Actress Nicole Kidman has always been extremely private. Which must have caused difficulties during her decades-long career in the spotlight. Never mind the fact that she was married for almost a decade to one of the biggest movie stars on the planet - Tom Cruise.
Their marriage ended quite suddenly - they were at the time, considered a 'Golden Couple' in Hollywood - and amidst apparent rumours that the union was put under strain due to the fact that they had struggled to have more children. They have an adopted son and daughter, Conor and Isabella, but no biological children of their own together.
Kidman has spoken only briefly in previous years of the heartbreak she and Cruise went through trying to conceive, and in a new interview has decided to share her devastating experiences of complications in two pregnancies, calling both "a massive loss" that she is still yearning about.
In the July issue of Tatler, she explained that the first miscarriage occurred when she was just 23 and newly-married to Cruise and was an ectopic pregnancy, while the second was a miscarriage and occurred about a decade later, shortly before the pair filed for divorce, in 2001.
I know the yearning," Kidman said of wanting to become a mother. "That yearning. It's a huge, aching yearning."
She said it's this loss that she feels isn't spoken publicly about enough. "And the loss! The loss of a miscarriage is not talked about enough. That's massive grief to certain women." But, Kidman said she experienced the other side when she eventually became a mother herself. "There's an enormous amount of pain and an enormous amount of joy on the other side of it. The flip side of going through so much yearning and pain to get there is the feeling of 'Ahhhh!' when you have the child."
She went on to say that the trauma she experienced so early on in her life meant she never really learnt to let go of the grief.
"From the minute Tom and I were married, I wanted to have babies. And we lost a baby early on, so that was really very traumatic."
The couple turned to adoption. "And that's when it came that we would adopt Bella. My mother has an adopted sister, so it's been part of our family and I knew it would probably play out somewhere in mine. I didn't think it would happen so early but it did."
But years later Kidman would conceive two more children naturally with her now-husband Keith Urban, saying she left it in "God's hands."
We commend Kidman for speaking out about her heartbreaking experiences so that others may relate.
