The Hallmark Channel star and “Mickey Mouse Club” alum discusses grief, motherhood, and her path from actress to advocate.

By Lindzi Scharf

Nikki DeLoach is an open book. Or two. Maybe even several.

Her journey from actress to advocate is so vast it could be broken down into volumes instead of chapters.

At fourteen, the multi-hyphenate – actress/singer/writer/producer – got her start on the “Mickey Mouse Club” alongside future superstars Ryan Gosling, Britney Spears, Keri Russell, Christina Aguilera, and close friend Justin Timberlake. DeLoach then traveled the world as a singer with Innosense before music manager Lou Pearlman bled her (and all of his clients like ‘N Sync) dry. DeLoach then married her childhood sweetheart, a former boy bander, and went on to gain industry cred with roles on “Mad Men” and “Awkward” – all while completing a college degree in psychology.

No question, she has an incredible work ethic, but DeLoach has admittedly worked even harder on herself. “Being in a business where you're only as important as your last job – your self-worth becomes completely dependent on that,” DeLoach reflects, seated on a gray couch inside a Valley Village home she's renting while her permanent residence is being built. “I still struggle with this, but when you're raised as a child to believe that your value is dependent on if you're working; if you're succeeding; if you're doing all of these things – when that's not there, you feel worthless. Also, there’s the trap of the ego of feeling like you are important because you have a hit show or a movie that just did well.” She now knows better. “Of course, none of that makes you important. You’re important because you’re human.”

But it’s been a journey to arriving here – as DeLoach’s early Hollywood experiences merely scratch the surface of her story.

DeLoach’s life changed once she became a mother. And not in the cliché, “I can’t imagine my life without them,” kind of way. After battling postpartum anxiety with her first son, DeLoach put her career on hold when her second son was given a life-threatening prenatal diagnosis that would require multiple surgeries and special care once he was born.

“Bennett turned me into the best version of myself,” she says, referencing her now five-year-old son. “I had such warped priorities in so many ways before he came into my life. Even after having had my first kid, I still had those same warped priorities. I got myself on a red carpet two weeks after giving birth. Bennett blew all of that out of the water.”

While preparing for Bennett’s arrival, DeLoach re-strategized her career. “I didn’t know if I was going to be able to act again,” she remembers. “I had no idea what we were up against and we were told a lot of really scary scenarios. So I said, ‘Listen, if I can never leave him or I don’t want to leave him, I’ll pivot. I will write. I can do that from home and that’ll be the new way forward.’”

DeLoach and her writing partner Megan McNulty now have countless projects in various stages of development in addition to writing for and acting in movies for the Hallmark Channel, where DeLoach has become something of a fan favorite. “Luckily, Hallmark wanted to use me,” she says. “It was perfect because I could work for three weeks and come back, be a mom, and take care of Bennett.”

DeLoach has found comfort in helping others navigate the path of becoming a medical mom, which requires superhuman strength, patience, and a new vocabulary that one might call “hospital speak.” In short, it’s a new way of life – and as a result, DeLoach is also now President of the Foundation Board of Trustees for Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

She credits her family’s experience with putting everything into perspective as she continues to pursue her entertainment career in addition to her passion for philanthropy and advocacy.

“The most important thing is, ‘Are we healthy? Are we happy?’” she says. “Nothing else outside of that matters. I feel like I’m leading some kind of different charge inside this [entertainment] industry of saying, ‘You don’t get to own me. You don’t get to tell me what’s important in my life. I’m going to make decisions that are best for me and my family and I’m going to trust that opportunities will still be there if they’re meant to be.”

GROWING UP

DeLoach was born in Waycross, Georgia. “I was from a small town,” she says. “At the time, it had, like, one traffic light. My mother was a teacher. My dad worked in timber and trucking. I was raised on a farm. I was the kid that didn't come home until it was dark and even then I would put on the porch lights and would play basketball with the neighborhood kids. I was a dirty, filthy, lizard-chasing child who liked to be outside.”

Raised in a religious household, DeLoach says her curiosity often landed her in the hot seat. “I was the kid that got in trouble every single week in Sunday school because I asked a lot of questions,” she says. “I was way too curious about things.” While the attribute has served her well as an adult, it wasn’t necessarily encouraged at the time. However, her family did support her interest in the arts.

“I knew at three years old what I wanted to do,” she says, explaining she was exposed to musicals through her grandmother. “I stayed with her every weekend. She was a singer and I learned later in life that she would perform in her small town in the little café they had. But she got married young, had kids young, and sang in the choir. We would rent three movies on Friday after school. I remember watching ‘Singing in the Rain,’ ‘The Sound of Music,’ and ‘Funny Girl,’ which is one of my favorite movies of all time. I said to my Nana, ‘I want to do that. I want to be a part of something that’s making people feel how I feel when I watch it.’”

Her grandmother put her in dance and voice lessons. “Dancing came super naturally to me,” DeLoach says, sharing her grandmother then put her in pageants. “I was not interested in the pageants,” she admits. “I didn’t like dresses. I didn’t like pantyhose. I didn’t like my hair or make-up being done. I was a tomboy. I was into dance, gymnastics, sports, and athletics, but I did the pageants because I liked the talent portion of the competition where I got to perform. I ended up winning a bunch of things and that took me to New York when I was ten years old.”

DeLoach spent a summer auditioning in New York where she won a competition, which attracted the attention of people within the entertainment industry. “A bunch of agents were like, ‘You should move out to L.A.,’” she says. “My mother was like, ‘Absolutely not. I have another child and I just gave birth to another one. I worked my whole life to build my career. I am not giving that up.’ She had two masters. She had been a teacher, but she wanted to go all the way in education.”

