Naomi Watts shares two kids with ex Liev Schreiber, but it was not an easy road for them to become parents.
“I was determined to get pregnant as soon as possible. Because of my hormone levels, I wasn’t a candidate for IVF, but I tried fertility drugs like Clomid and procedures like intrauterine insemination (IUI),” Watts, 56, wrote in her new book, Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known About Menopause, which was released on Tuesday, January 21. “I would have eaten my dog’s toenails if someone told me it would help.”
Watts wrote that she tracked her ovulation “on the regular” and got scans for updates on her “follicles and the eggs forming.” She added, “We’d have sex at the exact optimal moment for conception. None of it worked.”
The actress was 36 years old when she and Schreiber, now 57, started trying for a baby.
“I always dreamed I’d be a young mother but never got around to it,” she wrote. “I’d spent my entire adult life up to that point trying to avoid pregnancy, and so once I felt ready, at age 36, I assumed I’d get pregnant on my first go — maybe my second or third at most. Months went by. Nothing.”
Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber Pose for Selfie With Son Sasha
Throughout the process, she had one miscarriage.
While filming Eastern Promises, a movie that had Watts riding a motorbike, the actress found out she was pregnant. She did her own stunts in the 2007 film and stayed mum about the life growing inside her.
“I also didn’t want to tell anyone yet, because it was so early, and because I didn’t want to be difficult, so I just kept going,” she wrote. “It was yet another example of how as women we often do things that put us at risk in order to be team players.”
Naomi Watts Gushes Over Liev Schreiber’s Baby Girl With Taylor Neisen
Watts and Schreiber welcomed their first child, Sasha, in July 2007. Their second child, Kai, was born in December 2008. (Watts and Schreiber ended their 11-year relationship in 2016. She has since married Billy Crudup. Schreiber and wife Taylor Neisen welcomed a child in August 2023.)
“I gave birth at 38, and I had my second baby very soon after, when I was 40. I guess my body had somehow learned the program to make babies,” she wrote. “I always knew I wanted more than one baby, though I didn’t expect it to happen so soon. I’d wanted more than two, actually — but alas, by that point time really had run out.”
Dare I Say It is out now.
