Hannah’s bathrobe; papers with cheerful drawings and encouraging mantras; snacks; a carefully curated playlist they called “Powerful Songstresses.”

Entering the hospital during a pandemic meant roped-off aisles, a mandatory squirt of hand sanitizer, a temperature check, a COVID-19 test. A guard asked, “Where are you going?” Hannah replied, “I’m pretty sure I’m having a baby.”

For several weeks, Hannah’s mother had been chanting over the phone to her granddaughter-in-utero: “OK, Boomba, you still have some cooking to do. You’re going to come when Grandma’s here.”

The night before, Hannah’s belly had seized in a way that made her earlier Braxton-Hicks contractions feel like mere ripples. Then her water broke in a gush. Dan reached for his go-to book, The Birth Partner, to revisit pages he’d highlighted. Hannah called her mother in New York: time to get in the car.

Hannah’s contractions were erratic: seven minutes apart, then 15, then two, then 45. “Every time we called the doctor or nurses, they’d try to measure how worried we were,” Dan says. Hannah’s mother arrived mid-morning, just in time for a quick welcome — ”Here’s where the cat food is; you can sleep in our bed” — before the couple headed to the hospital.

In the birthing room, they covered the clock with a sheet of paper that said, “NOW.” It was a take-home from the mindful birthing class they’d attended online, a reminder to stay present.

They brushed their teeth. Dan caught a brief nap. They cued up their playlist: Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Erykah Badu, later segueing to world music from Morocco, Mali, and Cuba, and finally landing on Beyoncé.

They didn’t have a birth plan, but they had hopes: A low-intervention delivery. A healthy baby. A safe start to the next chapter of their lives.

They met as students at Goucher College in Baltimore; Hannah remembers Dan wearing giant purple pants and “the biggest hair I’d ever seen.” They dated, broke up, dated again, then spent time apart when Hannah taught in South Korea after graduation.

She remembers one night after her return: Dan was playing in a band called Brooks Long and the Mad Dog No Good, and they kissed briefly on the sidewalk before he went inside.

By July 2016, they were living together, along with Hannah’s jungle of houseplants. “By then, we’d known each other for 10 years,” Dan says. “We were young people actually starting to figure out adulthood, having conversations about life and plans that we’d never had before.”

He proposed on sacred ground— a patch of land in the Grand Canyon that’s Indigenous-owned — after a 10-mile hike and a climb down a cliffside ladder to the waterfalls. “I think we’ve conquered a lot of fears in the last couple of days,” he said. “I think we can conquer more of them.” Other hikers pointed to the sky: a rainbow arced above them.

They planned a wedding for the end of May 2019. But three weeks before the date, Hannah’s father had a stroke. So they married twice — once, a hastily planned ceremony in his ICU room, with bursts of artificial flowers (real blooms weren’t allowed) and a rabbi-friend officiating — and the second time as planned, in Newtown.

Hannah had always known she wanted kids; she babysat, worked as a camp counselor, studied early childhood education. “I was looking forward to having my little magic person to teach.”

For Dan, it was more of a negotiated settlement. He loved hanging out with the babies of friends and bandmates — he’d been on tour with a musician who had an infant — but at the end of the day, he handed those kids back to their parents. “I was nervous. I don’t think I was really excited until midway through the pregnancy.”

The first trimester was an easy ride. Hannah worked out in yoga and boxing classes; she took walks with friends. “My goal was to be really active and out in the world.” Then the shutdown came: She was moored in a small apartment, doing virtual Pilates classes, worrying about what COVID infection would mean for a fetus.

At the hospital, they used every strategy from the mindful birthing class: lunges, squats, a dance party, a hot shower. A low dose of Pitocin ramped up her contractions. “I had no breaks,” Hannah recalls. “After two-and-a-half hours, I was exhausted and asked for an epidural.”

At some point, the doctors donned blue robes and nurses flicked on giant lights. With each push, Hannah closed her eyes and pictured a forest, looking up to see tree branches sway across the sky.

Dan held one leg; a nurse held the other. He thought, “I hope she’s healthy.” He thought: “I hope she’s cute.” The word “awesome,” that 1980s cliche, came to mind. He thought this was a moment that truly merited the term.

Once Rani was out, Dan moved close to Hannah and the baby now nestled on her chest. “Now we are three,” he thought.

Once home, Hannah recalls weeping at everything: a song on the radio; Rani’s first pediatrician appointment. “We were living in a scary world that was filled with news of pandemic and people dying,” she says. She’d nurse Rani at 4 a.m., then watch the sunrise from the couch with “this wild mix of joy and wonder and fear and love and extreme exhaustion.”

Friends brought meals and did drugstore runs. And though family couldn’t visit, there was something romantic about those raw, sleep-starved weeks. “To be just the three of us, figuring it out — that was the silver lining,” Dan says. “We had a baby, we had a roof, and jobs, and we had each other.”