After DeLoach’s brief stint in New York, she returned home to Georgia but remembered advice one of the industry insiders had given her grandmother. “An agent said, ‘Your kid would be perfect for a show called the ‘Mickey Mouse Club. They're doing auditions. They're going to hire some new kids this next year. Be on the lookout for that,’” DeLoach recalls being told. “I had an agent in Jacksonville named Denise Carol. So my Nana told Denise, ‘If this audition comes around, will you let us know?’ I spent a year working on dances and songs – just in case I got an audition.”

THE MICKEY MOUSE CLUB

The time came. “It was a cattle call,” she says. “I think something like 24,000 kids in the United States and Canada auditioned.”

DeLoach’s preparation paid off. “I went to my first audition, went to my callback, and ended up in Orlando, [Florida] for a weekend,” she says, explaining she had no idea at the time that the casting directors were watching her every move to see who had chemistry. “They brought 24 of us down there to see how we would interact. I thought we were there for our screen test, but they were always watching. It didn’t feel like it, but they were good at being stealth.”

DeLoach remembers: “Justin [Timberlake] and I connected immediately and have been family ever since. So did Britney [Spears], T.J. [Fantini], and Ryan [Gosling]. We gravitated toward each other. The very first day at lunch, we were all sitting at the table eating together. Then, at another table, Christina [Aguilera] was sitting by herself. I walked over to her and said, ‘Hey, do you want to come and eat with us?’ So she ate with us and then every day we all ate lunch together. [The casting directors] clocked it and they were like, ‘Oh, [Nikki is] going to be the glue that holds them all together,’ and that was the thing that made them choose me over somebody else.”

DeLoach says that the casting team was vacillating between her and one other girl. “Jessica Simpson was also in the group and she had an insane voice,” she says. “But I think the thing that put me over the edge and the reason I got the job is – [Justin, Britney, and I would all hang out together in between auditioning], and that was the thing that made them choose me.”

DeLoach says she relished the opportunity to do what she loves around the clock. “It was like somebody had picked me up and dropped me into my version of heaven,” she says. “I danced every single day, learning new routines and new choreography. I was never the strongest singer, so I worked hard on becoming a better singer. We got to do skits and sketches—that's when I realized that I loved acting. It was like Julliard on steroids but for kids. We did everything on that show. In the last season, we were doing three live shows a week. SNL puts on one live show a week. We worked six-day weeks, but it never felt like work.”

Because they were kids and, thus, were still in school, she and her MMC castmates were tutored on-set and had class in between rehearsals and filming. “I met my favorite teacher in the world on that show, Chuck Yerger, who I ended up going all the way through high school with,” says DeLoach, who studied with him from ages fourteen through seventeen. “He was our principal and the head of the school there.”

DeLoach says the “Mickey Mouse Club” team created a safe and nurturing environment. “Our executives and assistant directors did such a beautiful job of letting us be children,” she says. “They realized, ‘These kids are working exceptionally hard. They’re doing something pretty extraordinary and we have to give them grace.’ I don’t know how they knew to do that but they were so gifted and I’m so grateful because I don’t feel like my childhood was taken away from me in any way, shape, or form.”

Quite the contrary, she has the greatest childhood memories. “It was some of the greatest years of my life doing that show,” she says. “One of my favorite memories is in Orlando during a certain time of the year the skies open up and it pours rain for thirty minutes straight. Justin and I would go outside and dance in the rain and stomp in mud puddles and twirl around and get soaking wet. Not on shooting days of course. But on all the other days.”

DeLoach also remembers Gosling and Timberlake being in cahoots. “Ryan and Justin would steal the golf cart and go on a joyride through the park,” she laughs. “The A.D.s would be like, ‘They’ll be back.’ They let us be kids. We left work and then we would hang out after work every single night, every single weekend. We went on trips together. It was a camp. For three years of our lives, it was incredible.”

Between moments of joy, DeLoach also learned a few hard truths about life and the business she was entering. One incident, in particular, has followed her into adulthood. “I did not think of myself as a Christina [Aguilera] who has the voice,” she says. “I was always happy to do backup vocals and backup dancing, but I finally got my first solo and I was so elated and started working really hard on it. Within twenty-four hours, it was pulled from me because one of the mothers of another child was upset that her daughter had not been chosen.”

“It was taken and given to somebody else,” DeLoach continues. “I was thirteen. As a [43]-year-old, which I am now, I would be like, ‘Whatever. It’s the game. That’s the way it goes sometimes.’ But as a 13-year-old, it was such a deep, creative wound. ‘How could another mother think it’s okay to take that from a child? Her child will get something too.’ But woof. It was that first moment of realizing that anything can be taken from you at any moment in time.”

DeLoach says the incident contributed to her work ethic. “What that put in me was, ‘I just have to work harder. If I work harder, then I won’t get it taken away from me,’ which I learned later on in life—that’s also not true,” she laments. “You have to do the work for sure, but you can be the best in the room and it doesn’t mean you’re going to get the job. It’s such a tough business in that way. In most other businesses there's this ladder that you move up. You put enough years in and then you get to the next level and the next level and then you become a partner at a law firm and then you become a name partner. There's this very set way of moving up a ladder and in our industry, it doesn’t exist. That was a hard lesson because I am that person that will put in the extra hours.”

“Humility is a big thing for me,” DeLoach adds. “I will earn something any day of the week. If you tell me that you’ll give me an opportunity if I work hard enough, I will be the hardest working person in the world.” She pauses. “So that pattern began. 'I have to be the hardest working person in the room so that I don't get stuff taken away from me.’ I’m still unwiring some of that stuff.”

Three years into her time on the show, the series was canceled. “Some of them were on the show for seven years and were ready to move on, but [Justin, Ryan, Britney, Christina, and I] came on at the tail end,” she explains. “The seven of us were devastated when the show ended. We were thick as thieves. We were so close. The show ending was another creative wound.”

Now sixteen, DeLoach left Florida and returned home to Georgia where she regrouped. She recalls, “Right after ‘Mickey Mouse Club,’ one of the acting coaches, Gary Spatz, reached out and said, ‘Your daughter is a talented actress and I think she could do well. Why don’t you guys come out to L.A. for a pilot season and try it out?’”

