MANY famous women tend to present their pregnancies as sweetness and light – but the medical reality can be very different.
Some serious credit is due to pop star Natasha Bedingfield for talking openly about the mental- health difficulties she experienced while expecting her first baby.
During an emotional new episode of my podcast The Dan Wootton Interview, which you can listen to free wherever you get podcasts, the I Wanna Have Your Babies singer spoke in detail for the first time about how she was driven to depression.
She told me: “I hated being pregnant because I was very sick. I was sick the whole time.
“There is something called prenatal depression and that’s what I had. It is one of the hardest things.”
For someone who has been so in control of her successful career, the experience left the woman behind hits like These Words and Unwritten out of her comfort zone.
She explained: “I think sometimes the strongest women find pregnancy and birth hard because they’re not expecting it to be that crazy.
“You have to be very vulnerable and accept help from people.”
But it didn’t help Natasha that she was on tour and keeping her pregnancy secret.
She recalled: “I would just crawl out of my bunk on to the stage and look really happy.
“And nobody knew. I just didn’t want everyone putting their hands on my belly, talking to my belly. I just thought it was so weird.”
Natasha’s own relationship with her bump wasn’t there either.
She explained: “It didn’t feel there was a real being in there. I didn’t feel this incredible connection. I felt peaceful. I felt like I was on drugs, I felt like I was very high. Those hormones are crazy. But I also felt very depressed.”
Not helping matters was the way the entertainment industry welcomes pregnancies.
Natasha said: “I remember early on in my career, people telling me, ‘Don’t have a baby until you’re ready to quit’.
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“Isn’t that awful? I do remember when I turned 30, people saying, ‘Radio is ageist, they’re not going to play you’. And it was just so shocking.
“But what’s been interesting is that having a kid has put me in a new flow — a new drive, a new kind of meaning.”
It’s been close to a decade between releases but it’s great that Natasha will now show off her refreshed attitude on her new album Roll With Me.
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