While talking with famed cook Ina Garten on her podcast Wiser Than Me, actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus opened up about her unusual birth experience when she was pregnant with her now 30-year-old son Henry.
During their discussion, Ina and Julia talked about everything from the kitchen to their respective home lives. Towards the end of their conversation, Julia asked Ina about her decision not to have children despite marrying her husband when she was just 20.
Ina said the decision to not have kids wasn’t a difficult decision at all. “No, it wasn’t any struggle at all,” Ina admitted. “I had no interest in having children.”
Ina continued, saying, “I had a terrible childhood. It was nothing I wanted to recreate. I think now looking back I might say I see my friends with their children and I understand what it could be but when I was 20 I didn’t want anything to do with it.”
Ina admitted her beloved husband Jeffrey would have been “a great parent” and probably “would have loved having children” but he wanted Ina to be happy more.
For most of the decisions Ina made in her life, she admitted she never looked back.
That’s when Julia opened up about her birthing experience with her oldest son. She was explaining that she was in the hospital during labor when she took herself to the bathroom.
The pair had been discussing how a lot of people, because their on television or on the computer in their home, their on-screen characters start to feel like friends and fans become relaxed in their presence.
“Which can be lovely, but there is a downside,” Julia admits.
“When I was giving birth to my first son,” she continues. “When you’re in labor, they put that monitor around your tummy, and I was in the bathroom and I was naked and I had the thing around my tummy. I was massive. I gained like 50 pounds when I was pregnant.”
“I was standing there and my water broke,” she continued. “All of a sudden the nurse came in the room and I went, ‘My water broke.’”
Must to Julia’s surprises, the nurses reaction wasn’t what she expected it would be. “And [the nurse] goes ‘Elaine!’”
As Julia and Ina laughed, Julia admitted “it was so awful.”
“Isn’t that crazy,” Julia questioned, “That’s crazy,” Ina confirmed.