HER TEEN YEARS

DeLoach and her grandmother temporarily relocated to Los Angeles, where they stayed in the Oakwood Apartments, a former right of passage for aspiring actors auditioning for projects during pilot season.

“I auditioned a ton,” she says. “I didn’t get a ton. Up until then, everything I had auditioned for, I had gotten. I was like, ‘Oh, okay. So there are a lot of things you don't get? Good to know.’ We had only booked our little apartment at Oakwood for [a small] amount of time and the last week I was here, I ended up booking a pilot, which kept me here.”

From there, DeLoach landed several television and film roles. “It kept keeping me here in L.A. with my grandmother,” she says, explaining she had no interest in a more traditional teenage experience. “I did not want to be a teenager. I was not interested in going out and having karaoke night and getting in trouble at the Oakwood Apartment complex. I was interested in doing my school work.”

She loved learning and worked hard at her studies when she wasn’t filming. “Remember the teacher I told you about—Chuck Yerger?” DeLoach asks. “When I came out to L.A., I was still dating J.C. Chasez [who was in ‘NSYNC] at the time. ‘NSYNC had come together in Orlando and Chuck, my teacher, was in Orlando. So I would fly back to Orlando once or twice a month and I would do all of my testing and all of that with Chuck and I would do four days with him at a time and then I would fly back to L.A., work, and audition. I did this every single month as a kid. Chuck kept tutoring Justin [after MMC], but Lance [Bass] was also still in high school. So he was also tutoring Lance.”

DeLoach graduated from high school with Bass by her side. “I graduated two years early,” she says. “Lance was two years ahead of me and two years older but because I graduated early, we ended up having a graduation ceremony together.” She laughs. “I graduated with Lance Bass. We walked together in our olive green caps and gowns. Chuck did the whole ceremony for us. It was me and my family; ‘NSYNC and their families. That was our graduation.”

Shortly after, her grandmother moved back to Georgia while DeLoach stayed put in Los Angeles. “She could only be away from my grandfather for so long,” DeLoach says. “Joey Fatone’s girlfriend at the time, Kelly, had moved to L.A. and I think she was 19 or 20 and I had just turned 17. So I moved in with her because I couldn’t sign for an apartment.”

DeLoach was then presented with the opportunity to join a girl group called Innosense, which was managed by Lou Pearlman, who famously created ‘NSYNC and several late nineties boy bands. DeLoach’s team in Los Angeles strongly advised her against it. She says, “My lawyer was like, ‘You’ll be committing career and financial suicide if you do this because the contract is the worst contract I’ve ever seen in my life. Please don’t do this.’ And my career acting wise was taking off and my agents were like, ‘No. You’re about to be 18. You’re about to be legal. Don’t do this.’”

But DeLoach missed the camaraderie she’d had during her childhood on MMC. “Minus ‘Mickey Mouse Club,’ I had been in an industry of adults and I had no friends out here because all I did was work and study,” she says. “I was seeing the guys [in ‘NSYNC] travel and have so much fun together and they had someone to share the adventure with. I was like, ‘I am so lonely. This is really lonely, especially for a 17-year-old kid. I’m just by myself. What other time in my life am I going to get an opportunity to be in the music business and perform?’ So I packed up. … I was like, ‘I’m going to be in the music business. I’m going to be the next female NSYNC.’ Cut to: six years later, I’m broke. I have two years left on a record contract and the guy who signed us is in prison.”

DeLoach’s time in Innosense turned out to be everything she’d been warned about. “We signed with the same people ‘NSYNC did,” she explains. “They were at the top of their game when they broke away from Lou and we were just breaking the top 20. Our album had just come out and RCA Records was like, ‘We want nothing to do with any of your acts anymore,’ and they dropped us, LFO, and one other act that they had. And then because Lou wouldn’t release us, we couldn’t sign with anyone else. So we had two and a half years left on the contract and couldn’t do anything.”

During that time, she’d started dating Ryan Goodell, a member of another boy band. “He was in one of Lou’s music groups, a group called Take 5,” she explains. “He had frosted tips and he was the bass. Not a bass player, but...” she slips into a deep voice. “He sang bass.” She laughs. “We had known each other for years because we were in the same world together. So towards the end, the last year of our time in Orlando, he had asked me out on a date.”

“We were dating,” she continues. “Then we moved in together and then when things got really bad there…” She pauses. “I mean when I say it was bad—like Lou had brought down people who used to be cops in New York—to follow us. I was followed. My phones were tapped because we didn’t know this at the time but the FBI was closing in on him for all of the bank fraud. We were caught up in the middle of all his fraudulent activity meaning he thought that we were talking to people about this and we had no idea what he was doing. We only knew the illegal activities we had learned he was doing in music. Ryan’s mother was suing Lou, so his phones were being tapped. It became a really scary situation. My car was broken into by some of his [people]… crazy stuff happened.”

Goodell and DeLoach decided it was time to move. “I was like, ‘I have to get out of here or I don’t know what’s going to happen,’” she recalls. “Ryan was like, ‘I was thinking of maybe going to L.A. with you and maybe going to law school.’ I thought, ‘This might work. This actually might work because if you’re going to keep doing the boy band thing, I love you so much, but I send you away with love.’” She laughs. “That’s when I packed my bags and moved back to L.A. with Ryan. We moved back with [nothing]. All of our money had been taken and all of my savings from ‘Mickey Mouse Club’ had been spent in fighting lawsuits surrounding Lou. I had not a dime to my name when I moved back out here. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll go to community college because if there’s one thing that I’ve learned it’s that this could all go away tomorrow and I want to make sure when or if it does that I have my degree and I can sustain myself financially and emotionally.’ So I went and got my first two years of community college in Santa Monica and it was glorious.”

