Yahoo Lifestyle Connie Britton Shares Reason She Wanted to Adopt (Exclusive)
Connie Britton is sharing her journey to adoption.
In Parade's March 16 cover story, the Emmy-nominated actress, who adopted her son Eyob (nicknamed "Yoby") from Ethiopia in 2011, says she "always wanted to be a mom."
“I thought that maybe I would have a biological child first, perhaps," she exclusively told Parade. "I didn't know.”
She first considered adoption after traveling to Ethiopia in the early 2000s to work on a documentary about the country’s orphan population (for various reasons, the doc never came to fruition). Then at a certain point, she had to ask herself, “What am I waiting for?” She added, “I knew that I hadn't achieved the kind of partnership that I was looking for to have a spouse and a child together. And so I thought, ‘This is the time, I'm going to start the adoption process.’"
Shortly after becoming a single mother, Britton, then 45, moved from California to Tennessee to shoot the show Nashville. "I didn't know a soul,” she remembered. “[I] started working 16-hour days, 18-hour days, and had this little baby at home and was like, ‘Ahhhh.’ It was kind of ‘crisis mode’ a little bit."
Years later, the experience in part inspired her upcoming show The Motherhood, an unscripted series she created and executive produced for Hallmark, in which she and a team of experts — a home design specialist, a parenting coach and a style pro — help other single mothers improve their lives and build community.
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"I had a stay-at-home nanny," Britton, now 58, said of those early days of motherhood. "So I realized, ‘Oh my gosh, at least I have help' ... so many single moms out there who are working three jobs and don't have the money to pay for help, and they're just split at the seams."
Despite the challenges that come with being a single mother, Britton said she'd never tell anyone they were "crazy" for doing it.
"If you want to do it, you can do it," she told Parade. "But what I hope the show does is show people that if you do it, you want to have a community around you, and you deserve to have a community around you."
