Gabrielle Union previously opened up about how she felt after learning about Dwyane Wade‘s love child with another woman amid her infertility struggles.
“I have not had words, and even after untold amounts of therapy, I am not sure I have them now. But truth matters,” Union wrote in her memoir, You Got Anything Stronger? The book served as a follow-up to her 2017 bestseller We’re Going to Need More Wine.
It was one of many revelations Union made in her latest autobiography, which took a deep dive into past traumas that have shaped her into the unapologetic woman she is today.
“I am not the same woman I was when I wrote to you four years ago,” Union penned. “If you thought you knew me then, you are not alone. I thought I knew me, too.”
How Gabrielle Union Really Felt About Dwyane Wade’s Love Child
Wade conceived a child with another woman in 2013 during a brief split with Union prior to the couple’s 2013 engagement. Union said they were “not in a good place” when the other woman was impregnated but noted they were in a “much better one” when Wade told her.
Union and Wade chose to work through their issues privately, going on to tie the knot in August 2014 in a large ceremony in Miami, but Union said she struggled with the “trauma” and “embarrassment” behind closed doors as she was trying to conceive.
“To say I was devastated is to pick a word on a low shelf for convenience,” she recounted. “The experience of Dwyane having a baby so easily while I was unable to left my soul not just broken into pieces, but shattered into fine dust scattering in the wind.”
Union said she chose to “love him and forgive him” after Wade “worked to be forgiven” each day, but the actress questioned whether she would’ve made a different choice now.
“The advice I would give myself now is to leave,” she honestly said. “The me of today would not have stayed with him, but would I be who I am now without that pain?”
Union first opened up about her fertility struggles in We’re Going to Need More Wine, but the Deliver Us from Eva star said all the nuance and pain she shared about her journey to motherhood was simplified to a brief excerpt.
“It seemed every article about me used the phrase I had offered: ‘I have had eight or nine miscarriages,'” Union revealed. “This was always followed closely by my age.”
Not only did the media fixate on her age, but Union also said doctors didn’t fully investigate her “unexplained infertility” because she was an “older woman” in her 40s. She was diagnosed in 2016 with a “pronounced” case of adenomyosis that likely started in her 20s.
“There would be anger that I had sat in the offices of the world’s leading IVF doctors, and all they saw was my age,” Union recalled. “There was no investigation into any other cause for my miscarriages, and I was never correctly diagnosed or treated.”
Union and Wade welcomed their “miracle” daughter Kaavia, now 4, by surrogate in 2018, but Union said it took her over a year to “make peace” and accept the surrogacy route because she felt like “a failure” for not carrying her herself.
“Choosing surrogacy would be acknowledging an ‘L,'” she said. “I felt the constant, public prodding to acknowledge my body’s failure.”
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The couple chose a married, white woman named Natalie as their surrogate. She even had a nose ring. (“Oh, I thought, she’s a cool-ass white girl.”) But Union said she never fully connected with Natalie and Kaavia during the pregnancy: “This growing bump everyone thought I wanted to see was now visual manifestation of my failure… I kept [the baby] at arm’s length because she could still be snatched away.”
Union said that feeling has been replaced with gratitude and relief since Kaavia’s birth, but a lingering question remains: “I will always wonder if Kaav would love me more if I had carried her.”
In addition to Kaavia, Union and Wade are raising Zaire, 19, Zaya, 15, and Xavier, 7, Wade’s kids from previous relationships, and his 19-year-old nephew, Dahveon.
What are your thoughts on what Gabrielle Union had to say?
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