HER TWENTIES

DeLoach embarked on a sociology and psychology degree. “I wanted to be able to do social work and go into low-income areas where they didn't have access to mental health,” she says. “I still may do that.” She remembers thinking, “I’m going to pivot and if I never work again in this business, this is something I’m interested in and that I think would make me happy if I don’t get to be a storyteller.”

She thrived in an academic setting. “I fell in love with it,” she says. “As a person who had only known this industry my whole life, it was such a relief to be in the world of academics where nobody cared about what I had done or what I might do. I could work hard on a subject and get an A and just be successful. Again, in our industry, that's just not the case.”

As she was completing her first two years of school, an opportunity arose. “A random audition came up,” she says. “It was an urgent situation because they were recasting someone in a pilot and the pilot was shooting in three days. I was like, ‘I can’t. I’ve got a sociology class that I’m adding today that’s important.’ Fifty people were trying to add the class, so professor Massey [at Santa Monica College] was like, ‘I will suss through this. Everyone, go home. You all can't just hang out here on the floor.’ I didn’t have another class for five hours, so I thought, ‘The audition is ten minutes down the street in Santa Monica. I’ll just go on it.’ I had not been on an audition in forever.”

She auditioned, tested for the role the following day, and one day later DeLoach found herself headed to Hawaii to shoot the 2004 television series “North Shore,” which also starred Jason Momoa. “I was in Hawaii for the rest of the year doing 22 episodes of that show,” she says. “I had gotten into UCLA. They have an incredible psychology/mental health program and that’s where I wanted to go. I deferred enrollment and then I had to defer enrollment again.”

Over the next handful of years, DeLoach booked several notables jobs including the 2006 series “Windfall” with Luke Perry and Lana Parrilla; the 2010 film “Love & Other Drugs” with Jake Gyllenhaal; as well as spots on “Mad Men,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” and “CSI.”

“I kept working,” she says. “I realized if I wanted to get my degree, I was going to have to do it in pieces through a school that allowed me to get it from a distance. The University of Maryland was the only one where I could get a fully accredited psychology degree, so I did psychology and English. Santa Monica College did all the proctoring of my exams and I chipped away at it over eight years. … I finally finished when I was 30 years old.”

Naturally, a lot unfolded personally and professionally during this time. DeLoach and Goodell got married in 2009. She also booked the part of Lacey Hamilton on the critically acclaimed MTV series “Awkward” in 2011. The project was on the air for five years – during which she finished her degree. “We had a big ‘Nikki Graduated from College’ party while I was on ‘Awkward,’” she says, laughing. “It was all the young kids who had graduated from college and then me. I was like, ‘I finally graduated at 30.’”

EMBRACING MOTHERHOOD

She gave birth to her first son Hudson in 2013. However, it was admittedly a journey to embracing motherhood. “I didn’t know if I wanted to [be a mom],” she says. “I was always so focused on my career that I never even really thought about children.” Her mindset shifted when her niece Molly Kate was born. “When I held that baby in my arms for the first time, I was filled up,” she says. “I was so in love with her and I thought, ‘If I feel this way about my niece, what would it feel like if it was my child?'"

But DeLoach had concerns. “I didn’t know if I would be a good mother, to be honest,” she says. “The only thing that I had known my whole life was working. So Molly Kate changed everything for me.”

DeLoach believes in spirits and a greater presence, which also influenced her decision to pursue motherhood. “I could feel a baby around me,” she says. “I could feel Hudson around me before I ever got pregnant. When we decided to go for it, I remember saying to Ryan, ‘There is a baby spirit around me and he is ready to come to this earth. If we pull the trigger on this, it’s now. It’s going to happen,’ and it did. First time out of the gate.”

Following his birth, DeLoach struggled. “I had such a hard go at it,” she admits. “I had suicidal postpartum anxiety and I didn’t even realize that that’s what I was experiencing until I was so far into it. I went back to work when he was three months old and it was shooting sixteen/seventeen hour days.”

Her oldest is now nine years old. Looking back, DeLoach says, “We are not meant to be separated from our infants for a long time. We need time to heal. We need time to be with them. At the time, I thought, ‘I guess this is what it feels like to be a working mom.’ But my bestie, Jen Dede, said, ‘You’re not okay. Something is happening.’ She was the first person that mentioned postpartum. I hadn’t even thought about it. You know you have a good friend when somebody will always tell you the truth and she has never—not once—told me anything but the complete and total truth.”

She recalls Dede saying, “I think that you need to get help.”

“She didn’t even know the suicidal thoughts that were going on in my brain,” DeLoach continues. “She just knew that her friend that she loved was no longer there anymore. … It took me eighteen months to start to feel better.”

It also empowered DeLoach to speak about her experience because she couldn’t find resources at the time. “When I was in postpartum, I was looking around and searching on the internet and trying to find people talking about it,” she remembers. “I found a Brooke Shields interview and then what happened when she spoke out? Tom Cruise completely brought the hammer down on top of her and was like, ‘That’s not what you’re feeling. You’re not doing it right. You just need to take these supplements.’ I thought, ‘Oh, so this is why nobody talks about this stuff. Well, I’m going to talk about it.’”

She remembers going on The Hallmark Channel’s “Home and Family” and warning the show's producers of her intentions. “I said, ‘If you ask me about motherhood, the only way that I want to talk about it is if I can tell the truth about what my experience has been in my postpartum,’” she recalls. “They allowed it. It was the first time I spoke out about something so painful. Women reached out and said, ‘Me too.’ I realized, ‘All of us are isolated and silently suffering,’ because we have been told that it’s not okay for us to talk about our experiences.”

Shortly after, DeLoach and her husband decided they wanted a second child. Because of her experience, she decided to take precautions, best she could, to avoid a second round of postpartum anxiety. She recalls thinking, “This time, I’m going to eat my placenta. I’m going to do all of these things. This is going to be a different experience. It’s going to be amazing.”

Then she received terrifying news.

