Working to have it all

THE PARENTS: Sophia Wasserwald, 31, and Ben Yamane, 33, of Center City

THE CHILD: Charles (Charlie) Juan, born Jan. 25, 2022

A GRANDFATHER’S LEGACY: Sophia’s father advocated for the name “Charles,” his own father’s name, which was already among the couple’s top picks. “I know Charlie has a very multicultural background,” Sophia says, “but when I look at him, he reminds me of my dad. His smile.”

Sophia kept asking for a date. Ben kept saying no. They were undergraduates at Skidmore College, and her ex-boyfriend was Ben’s housemate. Too much drama, Ben thought. “It’s a small school; there’s no need for stuff like that.”

Still, the two hung out: power-kiting on the soccer field; skipping out on the Spanish club’s annual gala to grab dinner by themselves. When Sophia spent the summer in Barcelona, Ben mailed a postcard to her parents’ house.

Then there was the weekend in the Adirondacks when Sophia posed “state of the relationship” questions — ”Are we dating? What are we doing?” — and her mother phoned campus police because she couldn’t reach her daughter for two days. Ben had forgotten to tell Sophia there was no cell service at his parents’ mountain house.

By that time, Ben had graduated and was back in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., for a semester of research. He moved into Sophia’s shared on-campus apartment. “He came to Skidmore, and he never left,” Sophia says. “My roommates loved Ben. It worked out really well.”

Despite their personality differences — he’s laid-back; she’s an inveterate Type-A — they shared a zest for travel, museums, and food. Both have mosaic ancestries: Ben’s father is Japanese; on his mother’s side are Dutch, English, Scottish, Irish, and Montauk. Sophia’s father was Jewish, with roots in Austria-Hungary; her maternal grandparents were Sicilian and Chilean.

“The big transition — whether or not the relationship would work — was me going to medical school,” Ben says. They’d been living in Philadelphia for only a year when he was accepted at a med school in Middletown, N.Y.

“I was happy and proud of him,” Sophia recalls. “But in the back of my mind, I’m thinking: Oh, my God, I moved here, left my family and friends, I’m in Philly, in a city I don’t really know yet, and you’re leaving.”

At the time, she was pursuing a nursing degree at Jefferson, so she kept her focus on that prize and learned to cherish the scant time the two had together. “Instant gratification is not always possible; you have to learn to be self-sufficient,” Sophia says.

The summer after Ben’s first year of medical school, he used student loan funds to finance a six-week trip to Europe. On a mountaintop in Norway, overlooking an emerald chain of fjords and islands, he proposed.

They married the day after their dating anniversary — Sept. 24, 2017 — under a chuppah, at a golf club near Sophia’s hometown of Palos Verdes Estates, Calif., with a view of the Pacific and her 99-year-old grandmother in attendance.

“I’m an only child, and I wish I had a sibling,” Sophia says. “I wanted a child, and for that child to have at least one sibling.”

Ben was in complete accord. “I didn’t care what my job was; I didn’t care where we lived. The main thing I wanted out of life was to have a bunch of kids and to be a good dad.”

First, he needed to complete his grueling intern year; Sophia wanted to have her nurse practitioner degree in hand and a stable job underfoot. Ben came home most weekends, but when four months of trying to conceive yielded nothing, a friend of Sophia’s suggested using an ovulation tracker.

“I got the tracker; I got the happy face; it happened it was a weekend he was here,” she says. Shortly afterward, she felt terrible at work one Friday — a migraine, nausea — then took two pregnancy tests and promptly called her mother with the news.

She kept it from Ben until two weeks later, when she presented a birthday cake box during dinner at a restaurant; inside was a onesie reading “Hello, Daddy!’ along with the two positive drugstore tests.

Ben, schooled by the urgencies of medical care to “keep it cool” when dramatic events are underway, smiled at the box’s contents and said, “Oh. Nice.”

The pregnancy had a smooth start and a harder finish. “I was getting tired. I felt like a whale. I had really bad sciatica pain; sometimes I’d crawl out of bed. There were times when I thought: I wish Ben was here. Times when I felt very alone. But then I thought: What do single moms do? I’ve got to toughen up.”

In his New York apartment, after clinic hours, Ben built a rustic cedar changing table for their son. Back in Philly, Sophia read On Becoming Baby Wise — ”my Torah,” she jokes — and readied the nursery.

She was alone when contractions began, five days before her due date. “My nursing judgment goes out the window,” she says. “It’s 11 o’clock at night, and I’m miserable. I call Ben: I’m going to the hospital.”

“I’m in the Hudson Valley, thinking: Do I call out from work?” Ben says. He did — and by the time he arrived at Pennsylvania Hospital the next morning, Sophia had had an epidural and was taking part in conference calls between contractions.

Around 5:30 p.m., she was fully dilated. She pushed Charlie out in nine minutes. Ben, who had seen difficult deliveries during his training, felt relieved that this one went smoothly. “I wanted to cry — but for me, crying is when you’re upset, sad, or angry,” Sophia says. “I was still in shock: Wow, this tiny little human. I made you, and now you’re finally here. It’s about time.”

Two weeks after Charlie’s birth, Sophia contracted COVID-19. In April, her nanny quit abruptly, her maternity leave ended, and her father died. Ben manages to get home most weekends. Friends raise their eyebrows at their choice to parent while still living apart.

“We’re still long-distance, and it’s normal,” Sophia says. “We’re in this for the long run. I do feel like I’m on a never-ending night shift, but I’m OK with it. Having a kid is chaos, but within the chaos, you can find some normalcy.”