Actress Gina Rodriguez knows that moms need community.
“Motherhood was never meant to be done alone,” Rodriguez told Parents in an interview published Aug. 5. The line doubles as the thesis of a new partnership she just announced with Philips Avent.
The JANE THE VIRGIN actress is fronting the launch of the Share the Care Connector, an SMS tool built to help postpartum mothers organize real help from the people around them. A survey Philips Avent ran with the March of Dimes found that 62% of mothers struggle to ask for that kind of support, even while drowning in isolation and decision fatigue. Rodriguez said she used to be one of them.
“I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be for me to ask for help,” she said.
That reluctance traces back to 2023, when Rodriguez and her husband, Joe LoCicero, welcomed son Charlie, who spent his first days in the neonatal intensive care unit. Rodriguez said the experience convinced her she had to handle everything herself.
“I got to hold him on the fourth day, and I was like, ‘I will never let you go.’ And that was to my detriment,” she said. “I thought I had to do everything…I didn’t want anybody else raising my child but me.”
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Daughter Lucille arrived this past winter and forced a rethink. Rodriguez said she finally understood that refusing help wasn’t sacrifice — it was risk.
“If I don’t ask for help, I’m going to drown,” she said. “My son is going to feel it. My daughter is not going to get the mother she deserves.”
Rodriguez also disclosed she experienced postpartum anxiety after Lucille’s birth, a condition that affects at least one in five women but draws far less attention than postpartum depression. She said intrusive thoughts and constant unease caught her off guard the second time around.
“I was navigating new feelings and strange feelings and sad feelings and scared feelings and intrusive thoughts,” she said. “It was really scary.”
LoCicero noticed something was wrong before Rodriguez did, she said, and gently pushed her toward therapy instead of trying to fix it himself.
“I would love to help you find somebody that you can talk to who isn’t me,” she recalled him saying. “I remember looking at him and being like, ‘Yeah, I need that real bad.’”
Rodriguez’s search for a village echoes something she told Movieguide® nearly a decade ago, when she voiced the Virgin Mary in the animated Nativity movie THE STAR. She said then that she saw God’s hand in landing the role, and that Mary is “seldom portrayed as a woman of strength and power” in most retellings — a woman, notably, whose own village of family and faith carried her through impossible circumstances.
Rodriguez, a Golden Globe winner who had Charlie at 38 and Lucille at 41, said she has no regrets about the timing of either birth. She has also settled the question of a third child: her body, she said, has already been through enough.
“I personally feel like my journey happened the way it was supposed to,” she said. “We’re here now, and this one’s good.”
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