Da Brat has announced she is expecting her first child with wife Jesseca “Judy” Harris-Dupart after a miscarriage.
In a new interview, the “What’chu Like” musician, 48, opened up about the stigma around being a new mother over the age of 40.
“It’s been quite a journey,” Da Brat, 48 told People. “There’s a lot of stuff we learned about women over the age of 40.”
The couple wed in February last year and this will be their first child together. Business owner Harris-Dupart is already a mother of three from a previous relationship.
“It started as a joke, we were like, ‘We’re extending our family!’” she explained. “But then we got a huge response. It was like, ‘Oh my God do we want to actually have kids, and if we do, girl, we better hurry up!’”
Da Brat, however, had never planned on having children.
“I never thought I was going to have kids,” she said. "I just thought it wasn’t in the cards for me. I’ve had a great career, a full life. I felt like, because I didn’t get pregnant earlier on, then it just wasn’t going to happen for me.”
The rapper admitted that her mindset changed when she met her wife.
“I started looking at life so differently,” she said. “I was like, I want a little me with you. Something special from the both of us that we can share and raise and love unconditionally.”
The rapper faced health issues in the lead-up to the pregnancy. She had to undergo surgery to remove fibroids and polyps prior to her embryo transfer procedure. Afterwards, she had a miscarriage. Meanwhile, Harris-Dupart had suffered ‘major’ health complications during her egg retrieval.
“I had never been so excited about something that I didn’t even know I wanted,” she told the publication. “I fell in love with the idea and then it was all snatched away from me."
The couple, who chose an anonymous donor, still had “a few” eggs left.
Into her second trimester, the “Funkdafied” singer described her pregnancy as a “blessing”, but said that the pregnancy has made her “sleepy” and emotional.
“Everything makes me cry. If someone wins American Idol, I cry. I’m like, I’m tougher than that!”
The pair made their relationship public in March 2021 when the celebrated rapper came out.
At the time, she told Variety that her decision to keep her sexuality private for 20 years was her own decision.
“I was always told you want to be f***able to men and women to sell records – you don’t want anybody to discriminate,” she says. “It was absolutely my decision. I mean, you saw what happened to people like Ellen: Remember when she lost her TV show, and all these horrible things were happening? People were totally against it.”
“I’ve always felt like being private is the better way to go, because then you don’t have so many people in your business,” she said. “I was fine staying quiet, but my partner is a social media mogul – that’s how she became who she is.”
She added: “And when you get with somebody, you have to meet in the middle. So to me, the middle was just letting everybody know: ‘Hey, she’s the one.’”