AN UNCONVENTIONAL EXPERIENCE

At five months pregnant, DeLoach learned her unborn son, Bennett, had health complications and wasn’t likely to survive. During an ultrasound, she remembers being told, “Your baby has four heart defects and is going to have to have immediate surgery when he’s born.”

“When I found out about his diagnosis, I didn’t know what we were up against,” DeLoach says. “I knew that he had an 11 percent chance of surviving his first surgery at five days old, but we didn’t know what condition he was going to be in when he was born. The ultrasound didn’t show that he had hands. We were told that he was going to be so small that he would have tiny legs and the rest of his body would be normal. On the sonogram, he was measuring a certain way, so there was an extreme likelihood that these were the things that we would also contend with outside of his heart, which was uniquely messed up. His beautiful, perfect heart was broken in five different ways that would have to be repaired. I braced myself for whatever [might unfold].”

The memory of that day – the moment she learned life would never be the same – still plays out in surreal flashes. “At 35, I was considered a geriatric pregnancy,” she recalls. “I remember being in the office doing all those ultrasounds in the 4D and the technician was taking a lot of time in one area. I remember thinking, ‘This isn’t normal.’ Immediately I knew something wasn’t right. She leaves the room and I’m shaking and Ryan is with me. I’m like, ‘Something’s not right.’ I get up and start pacing back and forth. He’s like, ‘It’s fine. Everything is fine,’ and I’m like, ‘It’s not fine.’ And [the doctor] comes in and he tells us about Bennett. He has what’s called transposition of the great arteries, [which meant that his arteries were going into the wrong chambers]. He also had a hole in his heart, [which is also known as a ventricular septal defect]. He also had an aorta that was completely closed.”

She remembers being stunned as she tried to make sense of the news. “We were there for seven hours as they did the [amniocentesis] to try and figure out if there were genetic components attached to it,” she says. “Hudson went to a friend’s house to stay there until we could leave and I just remember driving home in this complete fog of, ‘I don’t even know where to begin. Who do I even call? What do you even say? Where do we go from here?’”

A friend connected DeLoach with a mutual friend whose child had coincidentally undergone heart surgery at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles (CHLA). “She talked me off the ledge,” she says. “We got all of these different opinions. This is where I learned about advocacy because I was giving birth at Cedars[-Sinai]. You have a whole unit of doctors and people that work in that world and even though they didn’t have a pediatric heart program, they wanted their doctors to be able to do the surgery on Bennett. I was like, ‘Why aren’t they recommending Children’s Hospital, which has the #1 pediatric heart surgery in the country? What’s going on with that?’ The more questions I asked, the more digging I did, I realized, ‘Oh. These are competing hospitals.’”

DeLoach quickly got a crash course in the medical-industrial complex. “[Cedars-Sinai] wanted to bring doctors down from Stanford to re-launch their pediatric heart program,” she remembers. “I was like, ‘You’re not going to launch a new program on my child. We’re not doing this.’ So from the moment Bennett was born, it was fighting for him to get to Children’s. It was fighting for doctors not to touch him until he got to where he needed to be. It was never leaving his side.”

“Crazily enough, that baby came out with all his fingers and all his toes,” DeLoach says, explaining Bennett physically defied what they’d seen on the ultrasound. From there, her son was rushed from Cedar-Sinai to the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles for surgery. “When Bennett was in the room and we were waiting, I felt like my heart was being cut into,” she says, sharing they later learned the surgery was even more complicated than initially expected. “It was the worst-case scenario and he only had one coronary artery, not two coronary arteries, and the coronary artery was in the wrong place. That's the thing where they almost lost him on the table during the surgery—it was moving that coronary artery.”

Bennett beat the odds and miraculously survived. “He had a successful first surgery,” DeLoach says. “In fact, he has now become [the blueprint for] the procedure that Dr. Vaughn Starnes did. It had never been done in that way before and so now they have published his case so that other hospitals and other pediatric heart surgeons if they get a baby who is wired like Bennett was when they’re born, they know how to fix the heart. Dr. Vaughn Starnes is notorious for that. He’s come up with other different surgical procedures to be able to save other babies’ lives. He is incredible.”

As any pediatric heart parent or medical mom knows, it’s a delicate and uphill battle that is closely monitored throughout a child’s life, which meant DeLoach would need to shift focus personally and professionally. However, for her ambitious personality, she knew that self-care meant keeping her mind as active as her new schedule. “I wanted to keep working,” she says. “I wanted to keep telling stories. As long as I’m telling stories, I’m fine—in whatever shape that looks like. I put my acting career on hold. I couldn’t go away and do a show in Atlanta for nine months. I couldn’t go to Canada and do a show for six months. That wasn’t an option. My whole career—everything that I had worked so hard to build my whole life—shifted. I was coming off of a hit show. Everything stopped.”

WRITING HER WAY OUT

Her good friend Megan McNulty encouraged DeLoach to try writing and came to her with an idea for a movie. “It was a true story about this woman’s life and it ended up being a much bigger true crime story,” DeLoach says, referencing Bambi Bennett, who was falsely charged with first-degree murder and burglary after her parents were found shot to death. “Dateline had done a whole piece on her and we got her story rights, but I’m not a person who thinks that I can just do something. I don’t know if that’s a female thing. I think a lot of men are like, ‘How hard can it be to write a script, right?’ For me, I was like, ‘Listen, if I’m going to meet you where you are, I need to go get the training that you did.’ For my whole pregnancy, I trained with this incredible writing teacher—Charlotte Chatton.”

DeLoach soon realized writing could become the path forward, allowing her to work from home and care for Bennett. “Sixty percent of what I do now is writing,” she says. “I loved writing when I was a kid. Looking back, dancing and writing were the ways that I released trauma when I was little. There were a lot of hard things that I went through as a kid and I now know that dancing and writing saved me. Whenever I got a little bit older, I started writing for women's websites and outlets. It was something that I kept coming back to.”

