Naomi Watts Says She 'Spent So Much Money' Trying to Conceive During Her Relationship with Liev Schreiber

Naomi Watts is getting candid about her motherhood journey.

In her new book, Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known About Menopause, Watts, 56, opened up about her struggle to conceive during her relationship with actor Liev Schreiber. The new author wrote that she was "determined to get pregnant as soon as possible."

"Because of my hormone levels, I wasn’t a candidate for IVF, but I tried fertility drugs like Clomid and procedures like intrauterine insemination (IUI)," she wrote in her book, which was released on Tuesday, Jan. 21. "I would have eaten my dog’s toenails if someone told me it would help."

"I tracked my ovulation and checked my temperature on the regular," she continued. "I even got scans to see the follicles and the eggs forming, and we’d have sex at the exact optimal moment for conception. None of it worked."

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Related: Naomi Watts' 2 Children: All About Sasha and Kai

Watts added that her "obsession" with getting pregnant created a strain on her relationship with her partner Liev Schreiber. However, she couldn't bring herself to give up on conceiving.

"I was peeing on sticks constantly, both to track my ovulation and to check for pregnancy if my period was even an hour late. I was monitoring the pH of my vagina because I’d heard that sperm do better in an alkaline environment than an acidic one. I spent so much money, but I would have mortgaged my house to try to solve this problem," she continued.

When she finally conceived, Watts was in the midst of filming Eastern Promises and had to perform her own stunts, including riding "a three-hundred-pound Russian motorbike." Having previously experienced a miscarriage, she felt it was "too early" to tell anyone she was pregnant.

"I also didn’t want to tell anyone yet, because it was so early, and because I didn’t want to be difficult, so I just kept going," the Emmanuelle star wrote. "It was yet another example of how as women we often do things that put us at risk in order to be team players."

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However, a few weeks later while filming a scene with fellow actress Sinéad Cusack, she felt her first flutter.

"It was a sensation I’d never had in my life, but I knew instantly what it meant: the baby was moving around," she wrote. "The baby was real. The baby was fighting and strong. My eyes welled with tears."

Watts went on to welcome two children — Sasha, 17, and Kai, 16 — with Schreiber, 57. The pair ended their 11-year relationship in 2016.

Looking back at her own journey, as well as other woman's struggles around her, Watts learned the importance of having "compassion for ourselves."

"We need to be reminded that we should be compassionate with ourselves. None of the choices we have to make are easy," she wrote. "And after we’ve gone through menopause, we get closer to making decisions based entirely on what we want to do, not what others want from us. This is the age when we realize that all through our lives, we’ve felt pressured by and succumbed to expectations and hormones that we didn’t necessarily sign up for."

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