As her daughter Kaavia James Wade turns 1-month-old, Gabrielle Union is reflecting back on her emotional journey to become a mother.
The actress, 46, shared never-before-seen home videos of their baby girl’s Nov. 7 birth and the events leading up to their surrogate’s C-section on Instagram Monday. “We’re finally getting to this place where there’s this little person that will call me mom,” Union said in the video that also featured her husband Dwyane Wade.
“It wasn’t actually the problem of getting pregnant, it was holding the baby. And we discovered finally what I have is called adenomyosis,” the mother of one explained, sharing how the cause of her multiple miscarriages in the past was due to her form of endometriosis.
“We just decided as a family that the best and safest route, and most successful route was a gestational carrier,” Union shared. “For us, it was our embryo so our surrogate has no genetic tie to our baby.”
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“We will be in the room when our child comes into the world,” she said as one clip showed Kaavia being pulled out of the surrogate’s womb in the delivery room. In the clip, Union can be seen crying tears of joy as she’s dressed in hospital mask, cap and gown.
“We’re just so thankful and grateful for the gift that they’ve given us,” the L.A.’s Finest star said.
Also in the over eight-minute clip was footage from Union and Wade’s baby shower. “It’s definitely not made a fun or easy or understood journey,” Union told her guests about the surrogacy process.
Recalling her “eight or nine miscarriages,” the actress described her painful past. “It just feels like shame, years of shame, humiliation and betrayal of your body,” she said. “It was so many emotions.”
Wade, star of the Miami Heat, also spoke about his wife’s long journey to become a mom.
“People kind of get this perception that, especially someone who is an actress or celebrities, they get a surrogate because they’re lazy,” the father of three said. “Because they don’t want to carry it or because they didn’t want to mess their bodies up. But for us, it got to the point where it was dangerous. It was like, I married you, I choose you first. There’s no us, without you. And that was the reason why we looked into the next best option which was to bring our joy into the world.”
In a special video message to their daughter, Union explained to Kaavia how she was welcomed into this world.
“I didn’t have a chance to carry you so I haven’t always felt like am I doing it all wrong?” she said. “Am I going to feel this bond, you know that mothers have because they’ve cooked a baby for nine-ten months. Will I not have that? That scares me.”
Later in the video, Union added, “The beauty and the downside of surrogacy, it’s happening away from us. … This is our surrogate’s fourth baby and she sees it as allowing her body to give a gift, the gift of life, to another family.”
Following Kaavia’s birth, Wade holds his newborn daughter in his arms and bonds as a new family. “To have her in this moment, it’s all worth it, you know? All the sacrifice, a lot for my wife,” he said as Union added, “Every path to motherhood looks different, there’s no one right way.”
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