Nicole Kidman covers the newly redesigned issue of Tatler. It’s funny, because for years I’ve believed that Kidman is kind of a bad interview subject – she got her life together and she seems really happy these days, and that tends to make for boring, rote-sounding quotes. But every now and then, Kidman talks about the old sh-t. The Tom Cruise sh-t. And that’s what Tatler got her to do – Kidman talked about her miscarriage during her marriage to Cruise. That came near the end of the Cruise marriage, and there was actually some shady gossip about it, which I remember clearly. But of course Kidman doesn’t talk about that part of it. Some highlights:
The miscarriage she had at the end of her marriage to Cruise: “I know the yearning. That yearning. It’s a huge, aching yearning. And the loss! The loss of a miscarriage is not talked about enough. That’s massive grief to certain women. There’s an enormous amount of pain and an enormous amount of joy on the other side of it. The flipside of going through so much yearning and pain to get there is the feeling of ‘Ahhhh!’ when you have the child.”
Turning 50: “Yeah, 50 was a good year, I never thought that year would have brought so many triumphs, I suppose. Actually, it was just serendipity and a confluence of events. The one thing that did change is that both my kids were in school, and I was able to focus on my own life a little bit more, just because, you know, I’d got them through those pre-school years when you’re barely hanging on [and] it’s hard to get out of the sweatpants.”
Playing an abused woman in Big Little Lies: “You have to delve into parts where you go, OK, what’s the truth of this character? We had to be really honest. You’re playing love, but you’re playing love that is so damaging to each of the people. I would come home and cry after doing Big Little Lies. I would cry alone. I would sit and I would have a bath and cry. And feel very distressed and not know exactly what to do about it.
[From Tatler via E! News]
I always feel like Kidman is so careful about how she talks about motherhood, especially considering that at the time of the miscarriage, she was already mom to Bella and Connor Cruise. When she left Tom, she basically had to leave the kids behind to be raised in the church of Scientology. Bella and Connor barely have anything to do with Kidman at this point, and for the most part, she barely acknowledges them in interviews. Of course, Kidman is talking about wanting to be pregnant and carry a baby to term, which is something many women “yearn” for, as she says.
Photos courtesy of WENN, cover courtesy of Tatler.
She must thank her lucky stars everyday for dodging a bullet & leaving Cruise & that psycho cult!
As I recall it, it was actually Cruise who completely blindsided her by abruptly filing for divorce. Reports at the time alluded to the fact that NK was shattered at the time, because it came so close to their 10th anniversary, and hinted that she had no idea why he suddenly left her. It wasn’t too long after that that she spoke of her miscarriage. That’s how I remember it.
He left her. Basically when he was with her he drifted away from the Church of Scientology a bit. Also her father is a psychiatrist and Scientologists hate psychiatry. Miscavage freaked and worked on Tom a lot, whispering in his ear about Nicole. He dumped her and tried to claim they’d been separated for a while. This is because he dumped her right after their 10th anniversary and when you e been married ten years you’re entitled to a lot more. So Tom tried to claim they’d been separated for months and the fact that she was pregnant with his child and miscarried it proved otherwise. She was devastated and completely blind-sided.
Also, she didn’t “leave behind” her children as per what Kaiser is saying here. She and Tom had 50/50 custody. However, the Church had a whole team of people dedicated to brainwashing those kids whenever Tom had them. They completely poisoned them against their mother – absolutely abhorrent behaviour. Some of the people involved have since left the Church and admitted to all of this – Miscavige pressuring Tom to leave her and then brainwashing the kids.
Poor Nicole, I imagine this all must have been extremely traumatic and yet at the time he held most of the power and the public wasn’t aware of what a freak show the Church of Scientology is and the depths they will stoop to. It’s amazing how little she has said over the years and that restraint must be purely out of love for her kids.
I’ve had a miscarriage when I was more than 5 months along. It was soul shattering. That baby was wanted so much. I felt it moving for almost 2 months. I was in love.
The loss was huge. The loss of this little person, the loss of the future and the potential and possibility of that little life.
Something really shitty was I had signed up for a newsletter that tells you what your baby is like during each month of pregnancy and then each month after it’s born.
So I would get a newsletter telling me your baby is 3 months old and maybe smiling now, your baby is 11 months old and maybe walking now, ect.
Sure I could have unsubscribed or even changed my email, it was horrible getting them
But to delete them felt like denying the baby existed, that it didn’t happen and didn’t matter. So I kept the bittersweet emails coming til he would have been 36 months.
Then the service stopped. That was sad
I had a baby three years later after the miscarriage, that did help a lot. Helped the pain fade in the face of new joy.
