The pregnancy journey can be one fraught with uncertainty. While some people seem to have children the way an apple tree makes apples, that’s not always the case. For some, it’s a trying, exhausting experience filled with longing and IVF medical procedures. For Real Housewives of New York star Jessel Taank, it was definitely the latter.
Taank, 40, chatted with People about the difficulties she faced attempting to get pregnant with husband Pavit Randhawa. The couple currently have two 2.5-year-old boys named Kai and Rio, but the journey took “from start to finish, almost four years.”
Taank revealed that like many women who were recently betrothed, she thought she would get pregnant “so quickly, right after I got married.” When it didn’t happen, she got “frustrated” and felt defeated. “It wasn’t happening for me,” she said.
She especially wanted to share that women currently going through that journey and struggling with it are not alone.
“I went through so many different emotions. I really hit rock bottom, in a depression at one point. And I don’t think that people talk about that part of it enough, and I really want to normalize that conversation.”
She also chose to keep most of that journey to herself. Not even her family and friends knew what she was going through.
“I pretty much went through the experience alone. And that was a choice that I made because I didn’t feel like I could share what I was going through. I think when you’re in that moment, it was very isolating and I didn’t want the added pressure of everyone asking about it.”
After that experience and having some time to reflect on it, she realized that “maybe I should have been more open about it and there could have been a support system that might have helped me.”
Another wrinkle in the decision-making process was cultural. Taank is British-Indian, and different cultures deal with those issues differently.
“I can’t speak for every culture, but certainly I think with Middle Eastern and Asian cultures, fertility and childbirth is kept quite personal and quite private. And as a culture and women are typically seen to be this machine that bears children. You’re sort of seen as this mode of reproduction and there’s very much that type of mentality, even for me growing up.”
The couple also had an intimacy issue after the pregnancy, she said, one that caused her castmates and fans to disparage him publicly, which she said she found “disappointing.”
“With our fertility issue, I was going through it physically, but it was also really tough on him, and I think a lot of people sort of discount that. We’re married and he was going through the exact same emotions I was. It just seems unfair how a lot of people jumped to assumptions that he was cheating because of the postpartum situation. It drives me crazy that people jumped to that negative conclusion when in actual fact, he has been so supportive throughout everything.”
The Real Housewives of New York is currently in its 14th season. It airs Sundays at 8 PM on Bravo and streams on Peacock.