rewrite this content and keep HTML tags
Cheryl Cole once admitted she’d love to have “100 kids” and that she’d been broody since she was 13 years old. However, despite her longing to welcome a sibling for Bear, the seven-year-old son she shares with ex-One Directioner Liam Payne, it hasn’t so far happened.
She and Liam split just over a year after Bear’s birth and, although they remain committed co-parents, their days of romance have long since ended. Cheryl was previously married twice – to footballer Ashley Cole and subsequently to French restaurateur Jean Bernard Fernandez-Versini, and both unions sadly ended in divorce.
However, she defiantly declared in one interview that women “don’t necessarily need to be in a relationship” to welcome kids. “You can spend ages looking for the right man, waiting for the perfect time to get pregnant, then the right man might turn out to be the wrong man,” she stated.
“There are definitely other routes I would consider.” Cheryl added that one of her friends has had two babies using a sperm donor, hinting that this could be a future route to parenthood for her.
However, she also has her hectic career to contend with. She returned to the public eye with a run in the West End theatrical thriller 2:22 A Ghost Story – which is now being fronted by Stacey Dooley – while she’s also occupied with a Girls Aloud reunion.
The foursome took to the stage together for the first time in 11 years this spring for their reunion tour, despite the heartbreaking loss of Sarah Harding, who died of breast cancer in 2021, aged just 39.
Not only is her music taking up her time – along with a possible return to TV with Simon Cowell – but Cheryl has since started to have a change of heart about getting pregnant again for other reasons, too.
One of the biggest motivating factors for her had been giving Bear a baby brother or sister to play with – and she’s now concerned that the age gap between them might be too big.
She agonised in an interview with Mail Online: “I was so hell bent on having another before because Bear was at that perfect age.
“I think if you have that couple year age gap, you can still do things with them together where they’re both engaged and both interested.”
Despite confessing that she “loves babies” and isn’t short on maternal instinct, she admitted: “The pandemic happened in the meantime, and there’s such an age gap, and I’m a bit older. I’m not so sure, honestly.”
She added: “In the process of the pandemic I looked around at the world and thought this world is a bit crazy. Is it a sensible idea to bring a soul into all into this madness?”
Only time will tell whether Cheryl will follow her heart and expand her family further, or be content going solo with Bear as an only child.