The road to welcoming their daughter, Kaavia, via surrogate wasn't an easy one for Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union — especially with this major roadblock in their relationship that they hit along the way. In her new memoir, You Got Anything Stronger?, Gabrielle opens up about Dwyane Wade conceiving a baby with another woman and how it made her feel amid her own struggles with fertility.
Gabrielle has been open about her fertility struggles.
Gabrielle experienced several miscarriages on the road to motherhood, and she and Dwyane ultimately ended up turning to surrogacy in order to welcome daughter Kaavia into their family in late 2018.
She hasn't tried to hide the fact that this was certainly a difficult time for her, but there was tough stuff happening in her relationship with Dwyane too.
While Gabrielle and Dwyane were on a break, he ended up fathering a child with someone else.
Today, Dwyane's son Xavier with Aja Metoyer is 7 years old, but when he and Gabrielle got back together, he had to tell her the truth about what happened when they were apart. According to Gabrielle's side of the story, it was incredibly difficult for her to hear, especially in the future, when she'd struggle to conceive a baby herself.
In her new book, Gabrielle said she was "devastated" to find out what happened when she and Dwyane were apart.
"To say I was devastated is to pick a word on a low shelf for convenience. There are people — strangers who I will never meet — who have been upset that I have not previously talked about that trauma," she wrote in the book, via Page Six. "I have not had words, and even after untold amounts of therapy I am not sure I have them now. But truth matters."
Ultimately, they were able to put their relationship back together and would get married, but it sounds like it was truly a painful time for them both.
The memories of that time came back to haunt her when she struggled to conceive a baby herself.
"The experience of Dwyane having a baby so easily while I was unable to left my soul not just broken into pieces, but shattered into fine dust scattering in the wind," she wrote. "With desperate hands, we gathered what we could to slowly remake me into something new."
Gabrielle noted that Dwyane was the one to suggest they find an alternate route to parenthood, because she'd already put herself and her body through so much at that point.
Fortunately, their story has a happy ending.
They're still together, and they have the baby they wished for — and she's pretty adorable in our opinion. (Gabrielle and Dwyane would probably agree.)
It sounds like they learned a lot from that experience, though it's hard to imagine how hard it must have been for them both.