Now it was about 16 years ago, I still remember, I made myself sad right now thinking about it, but the pain has faded
I have a 22 year old and a 13 year old but I’ll always miss that one in the middle.
Some Asian religions believe that miscarried babies are returned to us in spirit in later pregnancies. I always thought that was a beautiful idea.
Cairinacat, I understand how you felt as I went thru something similar. I got pregnant in late 2016, the same month I turned 40, after years of trying. I excitedly signed up at BabyCenter.com to receive info about each stage of my pregnancy. I had a miscarriage at 2 1/2 months along, but didn’t have the heart to fill out/submit the “Report a Loss” option, so for the next year+, I would receive messages & emails about my non-existent pregnancy and then about my non-existent baby’s milestones. I was only able to bring myself to submit the “Report a Loss” after I (unexpectedly) became pregnant again more than a year after the miscarriage, when I went to sign up for my current pregnancy. I’m now 6 1/2 months along, and blissfully happy. But that 2016 miscarriage nearly destroyed me.–I was suicidal in its aftermath; completely unable to cope with the devastating loss.
I also had 2 other miscarriages, including one when I was 17, the summer before I was due to leave for college. Even tho that pregnancy was unwanted and at the time I miscarried I was leaning toward getting an abortion (I don’t know if I would’ve gotten one or not), it was still a devastating experience.
Thank you for sharing your story.
I agree with her. It should be talked about. When I was pregnant with my third son, the dr had said my numbers from a blood test weren’t where they should be. He took blood again and said to go home and wait 2 days for results. If the results were ok, all wud be well. If they were same or lower, I’d be miscarrying. I went home hysterical and cried until the results came back ok and thankfully all was well. I was inconsolable those 2 days so I cannot imagine if I miscarried. When it has happened to a friend or relative, I’m there just like I am for any death in the family.
I guess the lack of discourse on the subject is because most people don’t know how to address it? Since each one is different and extremely personal from person-to-person there’s also that you have to wrestle with, and it doesn’t particularly lend itself well to spokeswoman status due to the highly variable nature. Plus there’s always the simple truth that most people not affected feel uncomfortable by stories of death and despair, and would just prefer to brush it off entirely which is selfish yes, but no different from what people do with other topics they don’t like.
I think you’re right. There is so, so much variation in how women feel about miscarriages/stillbirths, and there’s that invisible line before which there will be no remains, past which there might be remains but no service, and again past which a family will have a burial. I had three miscarriages, but they were so, so early and two were dissolving twins (in two pregnancies) and they were followed up by getting pregnant so quickly. I hope in my life that I am able to support women grieving these losses in the way that they need.
For years I didn’t have an opinion about her one way or another, but I’ve grown to respect her a lot. I think she is a class act.
I’m glad she spoke up. Miscarriages are really, really common but it seems as if our society doesn’t accept how deep the emotional damage goes when a pregnancy ends without a baby.
Sometimes the only way to heal is to eventually have a healthy baby, but this is not possible for everyone. I have been through this personally and have seen it with friends who have had miscarriages, stillbirths and abortions- no matter how the pregnancy ended we were all emotional wrecks until a healthy baby came along.
I think the only way to ease the pain is for medical professionals to take women’s mental health more seriously and for society to stop putting pressure on women to have babies as a required milestone in their lives.
We need to see value in each woman just as herself, not as the label that society puts on her (ie wife, mother, caregiver, sex symbol, porn star, Saint, girl-next-door, bimbo, b!tch, trollop etc.)
I have had 2 miscarriages. I have endometriosis w a diagnosis missed until my 30s and could never conceive. I get her. It’s one of those things that you can’t really put in words or help other people understand and we don’t talk about it. We don’t grieve publicly. It’s not recognized like the way there are funerals. It’s something that most people can’t “get” nor would I wish it on them.
I think talking about miscarriage is confusing because we have been told for years it’s just a fetus, unless you want it – then it’s a baby.
So hard to reconcile those two trains of thought and how the person experiencing the miscarriage actually feels.
I don’t think those two are difficult to reconcile at all. If my friend informed me she was pregnant and getting an abortion, I would go with her, make a donation to Planned Parenthood for all the women who don’t have access and cheer the fact that she gets to keep her life in track. If my friend informed me she as pregnant and had lost the baby, I would cry with her.
I’m not sure if you are genuinely curious or just making a point, but I agree with Betsy. You just understand pregnancy is a sensitive topic and you ask the person questions about how they feel about the loss/termination and offer empathy. Someone else below I think meant to reply to megan and she explained that the grief over a miscarriage is in large part mourning the loss of an idea of who this person would be and what your life would be like as his or her mother.