DeLoach and McNulty, who became her writing partner, now have twelve projects in various stages of development. “We put our heads down and decided to work our asses off,” DeLoach says of the last five years. “We are writers for hire. We have a variety of projects. We have true crime, horror, and thrillers. We also have a lot of [intellectual properties that we own]. We have a show we’re taking out called ‘Minors’ about minor league baseball and we have some incredible major league players that have attached themselves to the project.”

DeLoach also teamed up with her best friend Jen Dede to create “What We Are,” a blog and community that supports women facing various uphill battles. “I was so sick of the fakeness and falseness and everybody showing up with a smile on their faces,” DeLoach says, discussing the platform’s origins. “I was one of those people. We were all programmed to put a smile on our faces and to tell everyone, ‘We’re doing great, everything’s good,’ and move on with our life. I did not want to live like that anymore and I didn’t know how to unravel that. Especially growing up in the south, it’s like you put lipstick on it and you don’t let anyone know that you’re in pain. You don’t let anyone know what you’re struggling with and that was so deeply embedded in me. I felt like, ‘I’m presenting one version of myself to everyone in my life and then I’m secretly in my bedroom struggling and there’s got to be a better way.’”

The site became her place of truth. “We decided to create the blog and to highlight women in our lives who have gone through [their own challenges]—like Jamie-Lynn Sigler and her battle with MS and Jillian Rose Reed and her battle with her weight and her body image,” DeLoach says. “All of these women who have silently suffered in their situations and didn't put a voice to it because society told them, ‘Put a smile on your face and be glad you're alive.’”

ADVOCACY & GRIEF

DeLoach’s experiences also led her to become an advocate for others navigating the unexpected. “I love to write and to act and it makes me happy, but my passion is advocacy work and helping other people,” she says. “When you’re inside any kind of health or medical situation, you begin to realize that no matter how incredible the hospital is—even if it’s the best hospital in the world—things are going to fall through the cracks. When it comes to that child, you are their voice. You are their person. That led me to want to show other people what it looks like to be an advocate in their own lives.” She hopes to eventually write a book, she says, “about the journey of what it looks like to be an advocate; how to show up [for your family and yourself], the emotional toll it takes on you; and how to take care of yourself.”

Over the last handful of years, DeLoach became involved at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles – with both fundraising and assisting other parents as they navigate their new norm. As President of the Foundation Board of Trustees, she recently enlisted her old pal Timberlake and the duo helped raise over 5.5 million dollars during the hospital’s annual gala.

DeLoach is also an ambassador for The Alzheimer’s Association as well as President of Mind What Matters, which aids Alzheimer’s caregivers; the latter non-profit became important to DeLoach following her father’s battle with Pick’s Disease, a rare and aggressive form of dementia.

“We provide care grants for the caregivers of loved ones with Alzheimer’s and dementia,” she says, discussing Mind What Matters. “Sometimes the caregiver dies before the person with the disease because they have not taken care of themselves; they’ve been so busy taking care of someone else.”

DeLoach’s father was diagnosed in May 2017.

“In one week, I learned that my kid had an 11 percent chance of surviving and that my dad was diagnosed with Pick’s Disease and was going to die and it was going to be fast and it was going to be horrible,” she says. “I knew at that moment that my life would never be the same. I was living in what felt like a complete and total alternate reality.”

Her father passed away in 2021. “Losing my dad, who was my heart, the way I did during COVID where I couldn't get to him, I was robbed of that time,” she says. “Once he and I were vaccinated, I rented an RV and we drove across the country to get to him. It was one of many cross-country trips that we took to get to my dad. But I didn't get to have that time with him to say goodbye.”

DeLoach has been leaning on loved ones as she grieves. “The other night, I sat in the backyard with five of my best friends in the world,” she says. “A couple of them had lost parents [during COVID] and every time that happened, we would all gather together and hold space for that person to be loved and to share whatever they needed to share about their father or their mother. So they were all there and I needed it. They asked me, ‘What do you want to share?’”

DeLoach chuckles heartily. “I was like, ‘I have questions.’ Shocker. I had questions.” She turns serious. “I said, ‘I feel like a piece of me gone. Is she gone forever? Do I get her back? Is she with him?’” she asks breathlessly through tears. “For those months [after a loved one passes], it’s such a fog and then you slowly start to come back to yourself, but then there’s still pieces of yourself that are missing. It’s all of that grief and all of that trauma, but then you begin to wonder, ‘Am I ever going to get those pieces of her back?’”

She continues, “My friend Jen, who is the truth-teller, finally said, ‘You know who that woman is? That woman is holding onto the back of you—begging you to let her go. You have to let her go, and whatever remains, you build on that because you can’t get her back. She knows too much now. She’s been through too much. She’s no longer a part of you and it’s not going to serve you to hold onto her.’”

DeLoach audibly inhales and exhales. “I just sobbed,” she says, “and was able to be held up by these friends of mine who are my sisters in life.”

DeLoach says her recent experiences have shifted her mindset and priorities. “There’s this thing that happens in our business where they think everything is, like, the most important thing in the world,” she says. “It’s not true. There are children who are sick that need help. There are people with dementia and Alzheimer’s, there’s cancer. Your health—and life and death situations—are the most important things in the world. But unless you’ve gone through something like that you don’t know.”

WHAT’S NEXT

DeLoach is open as the future unfolds. “In terms of acting, writing, and producing, I hope I keep getting to do all of that for as long as I live,” she says, “but the industry is the industry.” She takes a deep breath. “I know that those are things that I want to pour my energy and my heart into.”

She's also interested in further pursuing academics. “I still want to get my master's,” she says. “Even though my husband is like, 'Please don't. At least not right now.'" She laughs. "But it's something I want to do because I believe we have a mental health crisis in this country and we need as many people on the ground helping as possible.”

