Halle Berry on negative pregnancy tests and her 'Maury moment'
Actress Halle Berry, 41, appears on Oprah today to promote her new movie Things We Lost In The Fire — but of course, the talk turned into a baby chat. Halle is expecting her first child with model Gabriel Aubry this winter — they have decided not to find out the sex.
On deciding to become a mother:
I had resigned myself to, ‘I’m going to be single until I’m 50, at least, and I’ll have a child on my own.’ I was really okay with that. [Then I met Gabriel.]
On trying to get pregnant:
We had been trying to have a baby for quite some time. I’m sort of superstitious, so I saved all of the negative tests in a drawer. Don’t ask! I don’t know why, but I did. After about 35 tests, we finally got a positive test.
While I was trying to get pregnant, we tried really hard, so it was a lot of staying home and just doing what you do. I was watching a lot of television and — don’t judge me for this — ‘Maury Povich’. It was about, ‘You are the father. You’re not the father.’ So what the women do when they find out he’s not the daddy, they run off the stage, right? They run to the back. I don’t know why, but they run to the back.
So when we got the positive test — Gabriel was downstairs in the den — I ran upstairs! I got up there, and I thought, ‘I’ve been watching too much Maury!
Why they decided to leave the sex a delivery surprise:
We’re going to wait because we have a whole life[time] to know what it is. There’s so few genuine surprises in life anymore — why not have a huge surprise? I like fantasizing [that] one day it’s a girl, one day it’s a boy.
On having realistic expectations of her baby post-delivery:
When you’re pregnant, you have this idealized view of what the baby looks like. You don’t like to visualize is the post-birth reality, with its head smashed, purple, one ear folded down, eyes swollen.
On having more than one child:
Well, there’s just one right now. But we’re hoping right after this one to do it again.
