‘I cried every day when I was pregnant’ Alesha Dixon reveals that her second pregnancy was filled with anxiety and unhappiness

It’s clear to see that Alesha Dixon couldn’t be happier with her family, constantly posting cute photos of her six-year-old daughter Azura, nine-month-old Anaya and husband Azuka Ononye in lockdown.

But the Britain’s Got Talent judge has admitted that her pregnancy with Anaya was nowhere near as rosy – confessing she ‘cried every day for two weeks’ before she gave birth last August.

Alesha, 41, confessed to Giovanna Fletcher on the author’s Happy Mum, Happy Baby podcast, ‘I felt so low. You grieve different things. I remember thinking that it was the end of another era of just the three of us.

Truthfully, I don’t know what it was, it was a combination of anxiety, hormones and tiredness.’

Alesha went on to reveal that things got so bad she was beginning to worry she might develop postnatal depression once Anaya was born.

‘I felt so low that I was worried – which is a pointless thing to do because worrying changes nothing – but I was concerned I would feel like that after she was born,’ she said. ‘It was like a dark cloud that made no sense to me because it was the most joyful thing that was going to happen to me.’

The secret pregnancy

Alesha was judging Britain’s Got Talent for the majority of her first pregnancy with Azura, but kept it a secret, choosing to reveal the news during the live final.

She said she had a ‘good seamstress’ who helped her hide the bump until she was ready to make the announcement, and joked that the ‘bill for the tailor that year was quite high’.

And she’s now revealed the reason for keeping her bump under wraps was because she’d also kept her relationship with her dancer husband Azuka, 39, quiet too.

She said, ‘I don’t want to say, “I’m pregnant” when people don’t even know I’m in a relationship and then distract from the show.

‘And in my mind, I was like let’s just finish the show so that it can have its moment without any pregnancy malarkey and then we can announce that we’re pregnant.

‘And that’s pretty much what we did. The live show wrapped and I went down to Cornwall with my family and told all of them.’

‘The dark cloud lifted’

Luckily, Alesha’s ‘dark cloud’ left as soon as Anaya was born on 20 August last year.

She said, ‘All those worries I had were gone.’ And, looking back, Alesha believes her low mood may have been down to how much she was working, as she was still presenting BBC dance competition The Greatest Dancer just weeks before her due date.

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Alesha said, ‘I was working right up until the moment I had her, so maybe it was that. On reflection maybe it was a lot on my emotional wellbeing.

‘I like to think of myself as a healthy, well-rounded human being so the thought of dipping into a place that feels alien and being stuck in a low spot worried me.’

And lockdown has made Alesha appreciate her family even more, as she revealed her daughters have been ‘keeping her sane’ and preventing her from drinking too much alcohol.

Admitting she spent the first weeks of lockdown ‘baking and drinking wine’, she added, ‘I said, “Nah, I can’t do this for three months”.

‘Having children is what keeps me sane. There’s always that part of me that says, “You’ve got to keep it together for your girls”.’

She jokingly finished, ‘If I didn’t have them I’d probably drink more wine!’