An epidural didn’t entirely erase the pain of childbirth for Kristin Cavallari.
The “Uncommon James” founder revealed on her “Let’s Be Honest” podcast Tuesday that she was “just trying to get by” while giving birth to her first baby in August 2012. While she said epidurals — which are commonly administered in the spine to minimize pain during childbirth — are “great,” Cavallari said hers didn’t “take away all the pain.”
“What the epidural did for me was it took away the contractions,” she recalled, adding that it “didn’t take away the feeling of [her] vagina literally feeling like it was ripping in half.”
Cavallari recalled initially going into labor and experiencing the early contractions. “‘This is real,’” she recalled saying to herself, adding, “It was brutal.”
After having the epidural, the mom of three said she was “still f–king suffering.”
“I remember just laying in my hospital bed, just laying there in silence, and just tears just like running down my face.”
The “Laguna Beach” alum confessed that when she’s “really in pain, you won’t hear a peep out of [her].”
“I suffer in silence,” she continued. “That’s just how I’ve always been.”
“The epidural, thank God for that,” she said of the medication’s effect on contractions, joking that “it still hurt like a bitch.”
Cavallari, 38, welcomed kids Camden, 13, Jaxon, 10, and Saylor, 9, with ex-husband Jay Cutler. The pair married in 2013 and split in 2020, finalizing their divorce two years later.
Cutler — who is set to serve jail time on a 2024 DUI — and Cavallari have had a “bumpy” co-parenting journey.
“[It’s] really hard. It has not been easy, to say the least,” she said in a December 2024 appearance on the “Dumb Blonde” podcast, adding that it had been “so up and down” with her ex-husband.
During her brief romance with TikTok star Mark Estes, the Cavallari considered the possibility of having more children.
“The one thing that — I’m not actively thinking about it, but it’s definitely on the back of my mind — is, you know, he wants to have a kid,” the author said during an April 2024 episode of “Let’s Be Honest.”
She added, “If he ends up really being the one, I would have a kid.”