Jordana Brewster suffered a major meltdown during the surrogacy process and she felt like an “imposter” after her son was born.
The Fast and Furious star, 46, is mother to two sons — Julian, 12, and Rowan, 10 — with her ex-husband Andrew Form and both boys were born via surrogate.
Jordana has now explained she suffered an emotional breakdown after attending a scan with the woman — named only as Jessica — which left her sobbing and vomiting.
In an essay written for The Cut, Jordana explained: “I’m driving south, I realised on the ride back, and my child is heading north to a home I don’t know, hearing sounds I can’t recognise, getting used to routines foreign to me.
“I sobbed and sobbed in my hotel room until I almost vomited. I wanted to vomit, actually, because at least that would be real. Maybe I just wanted to punish myself for not doing what any self-respecting woman can do: Carry her own child.
“Pregnancy and childbirth were rites of passage, and I was grieving an experience I hadn’t known I even wanted in the first place.”
Jordana went on to explain the decision to use a surrogate to have children “wasn’t entirely” her own — revealing she has a medical condition which causes seizures and doctors told her it was “too dangerous” for her to carry a baby herself.
She was thrilled to eventually become a mother to her first son Julian, but Jordana admits she struggled with some complicated feelings about motherhood.
The actress wrote: “I felt like I had a dirty little secret: I hadn’t earned my child. The worst part of feeling like an impostor is that it creates an opening for other people’s cruelty.
“When my son was in kindergarten, the head of the school suggested I take a year off of work to ‘bond’ with my son. He had some behavioural issues like talking back and refusing to listen that would have been normal in the ’90s but were considered taboo in 2015.
“Rather than consider whether she was gaslighting me, her suggestion confirmed my worst fear: Everything was my fault. Little did she know that, as an actress, I was lucky to work two to three months a year, at most. Little did she know my then-husband was away on set most of the year while I navigated motherhood alone.”
Jordana later revealed “some of the shame dissipated” after welcoming her second son, but she underwent further trauma as she underwent surgery to ease her seizures and her marriage to Andrew collapsed.
She concluded: “Six years post-surgery, I feel softer, lighter. Maybe the surgery needed to happen so that I could somehow reconcile the choice not to carry my kids. Maybe that’s too simple an answer. Maybe it’s both.
“It makes sense to me now that I didn’t feel like a mom back then. I hadn’t put in the time yet. At our first meeting, Jessica told me that she was doing the easy part; I had the real work of raising my sons …
“Becoming a mother is earned; it’s not a given. Turns out Jessica was right.”
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