They’d been dating for three months — Megan had offered to cook Thanksgiving dinner for Ben’s entire family after learning they usually relied on Boston Market for their turkey and sides — when Ben’s mom hauled out the baby pictures and announced, “This is what your kids are going to look like!”

At their wedding less than a year later, Ben’s father gave the couple a triad of blessings; the third was “Go forth and multiply.”

They didn’t need the hint. Children had been on this couple’s agenda practically since the day they met in a spiritual study group hosted by their South Philadelphia faith community, Circle of Hope.

Ben was in his final semester at Drexel University; Megan had just moved to Philadelphia to work with Teach for America. She valued his honesty. He took note of how intentional she seemed. He’d been raised Jewish, while she grew up Christian; both were drawn by Circle of Hope’s blend of spiritual searching and social justice.

Only the playlist on her iPhone gave him pause. “It was mostly top 40s,” recalls Ben, a guitarist and drummer with eclectic musical taste. But that didn’t stop him from saying, “I love you” 10 days into their relationship. They’d been dating less than a year when he proposed, the morning after Valentine’s Day — he didn’t want to be “too cliché” — after sleeping all night with the ring under his pillow.

“I’ve always been a hopeless romantic, and a person who wanted to be part of a family,” Ben says. They decided to wait until after their 10-year high school reunions to start trying to conceive, but Megan was already working with a specialist in integrative medicine and taking supplements in the hope that her polycystic ovary syndrome wouldn’t cause fertility problems.

By the time she pulled out the drugstore test stick, she already knew what it would say; her temperature had been high for days, and her period was late. Still, she yelped and ran to show Ben; the two of them hugged each other, crying, until one of their roommates bounded upstairs to ask, “Was that a pregnancy squeal?”

The next weeks and months were uneventful; Megan continued to bike and kept up her CrossFit routine at the gym. In fact, the gym became a refuge, the one place where people weren’t constantly reminding her not to exert herself. “I had a neighbor run across the street and tell me not to carry my bike into the house,” she recalls.

Along with the cautions came practical advice from their doula and midwife, and blessings offered by friends in two separate ceremonies — one for men and the other for women — at their church.

Megan, surrounded by 27 friends and sister-congregants, received massages and encouragement. One woman said, “Free yourself to make noise when you’re in labor. Use those noises as prayers.”

That advice proved useful when, the day after that ceremony, at 36 weeks pregnant, Megan began to bleed, went to Pennsylvania Hospital, and learned she was already four centimeters dilated.

Her blood pressure was normal, the baby’s heart rate steady. “I was able to have the labor experience I wanted — I was active, moving around, not constrained to a bed,” she says. Their doula massaged her lower back. Ben’s job was to keep the washcloth cold. Finally, after four hours of intense labor and 20 minutes of pushing, “I felt him come out, the weirdest feeling ever,” Megan says. “It’s surreal to have this little human who’s been inside of you for eight months suddenly on your chest.”

All Ben could do was weep.

While they’d opted not to know the baby’s sex in utero, they weren’t surprised to have a boy; throughout Megan’s pregnancy, everyone she met predicted a son: “the way my skin looked, the way I was carrying … everybody’s wives’ tales,” she says.

What did stun them was the postpartum period. Megan struggled to care for both an infant and her own healing body. She had to learn patience, to soften her own sense of urgency. “I’m a really time-oriented person. I’ve had to loosen a lot. It’s OK if we walk into a church service 15 minutes late.”

Ben realized any new routine had limited efficacy. “For the first week, we had a good system. He slept in the bassinet, and I was able to get work done while he was sleeping. Then he stopped wanting to sleep in his bassinet.” At the same time, the early days of fatherhood brought a bracing clarity, a new ability to multitask: “I was on top of my game — cleaning the breast pump, getting diapers, making sure we didn’t run out of things.”

They’re learning to invent as they go. Each evening prompts a “pregame talk: OK, what’s the plan for tonight?” And they are learning how the hardest moments snuggle against the most sublime ones. “Last night, he cluster-fed for 12 hours,” Megan says. “As demanding as breastfeeding is, I look down at him and think: Oh, my God, Ilove this child so much. I’m so glad I am sustaining his life right now.”

Eli anchors them to each day, and to the broader horizon. Megan told a friend recently that the words she uses to soothe Eli — “Mommy will always feed you” — capture exactly her understanding of a benevolent deity. “God is saying that all the time: I am always caring for you, even if you can’t sense that.”

Once, during Megan’s pregnancy, Ben said, “I can’t wait for nothing else to matter.” But here’s the paradox they’ve both discovered: The baby makes everything matter more — their work for community and social justice, their relationships, their connection with God.

“The love I have for Eli is like the love we’re called to have for each other,” Ben says. “It’s a messy world out there, and he makes me want to make it a little less messy.”