Church speaks about family dramas

Charlotte Church has spoken for the first time about her mother's overdose and laughed off reports that fiance Gavin Henson cheated on her. The 21-year-old is expecting her first baby next month.

Rugby star Henson was reported to have kissed shop assistant Tracy Donnelly during a trip to Belfast, but Church told OK! magazine: "Well, of course at first hearing something like that pulled at my heartstrings, but then I thought, nah, he wouldn't do that to me."

Church was said to have thrown Henson out but she insisted: "In reality, me and Gavin were at home."
The pregnancy was unplanned and Henson made her take two pregnancy tests before believing the result. "I did say to him, 'What do you mean the result can't be right?' And he said, 'I just want us to be sure, I don't want us to get our hopes up'," she revealed.

The former Voice of an Angel can't wait to get her pregnancy over with.

She said: "You know, being pregnant is unbelievable. All you ever hear about is the morning sickness, but it's a massive strain on the body. My organs are all squashed up and my liver is just crushed to the back of my spine. But I'm ever so happy, even though the birth part of it is pretty s*** by the sounds of it!"

In the interview to publicise her new autobiography, Keep Smiling, Church told of the moment she found her mother, Maria, unconscious after taking an overdose of sleeping pills and paracetamol.

"It was a tough time. At first when I found her, I was angry because I thought she'd tried to kill herself. But she said all she had wanted to do was sleep for a few days to forget about what had happened. She said she wasn't trying to kill herself, or so she says. When I found her, I didn't panic, I just went straight into this calm mode - I had to."

Church phoned NHS Direct, who told her to take her mother to hospital, an instruction which the singer said "put the fear of God in me".

"I was worried about her and I made sure I took all the necessary steps to make sure she was okay. It wasn't a nice experience to go through. To see my mum like that was awful, no one ever wants to see their mother go through that."

Church said her mother had been diagnosed as a manic depressive and had been self-harming since the age of 20. "Sometimes she used to show me her scars when she was drunk, but she would never dare cut herself in front of me. I'd go mad."

Maria took the overdose after discovering that her husband had been having an affair with a family friend.

Church said of the other woman: "If I saw her today, I'd poke her eyes out because she was the cause of so much pain to my mother."


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