Baby unlocks a new set of priorities
It’s gotten easier, and Jamie often thinks about something a coworker told him: how parenthood turns a “cosmic key” in your soul, unlocking a new set of priorities.
THE PARENTS: Liz Fiola, 36, and Jamie Yakscoe, 30, of Phoenixville
THE CHILD: Hank Robin, born Dec. 4, 2022
THE GENDER REVEAL: They had a chalkboard with two names — Hank and Nora — and asked guests to choose which they thought the baby would be. Then the couple counted down — three, two, one — and unleashed confetti bombs. They rained blue.
Liz and Jamie had a habit of playing chess almost every night — sometimes with a “truth or dare” variation, offering each other challenges written on slips of paper attached to the pieces.
But this game was different. Liz had lit candles and arranged a spread of charcuterie, thinking it was a special date night. When she took his bishop and unfolded the note, it read, “Will you marry me?”
“I laughed and looked up, and he was down on one knee,” she recalls.
It was a sweet moment in an otherwise heartbreaking period. They were living in Collegeville with Jamie’s parents and his sister, who was dying from an intestinal disorder. Jamie was her primary caregiver.
“She started getting sick around the time we were dating,” Liz says. “I wanted Jamie to move in with me, but his family needed help. That was a difficult time. But even though it was so hard, we did bond a lot.”
They met at work: Eagleville Hospital, where Liz was a psychiatric nurse and Jamie was a mental health technician. Donald Trump had just been inaugurated; they talked politics and philosophy. “I really liked her brain,” Jamie says.
But the seven-year age gap between them — they were 23 and 30 at the time — gave Liz pause. “It was odd and strange to be connected with someone so much younger than me. But he was kind of an old soul. He wasn’t afraid to express himself emotionally, which I appreciated.” She recalls a time when the two were watching This is Us, and Jamie grew teary-eyed at a poignant scene.
They remained good friends, hanging out in groups of coworkers, for six months. “I was vocal: I just want this to be exclusive between you and me,” Liz says. In September 2017, under string lights at an outdoor bar in Brooklyn, Jamie agreed.
After the chess-game proposal, they planned a do-it-yourself wedding in Jamaica for January 2020: a suitcase packed with 27 bottles of champagne, an Airbnb castle large enough for the entire wedding party, a storm that blew in just before the ceremony and whooshed out just as quickly.
Jamie remembers a conversation, back when they were living in his parents’ basement and poring over a relationship checklist in a blogpost. “Are you OK with having dinner and thousands of hours of conversation with this person for the rest of your life?” That was an easy “yes.”
What about children? “I said I didn’t think I wanted kids,” Jamie recalls. Liz had a different vision. “I said, ‘No, I’m older than you and I’m ready to have a baby.’ I said that by age 35, I wanted to have a child. He respected that.”
Jamie describes his willingness as a leap of faith. It was March 2022, just a few months after they started trying, when Liz called him — he was at a bachelor party, surrounded by friends — and said, “I’m pregnant!”
The next nine months were mostly miserable. “I hated being pregnant,” Liz says. She vomited so much she ended up in an emergency room at nine weeks, with an IV of antinausea medication. “I had very bad anxiety. So much pain in my back and my hips and my pelvis. I had to set up a commode next to my bed. I was exhausted every day. The only thing I liked about being pregnant was feeling him kick me inside.”
The midwives at Lifecycle WomanCare urged the couple to attend classes, but since both Liz and Jamie are nurses — Jamie now works in emergency room pediatrics — they figured they were well-schooled in the basics of labor and delivery.
As the Dec. 5 due date drew closer, Liz had a punch list of house projects for Jamie: paint the nursery, sort out the basement, create a backyard patio, vacuum the cars. “I was nesting; I wanted the whole house to be cleaned,” she remembers.
One small contraction on Dec. 2 was the start of a two-day saga. Fierce contractions at home, with Liz leaning over the stove and groaning. A 2 a.m. arrival at the birth center, where her contractions turned sporadic. A dose of morphine for the pain. A heart-rate monitor that showed the baby was in slight distress.
Even though Liz and her sisters were born at Bryn Mawr Hospital, she didn’t want to leave the birth center. “I thought: Oh, no, now I won’t have the ability to pick and choose the treatment that I want.” When drug screening at the hospital showed the presence of opiates — the morphine she’d been given just hours earlier — Liz felt the scorch of accusation. “I kept saying, ‘I don’t use drugs.’ A nurse was asking me over and over if I vaped, asking about my withdrawal symptoms.”
Eleven people were having babies that day, so nurses rushed from room to room, and Liz’s labor seemed to have stalled, her cervix dilated to just one centimeter. Every time she moved, the heart monitor slipped off her belly. She hadn’t slept for two days. She said yes to an epidural.
Near 7 p.m. on Dec. 4, the midwife told Jamie, “Get ready.”
“He was coming out. I looked at his silly little blue face and his nostrils all flared out. I grabbed him, lifted him up, and put him on Liz’s chest. His eyes were wide open.”
When they finally left the hospital after two days — they had to wait for Hank’s stool samples to be tested for drugs, and then he developed jaundice — it was a harrowing drive, in pouring rain, both Liz and Jamie hammered with exhaustion.
It’s gotten easier, and Jamie often thinks about something a coworker told him: how parenthood turns a “cosmic key” in your soul, unlocking a new set of priorities. “It’s a real thing, what happens to your brain when you have a kid — it’s all about them.”