Naturally, DeLoach is also focused on raising her sons. “My kids are everything,” she says. “I will not get this time back and I know that because I’ve peered behind the curtains. You know ‘The Wizard of Oz’ at the end and you peer behind the curtains and you see what’s back there? I understand the preciousness and fragility of life and I understand that it can all be taken from us at a moment’s notice.”

She’s embraced prioritizing family above all else. “I am trying to be mindful of the jobs that I take because I don’t want to be away from them for nine months out of a year doing a TV show in Atlanta,” she says. “I want to be with them. So I'm hoping that I get to sustain myself as an actor in the way that I am until they're older and then maybe that'll be there on the other side of that but if it's not, it's not. That's where I am. It's an interesting place to be—putting together the pieces of yourself that have been lost along the way. What does that transformation look like and who am I going to become on the other side of it?”

“I know that the pieces that were left behind are the pieces I no longer need,” she continues. “Everybody goes through it differently and processes it a different way. For me, growing up in this industry and going through this very specific journey, it’s trying to figure out who am I now without the stories that I told myself about what my life was going to be.”

Even with the challenges DeLoach has faced throughout her life and career, she says she can’t imagine life differently. “I would not change it,” she says. “I love who I am now. I did not love who I was before Bennett. I still look back at that girl and I go, ‘Oh, you didn't know who you were.’” She laughs. “I thought I was in power. I thought I had it all together and knew who I was in this world. But I had zero clue.”

“I did not know until all the other stuff was stripped away,” she continues, “and I was left with, ‘Are you breathing? Are you breathing? He’s breathing. Okay. He’s breathing. Everybody he’s breathing.’ That’s always my and Ryan’s joke. Every single night, he’ll come into the room and I say the same thing, ‘Are they breathing? Yep? Great, we can go to bed.’”

She starts every day similarly. “When I wake up to do my devotional, the first thing I say is: ‘Thank you God for breath,’” DeLoach says, “because it really does come down to just that: ‘Are we breathing?’”

HOW SHE LIVES…

DeLoach – whose latest Hallmark film “The Gift of Peace” debuts on December 10th – is based in Los Angeles with her husband Ryan Goodell and their two sons, Hudson, 9, and Bennett, 5. “Our family lives in the kitchen,” she says. “We have Friday movie nights in here. I have a popcorn-making machine. We have pizza and popcorn and we cuddle on the couch. They don’t have a bedtime on Fridays. We go until they pass out. The rest of the week I’m militant. I'm like, ‘Alright, it's 6:30. Let's start wrapping this thing up. Mommy needs to take a bath and Mommy needs to go to bed. So chip chop.’ I’m promptly in bed at 9 o'clock the rest of the week.”

THE GREAT OUTDOORS

“I love sitting out here because I feel closer to my dad and my grandfather here,” she says. “I couldn’t have been luckier. I had the best dad on the planet. He was born to be a father.”

HER GRANDFATHER’S CHIMES

“I spent a lot of time at my Nana and Papa’s house,” she says. “These were his chimes that hung on the porch in the backyard and when he passed away I was given these chimes, so I hung these up here.” She adds, “When the chimes and all of that happens, it’s just them being there, trying to say, ‘I haven’t left you. I’m still here.’” She adds, “My grandfather loved birds. It’s going to sound crazy, but I think – especially crows – they’re trying to communicate with me and tell me things. My grandfather and I would always watch and feed the birds.”

THE CHIMES IN HER FATHER’S HONOR

“I was given these when my dad passed away in honor of him,” she says. “When somebody leaves you, it’s traumatic. Especially my dad. He was 66 years old and the way that he left this earth…” She pauses. “It was such a horrible way to go. I understand conceptually that they’ve never left me and I will always have them…” Right on cue, the chimes start ringing. “But losing the physicality of somebody being there and the physical presence of being able to hug someone and hold them and talk to them is hard. So sometimes the sound reminds me that they’re here.” The chimes are going full force. She becomes visibly emotional and says, “It’s really special.”

THE TEA CUP

“The whole set belongs to my Nana,” she says. “I’m a tea fanatic. I don’t know if it’s because the majority of my heritage is British and French, but I drink tea all day long. There’s something about drinking it out of a proper tea cup that I know belonged to my Nana.”

HER FAITH

“My faith is important to me,” she says. “It’s interesting because I come from a place in the world where everybody goes to church. Everybody has a bible, but faith – always from the time I was little – was so much bigger than the way that I was taught.” 

DAILY DEVOTIONALS

“I do devotionals every morning,” she says. “I start every day with that grounding of my faith and walking. It might sound trite, but how Jesus walked on the earth and always went where there was need [inspires me]. Nobody was more important than anyone else, which was always one of my favorite things about him. I don't care who you are or what you do. Nobody is more important than anyone.” She adds, “Starting with the devotionals in the morning, it reminds me every single day of what actually matters and what’s important. So that's why I do that every morning. If I skip that a couple of days, I feel like, ‘Woah. I'm not anchored in what matters and I need to go back to that.’”

HER SPIRITUALITY

“I have known of the other side for a long time,” she says. “My friends call me a witch because, since I was a little kid, I was able to see actual spirits and ghosts. They still come to me and will want things or need things. I will be able to walk into a house and be like, ‘Oh, someone is in here. Hi. Who are you?’ When I was young, it was a little scary and it's also the reason why I would make my sister sleep with me every single night, even though she had her own room because it would be all night long and I couldn’t sleep as a kid. But if she was next to me, I could calm everything down and sleep.”

THE SIGN

Ladybugs hold special meaning for DeLoach. “My grandfather was the first person in my life that I was super close to that I lost,” she says. “How he would come back to me was so crazy. When he passed away in one of the cabins on the farm, I wasn’t there on the day, but the whole cabin was [later] swarmed with ladybugs, which I had never seen in my life. They were everywhere around the cabin.”

