You may know Lili as my wild child. Some words people might use for her include Spirited, Sparkly, Spunky… her brother would call her a “pain in the butt.” However, things didn’t start out that way. she was actually my easiest delivery. I went into labor with her around 1:00 PM and she was born by the end of the day. No medication, no complications, I got to hold her after she was born and get that “golden hour” of skin to skin contact that I regrettably missed with Kyrie. The only difficulty I had was the pregnancy leading up to that moment.

First of all, this was back before I got my sciatica under control. I have a slipped disc at the lowest part of my spine which occurred some time shortly after my pregnancy with Xander. I thought I was doing better before I got pregnant because it didn’t hurt nearly as much when I walked or stood or moved in any way, however, as I got later into my pregnancy, I realized that the reason it hadn’t been hurting was because I lost enough weight after giving birth to him that my back was not as much of a problem due to the sheer fact that my frame was lighter. As I neared the end of my pregnancy, I had difficulty both walking and standing and would find myself sitting on the floor at work and sometimes scooting from one side of the shoe aisle to the other, organizing the boxes, so that I wouldn’t have to get up and stand, which caused me great pain. Despite this, I insisted that I work up until my due date, and my employers were fine with this as long as I continued to get my job done sufficiently.

On top of that, I spent a lot of my pregnancy sick. There was the regular morning sickness that I had beginning in my eighth week of pregnancy, then lasting eight weeks, which means I was into my second trimester when it went away. Then at the end of my second trimester, the whole family got a head cold which they got over in a few days, but for me, it lasted six weeks. I learned that this was because my immune system was throwing everything it had at protecting the baby instead of protecting me. A friend of mine, who is a midwife, told me that my body would be right as rain by the time I had the baby, however, and she ended up being correct.

Lili was extremely considerate about my work schedule in deciding when to be born. She waited until a Friday which happened to be a three day weekend for me, so I did not have to call in to work. My entire labor was less than six hours, and at the end of it, I had a beautiful, squishy little baby. I told my husband she looked like his mother. (She still does.)

I spent the whole weekend in the hospital with Lili, and it was a fantastic time of bonding for the two of us. I enjoyed that I did not have meals to cook or bathrooms to clean for those first few days, and I could just relax (as much as you can relax when you are being woken up every few hours for feedings in the middle of the night) and enjoy the company of the people who came to visit me in those first few days of my daughter’s life.

Xander took to Lili right away, and they have been best friends ever since.

As she grew, I realized Lili was the child my mother wished upon me when I was little. At the time, I thought that was a curse. I had such difficulty controlling my behavior as a child and often acted in ways that I did not intend to because my impulse control was too low to prevent it. I was afraid to have to try to raise a child just like me, but it isn’t a curse. Lili is an amazing gift, and I could not ask for a better child, despite that we have our struggles.

I will always think of her as the child my mother blessed me with.