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Pregnant Alanis Morissette Reflects on ‘Fear’ She Felt After Numerous Miscarriages
It was a longtime coming. Alanis Morissette is quite busy these days, as not only is she focusing on her career, but she is already preparing to welcome her third child with husband Mario Treadway. However, it hasn’t exactly been an easy road.
Noting her two children Ever and Onyx,” the 45-year-old tells SELF‘s digital issue, “Between [my two kids] there were some false starts. I always wanted to have three kids, and then I’ve had some challenges and some miscarriages so I just didn’t think it was possible.” The singer recalled how she “felt so much grief and fear” while trying to have another baby, saying, “I chased and prayed for pregnancy and learned so much about my body and biochemistry and immunity and gynecology through the process. It was a torturous learning and loss-filled and persevering process.”
On March 25, good news arrived for Alanis and Mario, 39, as they learned a third baby was finally on the way — however, the hitmaker has already decided she won’t wait four months to ask for help with her postpartum depression like she did with her second child. “And now this time I’m going to wait four minutes,” she tells the outlet. “I have said to my friends, ‘I want you to not necessarily go by the words I’m saying’ and as best as I can, I’ll try to be honest, but I can’t personally rely on the degree of honesty if I reference the last two experiences.”
“I snowed a lot of them as I was snowing myself [the last two times],” Alanis confesses. “I would just wake up and feel like I was covered in tar and it wasn’t the first time I’d experienced depression so I just thought, ‘Oh, well, this feels familiar, I’m depressed, I think.’ And then simultaneously, my personal history of depression where it was so normalized for me to be in the quicksand, as I call it, or in the tar. It does feel like tar, like everything feels heavy.”
After the birth of her first child, the Grammy winner tried to use her music to deal with her feelings. She explained, “Often what had pulled me out of my depression pre-family was service” — service meaning “offering comfort, empathy, validation, support, information, assurance” through her songs. “So I would just think, ‘Oh I’m just going to go out into the world and serve and then I’m going to feel better,’ but that didn’t do it,” she says. “And then I had my various forms of self-medicating [that also didn’t help]. So, creativity’s not doing it, tequila’s not doing it … and I even sang about it.”
We know it’s been a rough road for Alanis, but we know all the joy a third child will bring to her household — we wish her and her family the best!
