Actress Katey Sagal cemented her place as a television icon with her role as big-haired, sex-starved housewife and mom Peg Bundy on “Married With Children.” Now with her new memoir Grace Notes, which came out on March 21, she’s opening up about her experiences with real-life motherhood.
Sagal had two children, 22-year-old Sarah and 21-year-old Jackson, with her second husband Jack White (who has no relation to the White Stripes frontman). When she married a third husband in 2004, “Sons of Anarchy” creator Kurt Sutter, the couple initially wasn’t planning to have children of their own.
“When Kurt and I first got together, he wasn’t interested in having any more children,” Sagal told People Magazine. “He was happy being the stepparent to Sarah and Jackson. But he’d never had his own biological children, so about five years into the relationship we started toying with the idea of maybe we should raise a child together.”
“At this point I was too old to carry a child,” continued Sagal, who was 52 when she and Sutton became parents 10 years ago. “So at first we explored adoption, but that proved to be way more difficult than I expected.”
The couple decided to use a surrogate and welcomed baby Esme Louise Sutter in 2007. Esme is now 10.
“We headed down the adoption road at the same time were were investigating the surrogacy road and left it up to whatever happened first, because we weren’t attached to either way,” Segal told OK! Magazine in 2007. “Our surrogacy situation just fell into place really easily.”
She says now to People, “We went through the whole in vitro fertilization process and our embryos were not really strong, but we thought, ‘Let’s give it a shot and if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.’ And if it wasn’t, we weren’t going to do it. But then our little Esme came through. That’s why we call her our little miracle, our beautiful miracle.”
Shortly after the birth, Segal told OK! Magazine that it had been a “beautiful experience” and that she held Esme while Sutter held the cord. Sutter, Segal, the surrogate and her husband were all present for the birth.
Sagal’s memoir also documents her road to sobriety from drugs and alcohol and the tragic stillbirth of her first child, Ruby Alexandra, in 1989.
