Adoption was always the plan, she told Jay Shetty on his On Purpose podcast. “When it’s in your heart, it’s just in your heart.” She studied social work for two years, took courses on adoptive and birth mothers, and said husband Jake Bongiovi was “in from the jump.”
She and Bongiovi got the news over the phone, after what she calls a long, thorough process. “I will never forget it,” she said. “We both knew in that moment that was that, we had found each other.” She described sending each other pictures in real time: “I have a picture of him and he has a picture of me and it was just like, oh, my goodness. This is our girl, 100%, no doubt.” No questions asked, she said: “I knew we had found our baby and she found us.”
Shetty asked whether she had the conversation recorded. She didn’t, and she said that’s part of what makes it special: “My whole life’s recorded.” Then: “You had to be there.”
She also had things to say about the people picking apart her timeline. Brown got married at 20 and became a mother at 21, and she’s clocked every version of the criticism. “You get married at 20, you’re too young, what are you doing. Oh my god, people are praying on the downfall. And then it’s like, you’re 40, you’re not married, what are you doing? You’re twice divorced, oh my god, how dare you.” On adoption specifically: “How could they let you.” Her verdict on the noise: “You all are a walking contradiction.”
She said if she lived by those rules, she’d “live the most boring, mundane, awful, miserable life,” and she’s not basing her decisions on “random robots on the internet.” She keeps coming back to the same read on it: “Women don’t win. Because we don’t get to win. Like, we don’t get to just be in peace.”
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