Naomi Watts got candid about her fertility journey and the emotional and financial toll of trying for a baby in her new book, Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known About Menopause.
The Mulholland Drive actress shares two children with her ex-partner, Liev Schreiber: Sasha, 17, and Kai, 16.
However, the road to their baby joy was not easy, as it took a long time for Naomi to fall pregnant.
She revealed in her book that they began trying when Naomi turned 36, as she felt ready by then. “I always dreamed I’d be a young mother but never got around to it,” she wrote.
“I’d spent my entire adult life up to that point trying to avoid pregnancy, and so once I felt ready, at age 36, I assumed I’d get pregnant on my first go — maybe my second or third at most. Months went by. Nothing.”
“I spent so much money, but I would have mortgaged my house to try to solve this problem,” she continued.
Determined to have a child, Naomi began to doggedly track her ovulation and basal temperature to ensure she had conception down to a science.
“I even got scans to see the follicles and the eggs forming…None of it worked,” the English-born star said.
“Because of my hormone levels, I wasn’t a candidate for IVF, but I tried fertility drugs like Clomid and procedures like intrauterine insemination (IUI).”
© Getty Images“I would have eaten my dog’s toenails if someone told me it would help.“
She continued: “I was peeing on sticks constantly, both to track my ovulation and to check for pregnancy if my period was even an hour late.”
The pregnancy news finally came when she was filming Eastern Promises and due to perform a slew of intense stunts. She decided to go ahead with the stunt work despite experiencing a tragic miscarriage in the past.
© Instagram“I also didn’t want to tell anyone yet because it was so early, and because I didn’t want to be difficult, so I just kept going,“ she wrote in her book.
“It was yet another example of how, as women, we often do things that put us at risk in order to be team players.” Naomi welcomed a healthy baby, followed closely by another only a year later.
The author and the Spotlight actor were together from 2005 until 2016; their amicable split paved the way for a strong co-parenting relationship that endures to this day.
© Todd WilliamsonNaomi’s new book dropped on January 21 and explores everything there is to know about menopause. She emphasized the importance of women being kind to themselves as they experience the extreme changes that menopause can bring.
“We need to be reminded that we should be compassionate with ourselves. None of the choices we have to make are easy,“ she explained.
“And after we’ve gone through menopause, we get closer to making decisions based entirely on what we want to do, not what others want from us. This is the age when we realize that all through our lives, we’ve felt pressured by and succumbed to expectations and hormones that we didn’t necessarily sign up for.”
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