Hilarie Burton says she was “severely depressed” after she suffered the first of three miscarriages and she and husband Jeffrey Dean Morgan expressed their grief in very different ways.
“The false narrative that gets projected, especially by the celebrity angle is, we went through this hard thing and it brought us closer together,” the 38-year-old “One Tree Hill” actress told Us Weekly in a new interview. “I felt like a total failure because that wasn’t happening for me.”
She continued, “Until you go through that first really horrible thing together, you don’t know how your partner is going to react. You don’t know what they need.”
Burton, who shares two children — a 10-year-old son named Gus and a 2-year-old daughter named George — with “The Walking Dead” actor, said that while he needed her to “be strong and calm,” she needed “to slam doors and cry really hard and howl.”
Now, the actress is bearing all in her new memoir, “The Rural Diaries: Love, Livestock, and Big Life Lessons Down on Mischief Farm,” explaining the book is her way of “copping to my own crap.”
“I did have postpartum with my son,” she said. “I didn’t know I did because I was in the fog of it, but I wasn’t fun to be around and I was severely depressed after I had my first miscarriage … I can look at it now and see how self-destructive I was.”
She went on to praise Morgan, whom she began dating in 2009 and married in 2019.
“He was so generous with his own privacy in allowing me to put this out there,” she said. “Because it isn’t just me, it’s our story. And I can’t thank him enough for letting me process in this way.”
Burton first revealed the miscarriages in an Instagram post after George was born in 2018.
It took a long time for Jeffrey and I to have this baby,” she wrote at the time. “The first time I got pregnant, it took a year and a half. I surprised him on Christmas with baby Seahawk booties. We cried. We celebrated. We picked out names. And we lost that baby. More losses followed, and as so many couples know, it was heartbreaking. It still is heartbreaking.”