Adrienne Bailon-Houghton won't pretend having a baby with a surrogate was 100% joyous

Adrienne Bailon-Houghton is incredibly grateful to be a mom, but she won't pretend her parenthood journey has been all sunshine and rainbows.

The former "Cheetah Girls" star and "The Real" co-host endured eight IVF cycles and suffered multiple miscarriages before she welcomed her son, Ever James, in August, 2022 with help from a surrogate.

"I had no idea that this was going to be my journey," Bailon-Houghton tells TODAY.com, in an interview in New York before her appearance on the TODAY show. "I mean, I should have known initially when I did my (first) egg retrieval. My girlfriend was doing it at the same time as me and she got 18 eggs. When I did my retrieval, I got four."

Bailon-Houghton can clearly recall the optimism — and, she says, naivety — she had when she started IVF. The actor says she had "never heard of a failed cycle," and assumed the process would be as easy as paying "a bunch of money" to get pregnant.

"(We got) four eggs fertilized, so all four of them were getting biopsied," Bailon-Houghton recalls. "I bragged to the woman doing my hair, like: 'Today is the day I'm going to find out! Girls? Boys? What do I got?'"

While sitting under the dryer, Bailon-Houghton says she got "the phone call."

"I remember having to step out, because (the doctor) told me: 'I don't have good news,'" she says. "I was like: 'What do I only have? Two embryos?' He said: 'We got nothing.' I was devastated. I was oddly embarrassed ... then I was angry."

That anger, Bailon-Houghton says, remained, failed cycle after failed cycle, miscarriage after miscarriage.

Bailon-Houghton miscarried at 5 months gestation with what she says would have been a baby girl. The actor says she was preparing to announce her pregnancy — her husband, Isreal Houghton, wrote a special song for the occasion. During a pre-taped episode of "The Masked Singer," Bailon-Houghton said "I'm pregnant" on stage after her reveal.

"When they went to go air it, I had to talk to 'the heads' and ask them to please remove it," Bailon-Houghton says. "That probably was my lowest point, because it just felt really unfair. It felt like we had done everything. To even get to the stage of implantation for me took a really long time."

After another failed implantation, Bailon-Houghton says she only had "one embryo left." Her doctor asked if she would consider surrogacy.

"I remember talking to my mom about it. She was like: 'Why would you want someone else to carry your baby?' That hit me," she says. "I was hysterical. I was like: 'You don't understand — this is my final option. If I implant this child into my body and I miscarried, that was my last chance.'

"My mom allows me to say that about her — because it can make her sound pretty harsh and insensitive — because there are going to be so many moms who think and feel the same," she adds. "They just had like this disdain to the idea of it not happening 'naturally' for me, because it happened so easily and 'naturally' for them, my mom and my sister. The journey is not just hard for you, but it's hard for the people who love you and the people who are rooting for you and praying for you and wanting this for you just as much as you want it for you."

Anger also tinged the happy, "miracle" moments, she says, like when one IVF cycle resulted in the retrieval and eventual implantation of her now son, Ever James, into a surrogate.

While Bailon-Houghton says her surrogate was incredible ("She would ask me what I'm eating that day, then eat what I had so he could have what I was eating."), she admits she also felt "robbed" of the experience of being pregnant.

"It sounds so stupid — so superficial," she says. "But I felt robbed of maternity photos. I wanted to feel the movement of a baby inside me. I wanted my husband to experience my pregnant body. I imagined my son being born, and now had other people in this room that were not a part of what I imagined."

Despite the anger and sadness of imagined experiences lost, Bailon-Houghton says she was also able to create joyful moments during IVF.

"We turned injections into something romantic. It became ritualistic," she says. "We did it at a certain time. We played certain songs. We dimmed the lights. We held hands. We prayed."

And while the birth of her son did not go as she had originally planned, it was more beautiful than Bailon-Houghton could have imagined.

"I thought I was going to be guarded when my son was born — like (the presence of ) somebody else and their support person would take away from the sacredness of that moment," she says. "Yet when I pulled my son out of someone else's vagina and I put that baby on me, I ugly cried. I talked to him: 'I love you baby. I love you baby boy. I have loved you.'

"So yes, while I do feel like I was robbed of some things, when I came full circle and that baby was in my my arms I felt like: Who cares?" she adds. "I do not care about how I thought it was supposed to be. This is my perfect moment."

Bailon-Houghton says being candid about the highs and lows — the joy and the sorrow; anger and gratitude — of having a child via surrogate is by design. As a former "Cheetah Girl," she is aware that her fans have grown up with her, and that many of them — as well as countless women across the world — are going through a similar experience.

"Your journey to motherhood is your journey," she says, thinking of all the women who experience infertility, miscarriage, failed IVF cycles and more. "No one can rob you of that — infertility can't even rob you of that. Ask yourself: 'Why do you have the desire to be a mom so deeply?' Ultimately, it comes down to love.

"So if your ultimate goal is motherhood, keep your eye on that," she adds, "and don't worry about what happens during the process."

This article was originally published on TODAY.com