Sandra Bullock candidly explained the rollercoaster of emotions she went through when she adopted her son Louis back in 2010. On the one hand, she was overcome with joy at becoming a mother, after years of filing adoption paperwork, but on the other hand, she was processing her divorce from Jesse James, her husband of five years.
Bullock’s shock divorce happened shortly after she took home the Academy Award for The Blind Side, after several women came forward with allegations that they had affairs with the television personality. As a result, she opted to adopt Louis as a single parent as opposed to as a couple with James, as originally planned. And she confessed that she tried to suppress her grief following her divorce so as not to let it affect her first moments with her son!
"So much had happened," the 57-year-old Oscar-winning-actress said in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning's Tracy Smith, referring to her relationship falling apart at the same time as the adoption process. "How do you process grief and not hurt your child in the process? It's a newborn — they take on everything that you're feeling. So my obligation was to him, and not tainting the first year of his life with my grief."
The Lost City actress also told Smith about her fears for her two children – she also adopted daughter Laila when she was a toddler back in 2015 – who are both Black, noting how "scary" being a mother to Black children can sometimes be. "My children are Black. I have a level of defense that millions of mothers have that aren't white. I have an understanding of how scary it is," the Bird Box actress continued.
"I just get really emotional because I think of hundreds of years of women who've never been able to relax into motherhood. They've never been able to relax." The Unforgivable actress then said that Black mothers have to worry about their children "in a way that we as white women have not had to worry."