She shares another story to underscore why she loves ladybugs. “I was doing a movie in Winnipeg and a woman was doing my hair,” DeLoach says. “It was her very first movie and four days in, she goes, ‘Listen, I can get fired for this and hopefully that doesn’t happen, but there’s a medium that I talk to sometimes and she said, ‘There’s going to be an actress that you’re going to work with on this movie. You need to tell her she needs to come see me because I have a message for her.’ I was like, ‘Oh, you’re telling the right person. What’s her number? What is her address? I will be there tomorrow.’”

DeLoach continues, “I show up at this woman’s house and ladybugs are crawling all over her front door in the dead of winter. She opens the door and says, ‘I'm glad you finally got here. Your papa has some messages that I need to give you,’ and I went in and sat with her and she started telling me all of these things that he wanted me to know. I recorded the session and I’ve listened to it several times. When I look back on that, he was trying to warn me about my dad. At the time, I was like, ‘I don’t know what these messages are,’ and then as soon as we got my dad’s diagnosis and all of that started happening, I was reminded of the conversation and realized, ‘Oh my gosh. He was trying to say to us that something was going on with my dad and that we needed to figure it out.’ My dad was having all these personality changes… he was becoming a totally different person than we had known and my papa was trying to say, ‘Something’s wrong and it’s a medical condition. You need to get him to a doctor.’”

DeLoach says she pieced it together six months after her father’s diagnosis. “I was shocked,” she says. “I pulled up the recorded conversation and it was all there.”

HER HEART COLLECTION

“These have all been collected,” she says, pointing to various hearts in her backyard. “They were either given to me or collected in different places. Everywhere I go, I try to buy a heart.”

THE GIFT

“This was given to me,” she says, referencing a chime with hearts on it. “After my dad passed, a fan gave that to me. Hallmark fans are the sweetest humans. When we did the last Christmas convention, it was long days, but every single person in that line brought something for me in honor of my dad or shared their stories of grief and loss. It's such a thoughtful, kind thing to do. I do share my journey on social media. I forget what I posted. Maybe it was a picture of me in tears? But at one point, my husband was like, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t just be sad all the time.’” She laughs. “I was like, ‘But I am sad.’ He was like, ‘Yeah, but it’s a lot of sadness.’”

HER OUTDOOR OFFICE

“This is where my writing partner and I work,” she says, “because it’s outside and COVID-safe. And I shut those doors and try not to get in the way of my husband because he’s in the office working from the time he gets up until the time he goes to bed at night.”

THE MARKER BOARD

“This is a movie that we’re writing right now,” she says, referencing a marker board. “It’s a book adaptation. We are on our second draft. We were re-breaking the story to address some of the notes they had.”

THE CHEESEBOARD

“Boys eat so much food,” she says, laughing. “My [nine]-year-old will say, ‘Mom, can you make a cheese board?’ He’ll want me to make a giant one.”

ADVOCACY AND ACTIVISM

DeLoach has become an advocate for parents navigating the medical community. “I’ve taken a lot of parents and held their hands through heart surgeries,” she explains. “It’s people that I know and people who I’ve never met that just get connected to me through the hospital. [I take them through] what to expect emotionally. The thing that nobody warned me about was when you have to say goodbye to your child before they’re wheeled into surgery. Nobody prepared me for the fact that—for that moment in time—there’s a hallway where you have to say goodbye to them and they get rolled into double doors and you do not know if they’re going to come out. I prepare parents for that moment. ‘You’re going to have to say goodbye to your kid. It is going to split you in half.’ Doctors and nurses take you through it logistically, but nobody prepares you for emotionally what’s going to happen.”

FOR WHOEVER NEEDS TO HEAR IT

“You have to stay present for your child,” DeLoach says, discussing what it means to be a medical parent. “You are your child’s person. The nurses and doctors will rotate in and out of that room. You need to know what medicine they gave them and when they gave it to them. You need to know what their oxygen levels were two hours ago. You need to know every single thing that goes down. You need to write it down, so when those people come back in and they want to give them a certain medicine, you can say, ‘Oh no, actually it was given to him two hours ago.’ You have to be able to say, ‘No. He had a bad reaction to that medicine, so please don’t give him morphine right now because he had a terrible reaction to it. Can we give him something else?’ You have to be so present and the only way to stay that way is to stay in your body. The other part of that is – the only way to release trauma as it’s happening is to stay in your body.” She advises, “Is there a place in your body where you feel the safest? Are there parts of your body that you can breathe into that feel safe for you? For me, it's my feet, so I anchor myself on my feet and breathe into my feet and it keeps me in my body because the thing that we want to do when we're in moments of trauma is to lift out of our body and not be there. ‘I’ll be there physically, but emotionally I’m going to lift right up out of my body so that I don't have to feel how horrible this is.’”

ON FRIENDSHIP & HER BLOG

“When [Jen Dede and I] were starting to become friends, we made a pact,” DeLoach says. “We said, ‘If we’re going to be friends, we’re going to tell each other everything and we’re going to be the most authentic versions of who we are. We’re not going to lie to each other. We’re going to tell each other the ugly, messy truth, and that’s how we’re going to show up.’”

The result was, she says, life-changing. “We started doing that and all of a sudden, all of our friends around us asked, ‘What’s happening with the two of you? We want some of that.’ We were like, ‘We’re just over here being messy, so if you want to join that party, please come over.’ We saw a thirst for it in women—of their stories not being told, of the struggles not being shared. There was such a lack of it at the time.” Dede and DeLoach’s experience led to the launch of their blog “What We Are.”

“We highlight women who are going through struggle and trauma and grief and what their stories are and how they process it,” DeLoach says. “I don’t like the word overcome because you don't overcome trauma. You just learn to live with it. I was really under the impression that I could heal my trauma and there is a certain level of healing that you can do, but it’s working through it and finding a way to let it go. We’re told that we can overcome these things and then get right back to normal and that’s just not the way it works. That’s why they say grief is for the rest of your life because it’s never not going to be there.”