Julia Louis-Dreyfus is opening up about a pregnancy loss she experienced in her 20s -- and how her mom's cooking helped her through the emotional time.
"When I was about 28, I got pregnant for the first time and I was crazy happy. I got pregnant easily, I felt very fertile, very womanly," the "Seinfeld" actress, now 62, shared on the latest episode of her Lemonada podcast, "Wiser Than Me." "And then, quite late in the pregnancy, my husband Brad [Hall] and I discovered that this little fetus was not gonna live."
"So, that was emotionally devastating, as you can imagine, but it got worse because I developed an infection that landed me in the hospital," she continued. "I mean, this whole thing was just a complete nightmare."
After a few days in the hospital, Louis-Dreyfus was sent home to recuperate and was "bedridden." It was then that her mom Judith flew out to be by her side as she recovered.
"She made this incredible cozy chili in a cast iron skillet with cornbread on top, in the pan," the "Veep" actress said of her mom. "She and my husband Brad set up a little card table at the foot of the bed and the smell of that cornbread and the chili was so wonderful."
While Louis-Dreyfus said she wasn't allowed to eat the meal because she wasn't allowed to have solid food at the time, she said, “It just filled the room and the whole house and my heart, really."
"It was the best meal ever -- and I didn't even eat it. The making of it was so comforting, it was so embracing," she said, calling this moment "one of my greatest memories around food" -- despite the circumstances.
Louis-Dreyfus and Hall, who married in 1987, ultimately went on to have two children. They are parents to sons Henry Hall, 30, and Charlie Hall, 25.