Shawn Johnson East opens up about her previous loss before this pregnancy

Shawn Johnson East is set to welcome her firstborn any day now, and she’s taken us along on all the ups and downs she’s faced on this journey. Now she’s revealing how much she wanted to have this child and the role her first pregnancy, which ended in miscarriage, played in that realization.

“I don’t feel like we ever felt ready [to have kids]…and then we accidentally ended up pregnant. It was a surprise for both of us and we ended up losing that pregnancy,” Shawn says during a recent appearance on the Miraculous Mamas podcast. “It was after the miscarriage we both just kind of had this switch flip…it was a rude awakening of like, ‘holy, crap we’re going to have a kid,’ but all of a sudden it was like “we’re ready to have a kid and like we want nothing else.'”

Shawn says that even though she’s so close to giving birth, she still doesn’t feel 100% ready to have a kid (which is a completely normal sentiment). She also explains that she and her husband, Andrew East, worry most about how becoming parents will affect their marriage, but ultimately, they just wanted to experience parenthood together more than anything in the wake of their miscarriage.

“As soon as we did miscarry, I went through that whole phase of…it was almost like a postpartum depression,” Shawn reveals. “Because you have all these hormones leaving your body, which you have to deal with on top of the mental side of processing what did you just go through. With my husband it was a year-long, not battle, but back and forth. As soon as I miscarried I was like ‘I want to try again. I want to still be pregnant, I want to do this.’ And my husband was like ‘I think we need to take a break. I think we need to heal from this and process everything. That causes tension between a marriage.”

It took the couple a little over a year to figure things out, heal, work on their marriage and finally get pregnant again and while Shawn says she still doesn’t feel completely ready for motherhood, we know she and her husband have got this.

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