he developed gestational diabetes while pregnant — a condition that affects about one in 10 pregnancies and causes blood-sugar levels to surge. She couldn’t eat pasta, had to prick her finger every time she ate and text the results to her doctor. The diabetes vanished the moment he was born, but she was obliged to deliver him by C-section, and part of her will always wonder "Did I miss out?", so she had no intention of missing anything else. She was amazed when everyone kept telling her, before he was even born, to get a nanny. "The way I grew up, that’s so alien to me. Nobody had a nanny. We didn’t even have a babysitter."
Cheryl thinks Liam Payne "maybe" felt excluded when they had their son Bear.
The former couple welcomed their first child into the world in March 2017 and the ‘Love Made Me Do It’ hitmaker – who split from the One Direction singer this summer – admitted she was consumed by a "bubble of love" for the little boy and had little time for anyone else.
She said: "When I think back to the early days of new motherhood, I was in such a bubble of love, I actually don’t think I saw anyone else."
Asked if Liam felt excluded, she said: "Maybe. Maybe."
Liam, 25, had wanted children from the age of just 16 and was keen to "settle down" with Cheryl – but she suggested the reality wasn’t what the ‘Polaroid’ singer had expected.
She told the Sunday Times’ Style magazine: "He wanted to settle down and have a family and not do the solo thing.
"Then we encouraged him to do that. And then it didn’t work out."
Asked if it wasn’t what he wanted after all, she simply replied: "You’ll have to ask him that."
But the former Girls Aloud singer can understand why it was "hard" for Liam to juggle fatherhood with his solo career, while she took a break to be with the baby.
She said: "He was almost having two lives. You have to switch your head onto pop star and then switch it back to daddy."
The ‘Fight For This Love’ singer – who was previously married to Ashley Cole and Jean-Bernard Fernandez-Versini – thinks it is the "best thing in the world" to be sharing her bed with Bear.
She said: "I’m going to get mum-shamed, aren’t I? But yes, he does. Best thing in the world.
"I know I’m making a rod for my own back. I am aware of that.
"But when he was born, he used to sleep in the crib that you put on your bed, and then he never really left."
She admitted she tried moving the tot to a cot in his own room but he "wouldn’t have it" and she didn’t like leaving him to cry.
She said: "I don’t want to give him insecurities or a feeling like I’m not around. But at the same time I don’t judge anybody that does the crying-out thing. Do what works for you, and the rest of you shut the f**l up, because it’s not your business, is it?"