Nicole Kidman opens up about the "massive grief" she experienced after her miscarriage
"50 was a good year," Nicole Kidman said when reflecting on her past year.
The Australian actress enjoyed a throng of triumphs in the months surrounding her fiftieth birthday in June of last year, receiving an armful of prestigious acting awards, including an Emmy for Best Actress. She's happily married to country singer Keith Urban, and despite rumours that things were rocky between them, their display of PDA at the Country Music Awards in Las Vegas last month says otherwise.
But it seems that incidents of the past still haunt Kidman. In a recent interview, she opened up about her marriage to Tom Cruise and their two lost pregnancies Speaking with Tatler magazine, the actress spoke about the "massive grief" she still feels from the miscarriage that happened over 25 years ago.
Now a mother-of-four – with two children adopted with Cruise, and two she gave birth to naturally with Urban – Kidman reflected on the troubling times she had in her first marriage. She said how the devastation of failed pregnancies is still considered taboo, with the subject being "not talked about enough".
"I know the yearning," she told Tatler. "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.”
Kidman and Cruise were married for 11 years and she miscarried her first baby at age 23 shortly after their wedding in 1990. They lost the embryo early after it started developing in the fallopian tube instead of the womb, a condition called an ectopic pregnancy. After trying again and again after the incident, she managed to fall pregnant once more but suffered a miscarriage in 2001, around the time when Cruise filed for divorce.
The pregnancy difficulties were what led the couple to adopt their two children, Isabella and Connor, while they were still married. The two are now fully grown, reportedly both living in Florida.
"From the minute Tom and I were married, I wanted to have babies," Kidman told Marie Claire in 2007. "And we lost a baby early on, so that was really very traumatic. And that's when it came that we would adopt Bella."
"My mother has an adopted sister, so it's been part of our family and I knew it would probably play out somewhere in mine. I didn't think it would happen so early but it did."
Kidman recalled the "huge, aching yearning" she felt when struggling to fall pregnant, but then also described the joy and relief she felt when finally giving birth to a child. Her eldest-born child with Urban is Sunday, aged nine, and she has a seven-year-old sister, Faith.
"There’s an enormous amount of pain and an enormous amount of joy on the other side of it," she said. "The flipside of going through so much yearning and pain to get there is the feeling of ‘Ahhhh!’ when you have the child."
Despite the pain she still feels from the pregnancy difficulties she faced in her first marriage, Kidman now has four healthy and happy children. Her honesty about the ordeal should be commended, especially because of the taboo nature of the topic.