Bridget Moynahan, 37, says the first thing she did when she returned home from the hospital last August with her newborn son, Jack, as a single and unwed mom was cry. Uncontrollably.
Her three-year relationship with Jack's father Tom Brady ended just before the baby was born. Brady immediately took up with supermodel Gisele Bündchen after that.
"I'm not sure anyone — and I could be wrong in this — grows up thinking, 'I want to be a single mom,'" the actress says in the July issue of Harper's Bazaar.
"When you're suddenly pregnant and no one is standing by your side, even if you're in your 30s, it's a hard conversation. I'm a traditional girl, and I believe in marriage, and I just always thought that's the way I'd be doing this," she says. "For a moment, it was hard for me to accept that this was the way I was going to have a family."
She gave birth to John — whom she gave her last name — last August. She's nicknamed him Jack.
"I walk in and just started sobbing," she says of coming home alone with her baby. "All of a sudden, you have this newborn you have no training for. It's frightening."
But in the end, it was all worth it, she says. "It's golden and it's tough and it was f—-ed up. But now I have a child, and it's the best thing in the world."
“I have become that mother I used to dread,” Moynahan adds, shamelessly enumerating the things that Jack has been doing lately which includes clapping, crawling, and standing up.
“Every time he does something, you think he’s a genius.” She pauses and deadpans, “He’s totally a genius.”
