Melissa Rauch is pregnant — and opening up about her emotional journey toward becoming a mom.
The Big Bang Theory star, who plays microbiologist and new mom Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz on the hit CBS comedy, wrote an essay for Glamour.com detailing how she and husband Winston are expecting a baby this fall, after experiencing a miscarriage previously.
“Here is the only statement regarding my pregnancy that doesn’t make me feel like a complete fraud: ‘Melissa is expecting her first child. She is extremely overjoyed, but if she’s being honest, due to the fact that she had a miscarriage the last time she was pregnant, she’s pretty much terrified at the moment that it will happen again,’ ” Rauch begins in the piece.
” ‘She feels weird even announcing this at all, and would rather wait until her child heads off to college to tell anyone, but she figures she should probably share this news before someone sees her waddling around with her mid-section protruding and announces it first,’ ” adds the actress, 37.
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Rauch writes that she battled conflicted feelings during her own road toward conception.
“During the time when I was grieving over my pregnancy loss or struggling with fertility issues, every joyful, expectant baby announcement felt like a tiny stab in the heart,” she admits. “It’s not that I wasn’t happy for these people, but I would think, ‘Why are these shiny, carefree, fertile women so easily able to do what I cannot?’ ”
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“And then I’d immediately feel guilt and shame for harboring that jealousy — one might call this ‘the circle of strife.’ (A song I imagine is somewhere deep in the extended director’s cut of The Lion King.),” she jokes. “I’ve always been one to keep my eyes on my own paper, but when it came to having a baby, that proved to be a challenge.”
“So when I thought about having to share the news about expecting this baby, all I could think about was another woman mourning over her loss as I did, worried she would never get pregnant again, and reading about my little bundle on the way. It felt a bit disingenuous to not also share the struggle it took for me to get here,” Rauch adds of her inspiration behind writing about her experience.
