Alanis Morissette talks 'challenges and miscarriages' ahead of baby No. 3: 'Didn't think it was possible'
Jagged Little Pill the musical isn’t the only baby Alanis Morissette is readying for.
The iconic songstress, 45, is preparing to welcome her third child with her performer husband, Mario “Souleye” Treadway. She talked about the pregnancy — and showed off her nearly cooked bare baby belly — in a Self magazine interview. And, well, "You Oughta Know," it hasn't been an easy journey.
“Between Ever and Onyx” — her son, 8, and daughter, nearly 3 — “there were some false starts,” Morissette told the magazine.
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“I always wanted to have three kids, and then I've had some challenges and some miscarriages so I just didn't think it was possible.”
Amid the miscarriages, she “felt so much grief and fear,” she admitted. “I chased and prayed for pregnancy and learned so much about my body and biochemistry and immunity and gynaecology through the process. It was a torturous learning and loss-filled and persevering process.”
Morissette talked about all the medical research she did — “on everything, from hormones to physicality, every rabbit hole one could go down to chase answers.” And admitted that she tried everything — “from heavily self-medicating, to formal allopathic medications, to now.” She said her doctors laughed at “the thickness of my files.”
Ultimately, she had success — as you can see.
“When I ... chased my health in a different way, from multiple angles — [including] extensive consistent blood work monitoring to trauma recovery work to multiple doctor and midwife appointments to many tests and surgeries and investigations, things shifted,” she said.
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Though it was an emotional ride. “It's this whole chemistry of emotions,” she said. “Hormones and chemicals that are just coursing through your body. It [can] be triggering, or flashbacking, or re-traumatising.”
In the interview, Morissette opened up about her birth stories: 36 hours with her son and just one with her daughter — after drinking a bottle of castor oil. The latter was mostly without her midwife — just her husband by her side — due to the time frame.
She’s talked before about having postpartum depression both times — the first time waiting 14 months before getting help and the second time four months. This time, she’ll be ready.
“I'm going to wait four minutes,” she said. “I have said to my friends [as well as a physician], I want you to not necessarily go by the words I'm saying and as best as I can, I'll try to be honest, but I can't personally rely on the degree of honesty if I reference the last two experiences. I snowed a lot of them as I was snowing myself.”
She added, “Not singularly relying on myself to diagnose myself is key.”
Describing what it felt like, she said, “For me I would just wake up and feel like I was covered in tar — and it wasn't the first time I'd experienced depression so I just thought Oh, well, this feels familiar, I'm depressed, I think. And then simultaneously, my personal history of depression where it was so normalized for me to be in the quicksand, as I call it, or in the tar. It does feel like tar, like everything feels heavy.”
Morissette also spoke of marriage with Treadway, nine years strong.
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“He's an incredibly modern man, so he has never had an issue with being married to an alpha woman, God bless him,” she said. “His mom held down two full-time jobs, his dad stayed home. So there's nothing unfamiliar about [our situation for him].”
In November, after the baby arrives, Morissette will see her songs come alive on Broadway when Jagged Little Pill the musical debuts.
