Actress Constance Marie is in a state of bliss with her new baby girl, but she had no idea that she’d have to undergo three IVFs and two miscarriages to get there.
Like any new mom, Constance Marie is absolutely in love with her baby girl, Luna Marie. “She’s such a happy baby, and that makes me happy!” raves Constance, who delivered her daughter via C-section on February 5. “She only really cries when she’s hungry, and she is a great sleeper. I think she knows how much I love to sleep, so she’s a good sleeper. It makes me love her even more!”
While motherhood definitely agrees with Constance—best known for her role as George Lopez’s wife on The George Lopez Show—the road to conceiving her baby was anything but easy. For more than three-and-a-half years, Constance endured three attempts using the fertility drug Clomid with intrauterine insemination (IUI), two failed attempts at in vitro fertilization (IVF), and two miscarriages. Through it all, though, her belief that she would become a mom never failed. “I knew we would have a family one day. I just wasn’t sure how it would exactly come about,” she says.
But for someone who fought to have a child—and who is most known for playing doting moms—the desire to have a baby didn’t hit Constance until later on in life.
Raised by a single mother, Constance says she was a tomboy as a child. “I just didn’t grow up with that same desire to be a mom that many girls and women have. And to be honest, I’ve always been a little afraid of kids. I secretly thought they didn’t like me.”
At 30, she “adopted” a local elementary school, spending one hour each week reading to the students. It was also around this time that she met yoga teacher Kent Katich in an acting class. Between spending time around kids—and falling in love with her future fiancé (they became engaged in 2000)—Constance began to open up to the possibility of motherhood. Ironically, she also began getting cast as a mom in films like Tortilla Soup and Selena (where she endured over four hours of makeup each day to play Jennifer Lopez’s mother). “Those roles also helped me to embrace the idea of having children,” admits Constance.
Still, Constance wasn’t quite ready to start a family, and had no problem putting off pregnancy for a few years. “I would read all of these stories about women having babies later on in life—and Latin women are known to be fertile! So I figured, ‘I have plenty of time.’ ”
Constance and Kent had decided they were ready to become parents. And at 38, she wasn’t concerned about her age. In fact, they were convinced getting pregnant would be easy—and fun! “At first, you’re both like, ‘Yeah! We get to have sex all the time!’ Then after a few months, you’re like, ‘Ugh, we have to have sex all the time,’” laughs Constance.
After 10 months of trying naturally with no success, Constance’s doctor decided to run some tests, including a hysterosalpingogram (HSG), when dye is injected into the fallopian tubes and an X-ray checks for blockage. “When it was being done, I felt so much pressure and pain I didn’t think I could handle it. It felt like someone was shoving a fist in my stomach. The doctor said he couldn’t even find my fallopian tubes, they were so blocked—the ink couldn’t even get in there.”
Despite being upset by the discovery, Constance and Kent resisted using IVF right away. “We are very earthy, organic people, so I didn’t want to pump hormones into me.” Instead, they decided to try insemination, and Constance agreed to go on Clomid. During one memorable appointment, the doctor on call accidentally spilled Kent’s “deposit” all over the floor. “Now I can laugh about it, but at the time you think, ‘That might have been our baby!’” remembers Constance.
After a couple of failed insemination attempts, Constance was sent in for another HSG. This time, a new doctor had no problem finding her fallopian tubes and discovered they were clear. “We don’t know if it was the dye from the first round that cleared them out—sometimes that does happen—or if the first doctor just didn’t know what he was doing,” says Constance. “But that was a huge relief.”
And three months later, Constance got pregnant. “We couldn’t believe it! The test turns positive, and you are just thrilled.” But that joy turned to heartbreak at her six-week appointment. “All that was there was an empty sac. My body was pregnant, but the fetal cell had not developed.” Constance was sent in for a dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure. “It was such a radical emotional shift. We went from being so excited to devastated,” she recalls.
Constance couldn’t be depressed for long because two days after the D&C she had to be on the George Lopez set—ready to tape in front of an audience. “It was hard not to feel down,” she explains. “But since I had decided not to tell anyone at work what was going on, I couldn’t show it. I had to be pumped, so work was actually a good distraction for me.”
She also took comfort remembering what a teacher at her adopted elementary school had told her years earlier. “This woman had started her family later in life like me, and she suffered four miscarriages,” recollects Constance. “But she figured that if she needed to go through those miscarriages in order to have a baby, then she would have to just deal with it. She was very matter-of-fact about it. She accepted the reality that at her age this would be a part of the process, and that helped her get through it. Eventually, she had two beautiful daughters.”
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