I ask Velda Tan if she’s looking forward to her second child—and her answer catches me off guard. “Not really,” she admits. We are 40 minutes into our interview and, frankly, I expected a different answer, given how she just reflected on her journey with infertility and IVF.
“It’s not that I’m not looking forward to welcoming my baby; it’s just that I’m not keen on going through the newborn phase all over again,” she clarifies candidly. “Having to juggle work and motherhood is definitely challenging.”
Tan certainly has her hands full with Ellery, her four-year-old daughter with husband Frederick Yap, and her own lifestyle label Our Second Nature, where she is creative director. While she’s bracing herself for the mayhem that comes with a newborn, she’s excited “for Ellery to finally have someone to call her sibling”, having always desired a big family for herself after her own “very lovely childhood” with her two sisters. “I think that’s probably the main reason why I wanted more children,” she says, adding that she had actually wanted “four, but along the way, that dream changed.”
Tan tied the knot in 2012 at 25, but never
