“I Would Have Mortgaged My House”: Naomi Watts On Her Fight To Conceive
Naomi Watts is baring it all in her new book, Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known About Menopause. The 56-year-old actress dives deep into her emotional journey to motherhood, sharing her struggles with infertility during her relationship with actor Liev Schreiber.
Determined to conceive, Naomi described her relentless efforts, even when told she wasn’t a candidate for IVF due to her hormone levels. “I tried fertility drugs like Clomid and procedures like intrauterine insemination (IUI),” she revealed, admitting, “I would have eaten my dog’s toenails if someone told me it would help.”
Her obsession with getting pregnant consumed her daily life. “I tracked my ovulation and checked my temperature on the regular. I even got scans to see the follicles and the eggs forming, and we’d have sex at the exact optimal moment for conception. None of it worked,” she wrote.
The constant cycle of hope and disappointment took a toll on her relationship with Liev, but Naomi couldn’t give up. “I was peeing on sticks constantly, both to track my ovulation and to check for pregnancy if my period was even an hour late. I was monitoring the pH of my vagina because I’d heard that sperm do better in an alkaline environment than an acidic one. I spent so much money, but I would have mortgaged my house to try to solve this problem,” she admitted.
Naomi’s persistence paid off when she finally conceived while filming Eastern Promises. Performing her own stunts, including riding a heavy Russian motorbike, she kept her pregnancy a secret. Having previously experienced a miscarriage, she was hesitant to share the news too soon. “It was yet another example of how as women we often do things that put us at risk in order to be team players,” she reflected.
Weeks later, during a scene with Sinéad Cusack, Naomi felt her first flutter of life. “It was a sensation I’d never had in my life, but I knew instantly what it meant: the baby was moving around. The baby was real. The baby was fighting and strong. My eyes welled with tears,” she recalled.
Naomi and Liev went on to welcome two children, Sasha, now 17, and Kai, 16, before ending their 11-year relationship in 2016. Reflecting on her journey, Naomi emphasized the importance of self-compassion, especially for women navigating fertility struggles and menopause.
“We need to be reminded that we should be compassionate with ourselves…And after we’ve gone through menopause, we get closer to making decisions based entirely on what we want to do, not what others want from us. This is the age when we realize that all through our lives, we’ve felt pressured by and succumbed to expectations and hormones that we didn’t necessarily sign up for,” she wrote.
