Brooke Shields battles postpartum depression

Now, while I’m waiting for my cue, my cell phone rings. The news is not good. My doctor says, “I’m sorry, but the pregnancy is no longer viable.” I start to get very warm, and a huge lump forms in my throat. My doctor delicately explains that it is “nature’s way” of saying the baby isn’t strong enough to survive, and it’s better to have it happen sooner rather than later. There is a pause, and then she carefully adds that I am going to have to wait for my body to naturally expel the pregnancy or reabsorb it.

“What!” I can hardly grasp what I am hearing, and my vision begins to narrow. Just then another call comes through. It’s my husband, Chris, wanting to know if I have heard any news. Almost mechanically, I relay the information. I want to throw the phone across the stage and run out sobbing, but I am surrounded by hairy creatures and can’t leave.

At this moment I need to go onstage, decked out in a crazy costume, complete with a pig nose, à la Miss Piggy. Did I mention I am pretending to be Miss Piggy and I’m singing a duet with Kermit the Frog? As I move away from Snuffy’s legs and look up at him, he is sympathetically blinking his huge eyelashes at me. The stage manager can tell that something is wrong as I wipe tears from my face, but he has no choice other than to cue the Muppet rock band to file onto the stage and then point at me for my entrance. As they say, the show must go on.

I had always wanted to have children, and like most people, I just assumed it would happen when the time was right. My parents were divorced when I was quite young, and my mom never remarried. I was an only child in my mother’s house, and I used to beg her to adopt a baby. I desperately wanted a brother or sister to play with and take care of. My mother never did adopt a child, but my father remarried. Because my stepmother already had two children from a previous marriage, I had instant siblings. Then, luckily for me, my dad and stepmother added three wonderful daughters to the family. As a result, I was able to maintain a privileged, only-child status with my mom while enjoying being part of a larger family with my dad.

Years have a way of flying by, and before I knew it, my four years of college were over. Since I had been working basically since I was eleven months old, I significantly cut back on the number of jobs I took while I was at school. It was a much needed break. I graduated with a degree in French literature and then went back to working full-time. After a few years of living on my own in Manhattan, I met, dated, and subsequently married my first husband, Andre Agassi. We were busy with our individual careers, and our schedules often conflicted. Though we both wanted to have children, the appropriate time never seemed to present itself. Even though a great deal of love existed between the two of us, over time our lives seemed to become polarized and after two years, our marriage ended. It was a sad but amicable parting, and it was a blessing there were no children involved.

The real blessing, however, was that I was able to meet and fall in love with Chris Henchy, a comedy writer. To this day I believe that I fell in love with Chris the day we met, in 1999, but I would never tell him that! I had just gotten an American bulldog, Darla, and I brought her to meet friends of mine in the gym on the Warner Bros. lot. While there, the dog wandered off, and Chris brought her back. He was writing for a show filmed on the lot and loved dogs. We chatted and he made me laugh. I left without even knowing his full name, but he made such a strong impression that I called up a friend and told her I had found a guy I thought she should go out with. She told me she had starting seeing someone else. Because I had recently gotten divorced, I wasn’t even considering dating. Three weeks later, I was hosting a show in Washington, D.C., for which Chris was the writer, and we started spending time together and became friends. I was struck by how thoughtful and funny he was. Because he knew my situation, there was no pressure, and we were just friends for quite some time. Finally, though, I had to admit that there was something between us that I could no longer ignore, and we started dating. Although we were each consumed by our individual jobs, he with writing and I with the last season of "Suddenly Susan," we were both also quite ready to start a family.

Chris and I dated for two years and then became engaged. I was so clear about wanting to have children with this man that I would’ve gladly adjusted our plans if it happened before we were married. Though we didn’t specifically try to have a baby, I chose to go off the pill. As the wedding approached, however, I wasn’t getting pregnant. It crossed our minds that there might be something wrong. Wanting everything to be in order before we got married, we decided to see a fertility specialist in Los Angeles named Dr. Joyce Vargyas. She performed several tests and an examination, determining that changes in my cervix were probably the reason I wasn’t getting pregnant. Several years before, I’d had cervical surgery to remove precancerous cells, resulting in scarring that caused my cervix to be tight and significantly shortened.

As a result, the entrance to my uterus had become severely impeded, making it very difficult for me to get pregnant. In the process of removing the precancerous cells, the surgery also removed the cervical glands that secrete the mucus necessary to transport the sperm. Without this bodily fluid, the “little spermies,” as one of the nurses affectionately called them, couldn’t swim upstream. I said, “No wonder it hasn’t been working—not only is the door closed, but the poor guys have been jumping into a pool with no water!” Dr. Vargyas reassured us that this was one of the easiest fertility issues to overcome, though she did mention the possibility of my cervix becoming incompetent during pregnancy and prematurely opening up. After hearing the word “incompetent,” I couldn’t help feeling like damaged goods. With a very serious expression, Chris said to my physician, “Please, Doctor, we don’t like to use the word ‘incompetent’ in our house. Could you just say she has a ‘special’ cervix, or that she is simply ‘cervically challenged’?”

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