Together at last, and then at home with their newborn

THE PARENTS: Kia Livingston, 29, and Joey Pointer, 28, of West Philadelphia

THE KIDS: Josiah Omari, 5; Luna Yvonne, born June 2, 2021

HER NAME: Years ago, Kia had a dream in which she had a daughter named “Luna”; she’d been certain about the name ever since. “Yvonne” is a middle name the baby shares with Kia and with Kia’s mother.

Kia’s first pregnancy — they’d been trying/not trying for over a year — drew the couple together. Her miscarriage at 14 weeks drove them apart.

Their relationship already had a history of push and pull. When they first met in 2013 — Kia attended a show featuring Joey’s band, Ill Fated Natives — both were dating other people. Still, Kia recalls the indelible moment when a friend introduced her to the musically versatile percussionist: “This is Joey Stix.”

“That’s his stage name. He’s a drummer, but he can play everything. I thought: Oh, goodness.”

As for Joey, “I definitely was attracted to Kia when I first saw her. There was always that initial spark.”

The two became friends, went to the same parties, hung out with overlapping crowds. At one point, Kia became angry — she thought Joey was trying to pursue a relationship with her even though he was involved with someone else — and they stopped communicating for a year.

Finally, at one of Joey’s shows, Kia approached him and said, “Let’s talk.”

That was 2017. By then, Joey was the father of a 1-year-old, Josiah, though he was separated from the boy’s mother. The two began spending time together: coffee dates and walks, bowling and bars.

» READ MORE: Embracing the big and small changes of parenthood

“It was refreshing to date someone I could just let my guard down with,” Kia recalls. “I always found Joey to be a very charming person.” She was also charmed by Josiah. “We were spending time together with this delightful little child. I began to see the benefits of dating someone who had a child; I could see how this person is as a father.”

But then came a night when Kia didn’t feel well, accidentally locked herself out of her apartment, and expected Joey to come to her rescue; instead, he was out with friends.

They faced off at Front Street Cafe for “the talk.” Kia said she wanted to be in a relationship. Joey wasn’t ready for commitment. At the same time, he didn’t really want her to date other people. But a month later, he introduced Kia to his cousin as “my girlfriend.” And a month after that, the two moved in together.

They’d talked about having kids, and they were happy to learn that Kia was pregnant. But the second-trimester miscarriage jolted them both. “We were struggling individually. I needed time to heal. We were arguing. We didn’t know how to handle it,” Kia recalls.

They lived apart for eight months and mostly avoided one another … until the night Kia saw Joey at a party and burst into tears.

“We were trying to get past the miscarriage and the loss of the baby, trying to find happiness again,” Joey says. “I still wanted to be with Kia.”

The stars weren’t exactly aligned for parenthood: The pandemic upended Joey’s work as a performer and producer, and they were struggling financially. Kia worried about how a second pregnancy would affect her: Would she trust her body? Would she feel frightened for nine months? Would she dare to share the news with anyone?

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“We’re both religious; we both believe in God,” she says. “We decided: Let’s just put this in God’s hands — give it up to him and live our lives.” They did — until the fall day when Kia poked her head into the bathroom and said, “Guess what? I’m pregnant!”

Her first impulse was to pray. “I prayed over my mental state and my mind-set,” she recalls, trying to banish words like “fear” from her vocabulary and even from her thinking. Instead, she spent time envisioning a healthy baby: a girl, she hoped, who would embody the best of both of them. “I stayed very positive throughout our pregnancy. I drank a lot of water, took a lot of long walks. I was doing yoga.”

Meanwhile, the couple moved into Kia’s childhood home, which her family had been renting out for a decade. They readied the nursery, the same room in which Kia spent her babyhood, and hustled to arrange the rest of the house.

After her miscarriage, Kia had become a doula in addition to her work in child care, and attending a few pre-pandemic births left her eager to experience labor herself. Contractions began one week late, predawn; Kia bounced on a birth ball before waking Joey around 7 a.m. She labored at home all that day.

“I had cleaned my house the night before. We lit some candles. As things got more intense, I started taking baths, doing a lot of moaning, a lot of pain management.”

By late afternoon, Kia, her sister, and Joey were at Lifecycle WomanCare in Bryn Mawr, a site she’d chosen because she wanted less intervention and more latitude in how she gave birth.

“If I needed to let some tears out, or if I needed to scream, I wanted to be able to do that. A hospital didn’t feel like the most safe space for me.”

» READ MORE: In a different place, they make time for a third

At one point, pushing felt impossible. “I can’t,” Kia panted. “The midwife kept telling me to touch her head, and I kept saying no. I finally did, and then I got her head and her nine-pound body out of me in one push. She was so close.”

At home, Josiah was stunned to meet his sister: “Wow, she’s out of you! You don’t have a big old belly anymore!” Joey felt shell-shocked, too, so thrilled that he couldn’t help announcing to everyone he met, “I have a daughter!”

For Kia, the postpartum period meant discomfort and an unfamiliar dependence; she couldn’t walk stairs or prepare her own meals, and breast-feeding was harder than she expected.

But they were finally home — in a house textured with memories, every day an exercise in improvisation. “As soon as I think, ‘This is going great [with Luna]’, it changes,” Kia says. “The next week is a whole different week with her.”