Chrissy Teigen—a model, TV host, cookbook author, and Twitter star—is beloved for her refreshingly candid personality. True to form, the expecting mother put it all on the table in a recent interview with The Cut, opening up about life with her one-year-old daughter Luna, her worries about welcoming baby number two, and her struggles with both postpartum depression and failed cycles of IVF.
Though she was recently as the creative consultant for Pampers Pure (the brand’s natural and stylishly-printed diaper line), Teigen admitted she doesn’t quite feel like an expert in motherhood just yet.
“Oh god, no. I still hit up other people for advice all the time, especially people with two kids,” the mother-of-two-to-be explained to the site. “That’s something I’m really curious about right now — how to deal with your first when you have a second coming along, especially when they’re so young. Luckily, a lot of my best friends have two kids and they’re teaching me so much.”
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With a second baby well on the way, Teigen revealed that she’s already feeling someanxiety about splitting time between her two little ones.”I get really worried I’m not going to pay enough attention to Luna,” she started, “but they’ve told me you actually start overcompensating and paying too much attention to your first. So there are a lot of these little things I always wonder about.”
Baby Luna is already poised to be a big sister, the proud mom said. “She’s pretty independent,” Teigen explained. “Aside from John [Legend], she’s not really attached to any one place or any one somebody. But I think that’s going to be really hard in a few months, when she sees me breastfeeding Baby Boy. All I can do is really worry about the future. But for now, it’s not too bad.”
Teigen and Legend’s journey to expand their family was not without struggle. The model and mom has been upfront about her suffering from postpartum depressionafter Luna was born back in 2016, as well as her decision to undergo IVF treatmentto conceive baby number two.
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Despite experiencing postpartum depression, Teigen had hope. “I knew we’d be fine, really,” she explained to The Cut. But she added, “The depression thing came out of nowhere! And I will say, I’m not even worried about it for this time — because I know what to expect at least.”
Even after successfully conceiving her and Legend’s second baby via IVF, Teigen said that she still questions her preparedness to welcome another child.
“You know, we did IVF and it’s kind of crazy because even though you do all this planning and preparation, you take progesterone and inject your body and do all this stuff — and when I finally did get pregnant I was like, ‘Oh crap, are we ready?'” Teigen explained.
“I think it kind of doesn’t matter whether you do all that preparation or whether it’s a surprise. You still wonder if you’re ready. But then you hear from enough people that you’re never really ready, and you just go for it.”
The IVF experience brought about a confusing whirlwind of emotions, the model and diaper designer explained. “It’s also easy to grow resentful of how easy it is for some people, when you’re literally mixing your own powders and chemicals to inject into your belly, shoving progesterone up there,” said Teigen.
“It’s almost like one of those things where there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s like the physical pain of labor. Once your baby is actually born, you don’t remember that pain at all. When you go through IVF, it does feel like, ‘Oh it’s not fair I have to do all this.’ Still, it’s a complete miracle when it works. There are so many people that still struggle, even with access to IVF.”
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Sadly, fertility treatments are often unsuccessful on the first try—which was the case for Teigen and Legend. “Ours didn’t work the first time, and it was devastating,” sherevealed. “You realize that a lot of it is luck, and you can’t blame things on yourself. It’s so easy to try to figure out what you might have done ‘wrong’ and do the opposite the next time.
“The first round I did IVF, when it didn’t work, I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I was on my feet too much, and that’s why.’ You just look for anything to blame, especially yourself. I think hearing stories is just really important. You realize there’s no right way to do it, or right way to react. I don’t know. There’s no right way to do IVF. You just have to keep hoping that it will happen.”
We’re sending well-wishes to Teigen-Legend family on welcoming baby number two soon!
This article originally appeared on Harper’s BAZAAR US.