Enjoying a sense of fulfillment

THE PARENTS: Jenn O’Mara, 32, and Brad Bitting, 37, of Springfield

THE CHILD: Katherine Rose, born July 24, 2022

Jenn refers to it as “the dreaded two-week wait” — the 14 days from an IVF embryo transfer until the blood test that would flag the outcome: pregnant or not pregnant.

In February 2020, their first round of IVF, the answer was no. And then the world closed down — including Pennsylvania’s nonessential businesses, the couple’s fertility clinic among them. As a member of the state House of Representatives, Jenn felt the impact personally and professionally.

“It was a devastating time. I’m a state rep, now dealing with all this COVID stuff. We found out [I wasn’t pregnant] 10 minutes before Gov. Wolf announced that the state was shutting down.” Baby-making went on pause.

The couple had talked about children, in a hypothetical way, when they began dating in 2015. They also talked history — both were World War II buffs — and fantasy football. They met on Tinder; their first phone call lasted four hours.

“Most guys I had been dating wanted to text. But Brad was not that way; he wanted to talk to me on the phone. It was a form of communication that almost got lost,” Jenn says.

At the time, she was in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, studying English and history; Brad was recently out of the Army, where he’d served for four years, two of them in Afghanistan. That military background intrigued Jenn, who can trace her own family’s military involvement back to the Union army in the Civil War.

Their first date included dinner, a walk on the Schuylkill Banks trail, and a screening of Jurassic Park at Jenn’s apartment. The second date: go-kart racing. “From then, we were just sort of together all the time,” Jenn says.

She lived in West Chester; Brad was in Phoenixville. In 2016, they split the difference with an apartment in Delaware County. Shortly afterward, Brad proposed; he arranged for a friend to invite Jenn to happy hour at a place near the river, then showed up at the bar in a suit, with a bouquet of flowers.

“When he walked in, I knew,” Jenn says, even before Brad walked her to the Schuylkill Banks trail where they’d strolled on their first date.

That fall became a turning point. When Jenn and Brad met, they sat on opposite sides of the political aisle: She was a Democrat, while he identified as Republican, an admirer of John McCain and George W. Bush.

The 2016 election changed that. “Donald Trump was not a decent person. He was a mean, terrible person,” Brad says. Among his Army friends, “I could see what Trump brought out in them, this anger and grievance.”

After Trump’s win, Jenn recalls, “We were both upset, fearful of what was to come. I remember Brad saying, ‘We’ve got to do something. I’ve already served our country; this time, you’re going to do something. You’re going to run for office.’ ”

By December, they were attending trainings, planning fund-raisers, going to endless meetings while Jenn finished her graduate program and worked at Penn as assistant director of university stewardship. Brad quit his job — he was managing the sports complex district in South Philadelphia — to work on Jenn’s campaign and manage their day-to-day domestic lives.

Jenn graduated in May 2017. They married in August — a day that began with a tornado warning, erupted in a thunderstorm, then cleared just as the outdoor ceremony started. “The sky was beautiful after the storm,” she recalls.

Her campaign officially kicked off in November. They’d made a deal: Win or lose, they would start trying to conceive after the election in 2018. The House race was a long-shot, a run against an incumbent in a district that hadn’t been represented by a Democrat in 40 years. Jenn was preparing a concession statement when a staff member said, “Switch speeches. You won.”

She and Brad stuck to their baby-making bargain. After six months of trying, they sought counsel and testing at a fertility clinic. Because of injuries Brad suffered in combat, which resulted in the loss of one testicle, the doctor said IVF offered the best odds of conception.

After a COVID-19 hiatus, they began trying again. At one point — during debate on the House floor over a bill that would require Pennsylvania women to have a ritual burial or cremation for the loss of any fertilized egg, including embryos in a lab — Jenn spoke openly about the couple’s fertility struggles.

“To make [the experience] less isolating, people in positions like mine have to talk about it,” she says. Still, her hands shook before she talked, and her racing heart triggered the sensor on her watch.

In all, it took the couple four rounds of treatment, over two-and-a-half years, until the phone call last November: a nurse at the clinic announcing, “Everything looks great!”

“For so much of our relationship, because of the campaign and my job, we were running. The pregnancy forced us to slow down a little bit,” Jenn says.

The baby was due in late July. State budget negotiations went into overtime. “I was in session, super-pregnant, going to doctors’ appointments in-between,” Jenn says. An induction at Lankenau Hospital began on July 23; by 8 p.m. the following night, she began pushing.

During birth, the baby swallowed meconium; afterward, Jenn began to hemorrhage. “I said to Brad, ‘I’ll be OK. Just take care of the baby.’” Jenn remembers watching as the reading on their daughter’s oxygen monitor ticked down … then, finally, up.

Now Jenn is back on the House floor and Brad stays home full-time. “I enjoy that I get to spend all day with Katherine; I think a lot of men miss out on that opportunity.” Their perspectives have shifted: more responsibility, different worries, a new sense of satisfaction.

“For so long, I felt like I was preparing for something,” Jenn says. “I’d complete a task and still feel unfulfilled. Now I think: I got it. This was it.”