Gabrielle Union - You Got Anything Stronger? Stories

For Kaavia James and Zaya.

I am continually awed by the honor and responsibility of raising free Black girls. May you each embrace your vulnerability as your superpower, and may I not falter as I attempt to lead by example.

When I published my first book, Were Going to Need More Wine, in 2017, I opened by saying that it felt like you and I were on a first date. We each brought our expectations, not sure if this was going to go anywhere.

Well, weve progressed in our courtship. And this book is like us going away for that first weekend together. Because just as you think you know someone, it turns out you actually have no idea who a person really is until youve traveled with them. Thats when you find out their bathroom habits, and if theyre really the morning person they claimed to be on Instagram. And we also see how much baggage we bring along with us.

We are going on a journey, and for this, youre going to need something stronger.

I spent a long time planning this trip for you. Separately, we looked at the pictures of the house I picked for us to spend time in. Oh my God, I cant wait for this trip to start, we said. And now we are here, and the house doesnt quite look like it did in the glossy pictures. The beach is farther than the host advertised, the Wi-Fi is wonky, and as we explore the house we find doors that are locked to us.

Still, we nervously assure each other, Its charming.

And a few hours in, we realize it actually is. Sometimes the less bright and shiny a home looks, the more it offers. We can appreciate a house for its historyfor what it has weathered, and how its been lived in. See the places where someone has put love into it, the collaboration and collision of old and new construction. The house has great bones, it just needs tending to.

By the end of the first day, as if the house has warmed to us, we find the set of keys to those locked rooms. We are let in, trusted to see the photographs on the wall, the treasured books on shelves. All the signs of life and the good-ass energy that people were so purposeful in creating to fill this place. By the end of the journey, around when we really have a sense of the house and each other, this becomes our place.

As a lover of memoirs and biographies, I have benefited from authors revealing themselves so that, as readers, we can see ourselves. The truths collected in those pagestyped out letter by letter, as they were lived moment to momentbuild a community of kindred strangers. I owe these writers a debt, and while I can never repay them, I can at least honor them by sharing my own truths here with you. Readers gather the courage to become storytellers, and the lifeline is passed, person to person, book by book. The message remains, Keep going.

There are people on the sidelines who will heckle us, lingering on the fringe just long enough to hear half a truth and twist even that into a weapon to run amuck with. I know from fellow readers who found kinship in my first book that efforts to shame mein comments I probably never even sawsent the message that its too dangerous to be honest. Your story has no value, certainly not when you weigh it against the cost: the emotional toll of telling your truth, or the discomfort it might cause someone hearing it. Better to be silent, and remain alone.

You are not. We are here together in this moment, and we can have compassion for each other. But of course, that starts with giving it to ourselves. That is an ongoing project for me, one that I have had to continually start over and over again from scratch through the events of my life, collected here in this book. Theres always something that lands you on your asseven success, which comes with its own challenges. You think, Theres no way I can move on from this. I will never recover. I will never be the same.

No, you wont be the same. Life, it turns out, is a series of mini deaths. And, thankfully, rebirths. You have to grieve the person you were before, and I have to acknowledge that I am not the same woman I was when I wrote to you four years ago. If you thought you knew me then, you are not alone. I thought I knew me, too.

So, lets raise a glass as we start our trip. Heres to getting to know each other better.

So. Where were we?

Right, you and I left off in October 2017, when my first book came out. The weeks before the release were filled with dreams of loss. Pets dying. My husband leaving me. Babies not being born. My therapist told me those dreams were my soul preparing for my true self to emerge after letting go of my grief. In the book, I had finally spoken openly about my fertility journey. I was having second thoughtsin fact, so many thoughts they were organizing to go on strike. But I knew I had to stay honest because I didnt want other women going through IVF to feel as alone as I did. I had suffered in isolation, having so many miscarriages that I could not give an exact number. Strangers shared their own journeys and heartbreak with me. I had led with the truth, and it opened the door to compassion.

But from then on, it seemed every article about me used the phrase I had offered: I have had eight or nine miscarriages. This was always followed closely by my age, which at that time was forty-four. At least that stopped reporters from asking the question I got at every red carpet: When are you and Dwyane gonna have a baby? But my openness about pregnancy loss led journalists, friends, and strangers at the supermarket to cock their heads and ask a new question. It was presented casually, but not offhand. No, this was a statement, disguised as a question, that people thought I needed to hear right now.

Why dont you go the surrogacy route?

Each time this was presented, I felt the constant, public prodding to acknowledge my bodys failures. Just let some other, more capable, woman get the job done. Because youre not capable. It wasnt my imagination. In lifes many comment sections, it was clear that I had wasted enough of everyones time. The messages were that I had prioritized my career, and now I was too old to have a kid. In fact, I owed that to Dwyane. I had robbed him of this child because I was an older womanalmost ten years older than Dand I had to have known my window was limited.

The reality is that I had been diagnosed with adenomyosis one year before, with the gag being that Id had it since my early twenties. It was Dr. Kelly Baek, a freakishly intelligent, no-nonsense reproductive endocrinologist in L.A., who finally, accurately, diagnosed me with what every other doctor had missed. Before meeting her, I had gone through multiple rounds of IVF with leading doctors around the country. When you are in their offices you stare at the holiday cards behind them. Plump babies with beaming, relieved parents. Each baby is counted, with numbers reported to the CDC and officially tabulated to define that fertility clinics success rate. For the desperate like me, the CDC website has a handy table showing every clinics numbers. Picking one just now at random, I see it says, Pregnancies: 225, and then just below, Deliveries: 177. Then that gets divvied down to patients using their own eggs, and those using donor eggs. Those success-rate numbers are everything to a doctor, and keeping them up is why doctors dont always want to work with older women or women with unexplained infertility. When a clinic prefers winners only, there isnt much incentive to find an explanation. We, the worst cases, are simply weeded out.

But Dr. Baek saw the real issue at the first ultrasound, my uterus up there on a flat-screen in her exam room. Oh, she said, so, you have adenomyosis.