Former Bachelorette Becca Kufrin is getting extremely candid about the highs and lows of welcoming son Benson.
“I don’t think anyone can prepare you for becoming a mother. Obviously, people will warn you, ‘Parenting is the hardest job you’ll ever have to do,’ but when you hear that, it just goes in one ear and out the other. And until you’re in it, you don’t actually realize, ‘Oh, people were right,’” Kufrin, 35, told Us Weekly in an exclusive interview pegged to the announcement of her partnership with Momcozy.
“I was always the type of person to think, ‘Oh, I’m gonna love the newborn phase. I’m gonna love snuggling with that little baby, and all they’re gonna do is eat, sleep and poop. And it’ll be easy.’ That wasn’t the case,” she continued. “To be brutally honest, I didn’t love the newborn phase. It was so much harder than I thought [it would be] on my body.”
Kufrin, who describes herself as “emotional, but not a big crier,” thinks she “cried every day, multiple times a day” for the first couple weeks of her son’s life.
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“They were sad tears, happy tears, overwhelmed tears, tired tears — anything would trigger those emotions,” she explained. “I just wasn’t used to feeling the roller-coaster and the lack of sleep. I am somebody who loves and needs her sleep. You will ask my husband and he will say, ‘Becca needs at least 10 hours every night, otherwise she will need a nap during the day.’ That was the hard part. When you have a newborn, you have to wake up basically every two to three hours to feed and change that little one, and you’re constantly thirsty and hungry. So I think just all of those weird changes to my body that I wasn’t prepared for were difficult.”
Kufrin feels like she “blacked out for the first two months” after giving birth in September 2023, calling the beginning of Benson’s life “a blur” where she was just “in survival mode.”
“We’ll scroll through old photos of him and we’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, he was so small. … Wow, I don’t remember taking this or I don’t remember doing this,’” she recalled. “You forget about those moments and I only remember how tired, drained and just terrified I was, which is hard because, obviously, there were so many beautiful times with him too, especially when he was a newborn.”
As a result, Kufrin worries “so much” about having baby No. 2, despite her and husband Thomas Jacobs always talking about having two or three kids.
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“Thomas is not the one who would have to be pregnant and carry this baby and deal with all the internal and external changes,” she said. “When I was pregnant, I did go on anxiety medication and we had to raise the dosage just so I could get through that hard time and keep myself balanced hormonally. The other day, I was thinking, ‘If we’re ready to do this, do I need to up that dosage?’ For me to be at my best — for not only myself, but for my partner, for our current toddler and this oncoming baby — I need to really take care of myself. I don’t want to feel too much ego or pride to ask my doctor to up that dosage to help. I’m scared. We do kind of know what to expect because we’ve done it before, but I’m not ready to not sleep again.”
Despite her fears, Kufrin and Jacobs — who she gushed has been “the best partner” during every stage of parenthood, even waking up with her every two hours when Benson was a newborn to be by her side during feedings — are about to start trying to expand their family.
“He’s wanted to be a dad for a long time,” Kufrin said of Jacobs, who she met on Bachelor in Paradise in 2021. “He was ready. So to watch him now be able to experience things like taking Benny to baseball games with him, taking Benny outside to start to play catch and teach him how to dunk his little basketball, it’s really, really precious. And I think it makes it more special for me because I don’t have my dad in my life anymore. He passed away when I was 19. So to see Thomas become a dad is such a beautiful moment. He was my best friend and my love before we had Benson, but now it’s just so much deeper because it’s a whole different level of that bond and that intimacy when you have a little one.”
When they do have a second baby, one thing Kufrin will be happy to do is return to her go-to Momcozy products.
“I’ve loved the brand for a while. Benny is 18 months, so we’ve had some of their products since he was born,” she said, naming Momcozy’s hands-free breast pump, the lactation massager, the nasal aspirators, the hip-carriers and the pregnancy pillow as her favorite products.
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“And I love not only some of their products, but I also love what they stand for,” she continued. “Not only do they make products aimed for babies, but they really have a focus on products for moms too, which I think is so important. Moms — we go through so much and we deal with so much having that baby and we don’t always get that support that we need. They make these products that give us a bit more freedom and flexibility to still live our lives and feel like us and feel as normal as we can be in a new motherhood journey. I’m really, really excited to announce this partnership with them.”
Kufrin added that during her shoot, the brand partnered with PSI, Postpartum Support International, an organization that focuses on postpartum depression and anxiety, offering “a community and a support system” for new moms, dads, partners and other family members.
“It’s just a community where people can feel safe, where they can have a dialogue around how they’re feeling,” Kufrin said. “Whether it’s depression, anxiety, or other things that they’re struggling with — they offer resources for lactation, for doulas, really everything. To open up that you’re struggling with something so big during such a huge change in your life can be really, really difficult. So I think it’s so special that Momcozy partnered with them and that we were able to do this shoot together to bring more awareness.”
