Sanya Richards-Ross shared some raw moments from her heartbreaking pregnancy loss on this week’s episode of The Real Housewives of Atlanta.
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The season finale featured the Olympic track and field champion, 38, sharing that she experienced a pregnancy loss after revealing she was expecting baby no. 2 earlier in the season.
“Everything was fine at my five-week checkup, but when I back to Dr. Jackie for my seven-week checkup, she told me that the baby wasn’t growing and it looked like it was no longer a viable pregnancy,” she explained in a confessional.
Explaining that she planned a dilation and curettage (D&C) after a weekend in New York, she explained that she ended up having “the most traumatic miscarriage.”
“I was rushed off in an ambulance to the hospital. I lost so much blood that I had to get a blood transfusion,” she tearfully revealed. “Especially not having Ross there, being by myself, it was really, really hard.”
Richards-Ross and her husband, former NFL star Aaron Ross. are parents to son Aaron Jermaine a.k.a. “Deuce,” 6, with the reality star explaining to her mom that telling her son was the hardest part.
“I kept debating whether to tell him or not. But literally every night without fail, he’d put his hand on my stomach and he would say, ‘Dear God, please let us have a healthy baby, and let it be a little girl,'” Richards-Ross cried as she explained the situation to her mom.
“And so Ross and I were like, ‘We’re not gonna tell Deuce.’ Like, ‘We’re just gonna try right away, and he doesn’t understand the timeline and all that stuff,’ right? And so the first night I came back and he said the prayer, I just, it broke my heart because I felt like I was being so disingenuous to, like — Deuce is like the love of my life, and I love him so much. I don’t want to lie to him, you know?” she continued.
“And I talked to Ross, and I said, ‘Babe, I can’t not tell him.’ So I said to him, ‘Deuce-y, when mommy was in New York, something happened, and I lost the baby. And he just started crying,” she cried.
“He was like, ‘What? How?’ He just started bawling. He said, ‘Are you OK?'” she sobbed.
“And I said, ‘I’m OK, Deuce-y, are you OK?’ And he said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘I really wanted my baby sister.’”
Richards-Ross opened up to PEOPLE about the miscarriage last month, calling the experience “very traumatic.”
“I was in New York and had a really bad miscarriage. I had to go to the hospital. I had to have a blood transfusion. It was very, very, very scary.”
“You already opened your heart to becoming a mom, so it was awful,” she adds. “Even just talking about it… it really was a difficult time.”
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The painful loss provided Richards-Ross with a turning point, though. As RHOA viewers have seen, she’d been reluctant to have another child, after finally finding stability in the wake of a few years of significant changes in her life.
“I think a lot of women can relate to this too, but when you become a mom, you can sometimes question, ‘What’s my identity now going to be outside of the home?’ ” Richards-Ross said. “I had been an athlete, competing across the world while representing Team USA. Then, after retiring from sports and having a son, all these life changes hit Ross and I simultaneously. It was like a tornado hit our relationship for that 14 years prior to having our son was like a honeymoon at the time. And It was really overwhelming.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Aaron and I, we loved being parents,” Richards-Ross added. “But all these years in, we had just gotten into a good rhythm where we finally figured out how we wanted to parent. We had that balance where we were communicating well again, I was finally working again… And so I was skeptical about having another child.”
The miscarriage “put everything in perspective for Richards-Ross,” she told PEOPLE. “I didn’t realize until then how much I really wanted to become a mom again and how much of a blessing it is to be a mom. And I was like, ‘You know what? It’s family first, and all the other things that I love — which is work and all that stuff, it’s second. I know if I do this, if I focus on my family, all those things will come.'”
Richards-Ross was lucky enough to get pregnant again about a month later. “At my age, it’s considered a geriatric pregnancy, so I was nervous that the window has started to close. And after the miscarriage, I wasn’t ready to go through something like that again — that physical, mental, and emotional pain. But my doctor assured me that everything looks good, and sure enough, it worked.”
She’s now four months pregnant and due on December 25, 2023. “It’s going to be the best Christmas gift ever,” she laughs. “But I just couldn’t be happier and more clear about. I know I can do this. I’ve done it before. I have the support. I know what to expect. I’m so ready to meet this little one.”
As for the baby’s sex, Richards-Ross said she will be learning beforehand, and teased she might just drop the news at the RHOA reunion.
The Real Housewives of Atlanta airs Sundays (8 p.m. ET) on Bravo.
