Erin Andrews on battling mom guilt and how she wants to ‘memorize’ her baby’s face

Erin Andrews has had a long road to motherhood. After being diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2016, she and her husband, retired NHL player Jarret Stoll, began an arduous journey with IVF.

After nine years, eight rounds of fertility treatments and a devastating loss of twins via surrogacy, Andrews and Stoll had one "golden embryo" left.

Finally, on June 28, 2023, their long-awaited son, Mack Roger Stoll, was born with the help of a surrogate.

"I stare at him a lot. I just stare at his face," Andrews, 45, tells Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb on TODAY. "And I don't know if that's because, you know, I didn't carry him or anything like that. But I just want to memorize his face."

Though the journey to holding Mack in her arms was a long one, Andrews says she never lost hope. "I listened to a lot of what you guys were talking about when you were so open about your journey. I thought there would always be a baby at the end of the tunnel," she says to Hoda and Savannah. "I just didn't know how."

Time with Mack is precious to Andrews, especially because of her grueling fall schedule as a football sportscaster.

"Everyone's kind of wondered if the 'mommy guilt' would hit," Andrews says on her podcast. When her husband sent videos of the baby while she was working, Andrews felt terrible to miss all of Mack's adorable moments. She "felt bad" because "he was talking, he was laughing, he was being cute."

After receiving all of those cute videos while on the sidelines covering a football game, she couldn't wait to see Mack's smiles in person. But of course, she jokes that when she walks in the door at home, Mack immediately starts crying, making her wonder, "What am I doing wrong?"

Andrews is discovering that being a working mom is not easy, and she finds it helpful to look to other working moms for guidance. She cites Hoda and Savannah as being her "mentors" and "inspo," and she has also followed the motherhood journey of NBC's Kristen Welker.

Even now that Mack is more than three months old, Andrews seems stunned and grateful that she is a mother at last.

"Our nanny will always say, 'He's yours. He's yours. That's your baby,'" says Andrews.

"Then when he starts having a fit, I'm like, 'No, he's your baby,'" Andrews jokes.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com