After fighting off stigmas and hesitations about surrogacy, new mom Gabrielle Union-Wade is ready to take on motherhood full throttle.
The Being Mary Jane star has never hid her fertility journey from the public eye. In fact, she’s embraced it – even during its most emotionally trying moments. In her 2017 memoir, We’re Going to Need More Wine, the 46-year-old revealed she’d suffered eight or nine miscarriages and three unsuccessful (and very expensive!) IVF rounds. But unbeknownst to the public, the Wades were about to embark on their surrogacy journey. On November 6, 2018, the overjoyed couple popped up on Instagram to debut their baby girl, Kaavia James Union Wade.
In a new interview with Women’s Health, Union says she’s enjoying every moment of the exhausted new mom phase, relating it to “that second day in Vegas where you’re all, ‘I’m not sleeping Saturday away. I’m going to day-party and rally!’ But your body is like, ‘Are you crazy?’” Absolutely no complaining over here! Though Gabby is adjusting well to her new normal, she wasn’t always open to surrogacy. When she and husband Dwyane Wade first looked into it, she said, “The idea of it felt like surrendering to failure,” but concludes, “now I’m in the right mindset and mental space, and I’m open to being the best mom I can be.”
There was also concern over how she might be perceived. “People want to see the bump, hear that you got hemorrhoids—they want to know you’re like them. I was like, ‘This is going to seem like the most Hollywood sh*t ever. Will I be embraced as a mom?’ It’s terrifying.” As any new mom can tell you, those inner doubts are all erased when holding your new baby for the first time. For Union, it was no different. “[When Kaavia was born] I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is my baby,’” she recalls. “I wanted to fight everybody in that room for various reasons and no reason.”
Union’s hitting her parenting stride, especially with her stepsons. Hitting the gym to train with them has become part of their bonding time. “it’s been a cool thing that doesn’t feel like, ‘Let’s go talk about our feelings.’ It’s like, I’m a cool mom!” As for her daughter, the fiercely protective mom still wants her baby girl to learn life through experience. “I want to instill in her morals, values. And then I want to give her space to fill in those gaps, fall on her ass, and make mistakes,” she says. “I don’t want to be super judge-y.”