The actress opened up about the heartache she felt in her memoir.
Gabrielle Union has been open about her struggles with fertility and journey to motherhood prior to welcoming her daughter Kaavia via surrogate in 2018.
But now, the star has opened up about her initial reaction to husband Dwyane Wade fathering another woman’s child in the midst of that struggle several years ago.
The Bring It On actress and the retired NBA player married in 2014, despite him fathering a son the year prior while the couple were on a break.
“To say I was devastated is to pick a word on a low shelf for convenience,” Gabrielle, 48, wrote in her newly-released memoir, You Got Anything Stronger. “I have not had words, and even after untold amounts of therapy I am not sure I have them now. But truth matters.”
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Though the couple were on a break at the time Dwayne, 39, became a dad to son Xavier, now 7, whom he shares with Aja Metoyer, the news stung for Gabrielle as the pair had been trying for a baby beforehand.
“The experience of Dwyane having a baby so easily — while I was unable to — left my soul not just broken into pieces, but shattered into fine dust scattering in the wind,” she continued. “We gathered what we could to slowly remake me into something new. There was no way to disguise where I’d been glued back together.”
The She’s All That actress admitted her fertility struggles made her think unkindly about herself, as she recalled thinking: “This woman is such a failure. And she has the nerve to be old. And she has the nerve to have a younger husband. And she has the nerve to stick with a guy who had a kid with somebody else.”
Her feelings, she says, “weren’t originating from a healthy place” at the time.
Gabrielle added that the former Miami Heat player told her during their struggle to conceive: “As much as we want this baby, I want you. … We’ve lost too much in our relationship for me to be OK with encouraging you to do one more thing to your body and your soul.
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“So much of what made the decision so difficult was that if I didn’t submit to a surrogacy, then I was convinced I needed to let Dwyane go,” she wrote. “Even if he didn’t want to, I had to let him find someone who could give him what he wanted. But I loved him.
“Each day, he had worked to be forgiven, and I had chosen to love him and forgive him. And part of this journey of making peace with our love is also making peace with ourselves.
“He wouldn’t have become the man he desperately wanted to be, and I would not become the woman I dreamed of being.”
Now a mother to the couple’s daughter and a stepmother to Xavier and Dwayne’s other children Zaire, 19, and Zaya, 14, Gabrielle said she has embraced being “Baby Mama number three.”
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“I can never know if my failure to carry a child put a ceiling on the love my husband has for me. Yes, I am Baby Mama number three, a label that is supposed to be an insult.
“If I am telling the fullness of our stories, of our three lives together, I must tell the truths I live with. I have learned that you can be honest and loving at the same time.”
