Friends for life.
Just days after Beverley Mitchell revealed on Thanksgiving that she miscarried twins earlier this year, the Hollywood Darlings star, 37, opened up about her experience, and why she chose to share her story.
“I think it’s a conversation starter,” she told PEOPLE at Volkswagen’s Annual Holiday Drive-In Event in Los Angeles on Friday.
She went on to tell reporters about the incredible support she received from 7th Heaven costar Jessica Biel, 36.
“She was very supportive through everything and was always checking in on me,” Mitchell remarked. “She was one of the first people I called and I’m just very grateful for her friendship and just her being just a frickin’ badass, awesome person.”
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Mitchell, who attended the event alongside her husband Michael Cameron and their two children — son Hutton Michael, 3½, and daughter Kenzie Lynne, 5½ — also said that she “wasn’t actually nervous” about sharing her story.
“I’ve been wanting to do it for a few months now. I just couldn’t find the right words and every time I wrote something I felt like it was not coming off the right way,” she added. “One day I’d be really angry about it and then I was like, ‘That’s not a good one.’ And another day I was really emotional and I was like, ‘Uy yuy yuy. That’s not a good one either.’ ”
“And then finally I felt like I was able to speak out with a clear heart and get my point across, but not be overly one way or the other and maybe in a way that I thought the message would be heard a little better,” she continued. “My key was just wanting to do it in a way in which people could hear it, understand it and appreciate it and not make anyone feel something that I didn’t want them to.”
The actress went on to say that it’s important to talk about miscarriages in order to “remove the stigma and not make it something that’s embarrassing” or “taboo.”
“What I noticed is a lot of times you talk about miscarriage and people just brush over it and almost ignore it,” she said, explaining that often it’s not “because they don’t care, it’s because they don’t know what to say.”
In an emotional Thanksgiving Day blog post, Mitchell wrote that she was “excited” to learn she was pregnant with twins, but “a few weeks later, our new dream of our growing family came crashing down; we had a miscarriage.”
“This was a shock. Honestly, my first instinct was to say I was fine, and to be honest, I was trying to be. I thought I had to be, for my family, for myself. I had to jump on a plane and go to work being surrounded by babies and kids while I was still miscarrying. That was interesting.”
“My heart could not make sense of it,” she revealed. “I never really considered that I would miscarry being that I had already had two healthy pregnancies. This was my misconception, you see, I didn’t know much about miscarriages and I didn’t know many people who had miscarried, or so I thought.”
However, as Mitchell started talking to others about her loss, she found that more people than she originally realized had gone through similar experiences and “shared the same scars” with her.
“I was now part of a group, the unspoken and hidden group who mourn their losses in the shadows,” recalled the 7th Heaven alum. “This was the hardest part, suffering in silence. Every time I shared what we were going through I made people uncomfortable, no one ever knows what to say, and to be honest, there is nothing to say.”
The actress shared that while “with time has come healing,” “it took time” for that healing to really kick in.
“It is crazy how quickly you can adopt the idea of a new life and how fast that can all go away,” she wrote. “I am incredibly grateful for my rock of a husband who had patience while I worked through the gamut of emotions. I had my girlfriends who I relied on too who, though I didn’t talk with them much during this time, constantly checked in and left me messages and gave me the time to heal but also to show the support was there when I wanted or needed it. To these ladies, I will forever be grateful, they are my ride or dies.”
“We still have dreams of growing our family but now more than ever, I look at Kenzie, Hutton and Michael and just feel full,” Mitchell continued. “If we are blessed with more children they will fill us with more love, but for now, I look at my family and I am GRATEFUL, BLESSED and THANKFUL.”
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