Beyoncé lit a match to the Internet today when she dropped both a surprise live album and her long-awaited documentary Homecoming on Netflix. The film chronicles Queen Bey's historic Coachella performance last year, and it also tackles some of the more intimate issues in her life—in particular, how she struggled with serious pregnancy complications before and after giving birth to her twins, Rumi and Sir.
In the film Beyoncé reminds us that she had been slated to perform at Coachella in 2017. However, after she got unexpectedly pregnant, she pulled out of the festival, citing "pregnancy concerns." She went into detail about what those issues were, explaining that she was balancing a series of scary conditions, such as preeclampsia, which is marked by high blood pressure in pregnant women and can lead to more severe liver or renal failures. Bey had addressed getting preeclampsia when she graced the cover of last year's September issue of Vogue, but Homecoming sheds light on exactly how the difficulties affected her career as a performer.
"My body went through more than I knew it could," she said in the film. "I was 218 pounds the day I gave birth. I had an extremely difficult pregnancy. I had high blood pressure. I developed toxemia, preeclampsia, and in the womb, one of my babies’ heart beats paused a few times, so I needed to get an emergency C-section."
The babies were born healthy and happy, but Beyoncé explained that the road to recovery was long and arduous. “There were days where I thought I’d never be the same,” she says, speaking to a postpregnancy experience many women feel. “I’d never be the same physically. My strength and endurance would never be the same.”
Still, she worked through the moment and gave herself to time to rebuild. She describes adopting a rigid vegan diet and working to get her stamina up so she could give the world the groundbreaking Beychella: “I learned a valuable lesson: I will never, never push myself that far again," she said. "I feel like I’m a new woman in a new chapter of my life, and I’m not even trying to be who I was.”
Spoken like the hero she is. The film is streaming on Netflix now.
