As co-host of FOX & Friends Weekend and an author and columnist, Jedediah Bila is used to asking the tough questions to people she interviews.
But nothing really prepared her for the onslaught of questions she received when she entered her 20s and 30s. Despite having an impressive career and a happy personal life, people wondered when she would get married or have kids. All the assumed questions made her feel uncomfortable.
“Once I hit 25, people started asking me about marriage and kids all the time,” the NYC-based host tells Parade.com. “I remember hitting 35 and some would ask the same questions with a strange tone, as if my life was somehow over because I hadn’t yet settled into their version of happiness.”
It was frustrating, especially because Bila, 40, wasn’t sure she necessarily wanted those things.
“I honestly didn’t always want kids—for a very long time, it just wasn’t a path I saw myself on,” she says. “I wasn’t even sure I wanted to get married!”
And then as life goes, some things did start to falling into place for Bila—on the timeline that worked perfectly for her.
She met a great guy, Jeremy Scher, at 36 years old, and they wed when she was 39. Now, the pair are happily expecting their first child, a baby boy. For Bila, her journey is proof that you can check off major life moments when you feel the time is right.
“This world would be a better place if people just realized that there’s no written-in-stone set time to do anything,” she tells Parade. “You could meet the love of your life at 18 or 48. You could become an amazing mom and be in the right head for that incredible journey at 24 or 42.”
According to a May 2018 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report., births among women ages 40-44 have been rising since the early 1980s and kept rising in 2017, even as the overall U.S. birth rate fell to a record low.
For Bila, age is just a number. “It’s less about age and more about state of mind,” she says. “One thing I will say is that for me, 40 feels right.”
In our conversation, Bila reflects on her pregnancy, including working through symptoms, her initial fears of infertility and how she’s strived to have a fit pregnancy.
Being on her own timeline
I honestly didn’t always want kids. For a very long time, it just wasn’t a path I saw myself on. When I met Jeremy, things changed for me and I can’t really explain it all. I just started to see my life path naturally grow and embrace things it hadn’t before. I’ve always been a “let life take you where it takes you” kind of woman, and suddenly the idea of marriage and a baby took on a whole new feeling for me that just felt right.
Fears of infertility
I did go to a doctor about two years ago to have my eggs looked at and get an idea of what the possibilities would be. I remember he told me that I had a decent amount of eggs, but not as many as he’d like to see, and that I had one ovary that was a little sluggish. I did some heavy research on egg and embryo freezing and made a decision that it wasn’t something I could do. My body responds very badly to synthetic hormones (I struggled very much on birth control pills that I took for medical reasons and it took me a long time to recover from it all). Jeremy was really supportive of my feelings and we decided that we were really okay in a “whatever will be, will be” space.
I wasn’t sure whether it would happen. There was a little voice in the back of my head saying, “You’re 40, not 20.” (That’s a little voice named society, by the way, which loves to stress me and you out.) But I’m being honest when I say that I was really okay with whatever life brought us. I knew that adoption would always be a possibility we were both open to, so I decided to leave it all up to the universe.
On being able to conceive naturally
I had spent the first year of our marriage being careful *not* to get pregnant. I really wanted that time with Jeremy (especially in Italy, which was a trip we had planned for some time that involved hot air ballooning, parasailing and all kinds of adventurous stuff). I was also on the cusp of new TV hosting opportunities. I needed a minute to breathe and absorb it all. Jeremy, though really excited to get started, supported my feelings 100%. One day in February 2019, we looked at each other and it just felt like the right time to let go and put the universe in charge. A few weeks later, I started getting this odd nausea right before bed. Jeremy ran out to get a pregnancy test and there they were—two lines. We laughed at first—how did that happen right away?!—then our faces lit up.
It’s a fun story, but I struggle to tell it because I’ve had so many family members and friends who’ve traveled a really difficult journey to try to conceive. They would make amazing parents and my heart has broken for them so many times. I would never want any of them—or anyone out there—to feel like I wasn’t sensitive to what they’ve gone through. The truth is that I don’t know why it happened this way for us. I feel like I’ve been given an incredible gift and I don’t always know how to talk about it. There are so many people who I feel deserve the gift of a child and have struggled, and that’s always very hard for me to understand.
How pregnancy has been
There are so many things people don’t tell you! First, they call it “morning sickness,” but mine came at night. I can’t complain too much—I’ve been feeling pretty good. The one symptom that’s been a little tough for me is dizziness. Before pregnancy, I had mild vertigo that would come and go, but pregnancy hormones kicked it into high gear. It makes it extra fun to read the teleprompter, I tell you! My Fox and Friends producers have been amazing about it and let me do interview segments and long prompter reads seated so there’s no major spinning on my end.
Maintaining a fit pregnancy
This was a big challenge for me because fitness is my antidote to stress in life. Before pregnancy, I would box, do SoulCycle, and do some pretty intense circuit training in the gym. When I got pregnant, I realized I’d need to tone some of that stuff down and remove some altogether, but was determined to maintain the mental and physical health benefits of exercise. I worked out on my own (minus the boxing, which I eliminated) for the first two to three months and then sought out the help of a trainer who specializes in pre-natal and postpartum fitness. I’ve been working with her twice a week and it has been a lifesaver. Not only does she guide me in what’s safe to do, what I should do more of, and what I should avoid, but she also helps me with breathing exercises that will assist me during labor. We mix it up with weights and cardio, and I usually add a third cardio day on my own at the gym.