If you are happy to be pregnant then you most likely have a million thoughts about when it will be born, what you will name it, whether you think it’s a boy or girl, what your parenting philosophies will be, which parent you think it will resemble, what its personality will be like, how far apart you might space your next kid, etc. You glow from contentment and excitement. Then all of a sudden, that just disappears and you no longer have all those things to think about and all that excitement and now you just wonder what went wrong and whether you will be able to conceive again and when. That shift in feelings is the grief and the loss. It’s wanting something so deeply and almost having it and then losing it.
A parent can intellectually know that the fetus was only x centimeters and didn’t have y organs yet, much less a face or a personality, and that it would not have been healthy and it was “for the best” to have lost it and also experience sadness. And one can feel sadness over a personal miscarriage and still accept that women have the right to abortions.
Now I want to know about the shady gossip related to her miscarriage and/or the end of her relationship with Cruise.
Wasn’t there a rumour she was having an affair with Ewan McGregor and that the baby was his? That they had adopted because they couldn’t have kids biologically and then – boom – she’s pregnant so it can’t be her that’s the problem. Something like that I think!
Yep and I do believe that it was Ewan’s and not Tom’s and that’s why he divorced her.
I think the yearning for the child is less about distinguishing between bio and adopted. But she had adopted her older children and then got pregnant. I had a miscarriage before my son and that wound never really healed until I had him in my arms. Until that point I never really believed I would make it to term. And having my son did help with the healing process. I’ve had two more miscarriages in the past year and hit 19 weeks tomorrow with my 5th pregnancy. Even though I’m doing better dealing with the miscarriages now I don’t think I’ll heal anymore until I have a healthy baby. But I think I would have felt the same had this coming child been adopted. But woman also seem to take for granted that our bodies were made for this so there’s also a bit of feeling like a failure that comes in to play with miscarriages and that feeling doesn’t go away until you complete a pregnancy.
I like that she said “certain women” because sometimes a miscarriage or stillbirth is a massive tragedy and sometimes it just…is. My mother thinks she had a miscarriage between my siblings and shrugged it off as no big deal. She already had two healthy kids, after all, and told me it felt silly to mourn something she hadn’t even processed yet. My friend, on the other hand, miscarried an oops baby shortly after finding out her BC failed. She was crushed, and it actually led to her husband and she actively deciding to have a third child. Maternity is a different experience for every woman. The narrative needs to include all of those experiences and feelings and reconciliations.
Yup.
Another opportunity for me to plug “An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination.” Lovely, lovely book.
I wish people realized that limiting abortion means limiting women’s miscarriage options. I’m so grateful I had that choice rather than waiting for things to happen “naturally.”
I agree, it is tricky. This is why stillborn babies don’t receive a birth certificate and why fetuses under 24 weeks aren’t taken to the NICU because they aren’t viewed as viable. Once you start acknowledging fetuses and babies in utero as people it opens up a whole world of legal and political issues around abortion. I am pro choice and have also lost a full term baby so I understand. The grief is two fold, you are grieving your dead child and you grieve the life you were expecting to have with that child. When a pregnancy ends very early on or someone chooses to terminate I think they tend to mourn more the loss of the idea rather than the actual baby but that is just my personal opinion, having experienced both, and everyone is different.
Do we believe they had a real marriage? Do we believe the child was conceived naturally? Was Suri conceived naturally? Times have changed. We know contract relationships exist. We know sometimes these arrangements are used to hide a celebrity’s sexual preferences. I 100% believe Katie Holmes was “an arrangement”. What is the truth behind Nicole and Tom? People used to fear him, but now? I think the truth will come out eventually.
It’s difficult because every woman handles a miscarriage so differently. I had a miscarriage at 12 weeks; I already had a son who was a toddler at the time and had problems in my marriage. I was in my 20s and wanted to finish college and had no reason to believe I wouldn’t be able to conceive again (and later on I did). So while it hurt, I was kind of over it in a few weeks; if someone asked me now, I don’t even remember the exact date or month that it happened. It was sort of an unfortunate blip on my radar. I can see other women take it much harder under different circumstances (or the same, idk). It’s so individual that it’s hard to know the real way to talk about it. I’ve known women who compared it to the death of a child and I could never see that, because I already had a child running around outside my womb. What I went through with the miscarriage pales in comparison to what I would go through if I were to lose one of my sons. But not every woman takes it the same way so it varies. I know sometimes I feel like a stone-cold freak for being like, “Yup, had a miscarriage, sucked, over it” but it is what it is.
Agree. I had one at 20. Didn’t want the kid but didn’t really want the ordeal of trying to arrange an abortion. It was a relief for me, tinged with only the slightest sadness