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Deborah Joy Winans Welcomes Baby Boy After Difficult Pregnancy: 'Worst Pain of My Life'

deborah winan
deborah winan

A Turner Archives

Deborah Joy Winans is feeling grateful for her baby boy after a difficult pregnancy journey.

The Greenleaf actress, 38, welcomed her first child, son Terrence David Williams, with husband Terrence Williams in October, and tells PEOPLE that she's "on the mend" following a painful pregnancy involving fibroids, noncancerous tumors that grow in the uterus.

Winans, who stars in OWN's new holiday film A Sisterly Christmas, gave birth to her son via an emergency cesarean section three weeks before her due date. Baby Terrence weighed 8 lbs, 2 oz. at birth.

"I was so big. Between the fibroids and my son, it was just too much and so they induced me at 37 weeks. When they broke my water, I started dilating, but once I got to six, I just stopped and [the doctor] said my cervix was swollen. Then [my son's] heart rate kept dipping," she recalls. "When they pulled him out, I hadn't even laid eyes on him. I heard him cry and I just was overwhelmed. Through everything, just hearing him, it just made everything okay."

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Now at almost seven weeks postpartum, Winans says she's "feeling better and better every day."

Subscribe to our new 12-episode weekly podcast, Me Becoming Mom, to hear celebrity moms open up exclusively to PEOPLE about their extraordinary roads to motherhood.

deborah winan baby
deborah winan baby

A Turner Archives

RELATED: Celebrity Babies Born in 2021

"Every day I look at him I just think, number one, what a miracle he is, because when they took out my fibroids, the size of the one was like a basketball," says Winans, who had surgery to remove the fibroids at four weeks postpartum. "The fact that he was able to grow in there is just amazing."

Speaking of her experience with fibroids, Winans says her pregnancy was "probably the hardest thing I've ever had to do."

The new mom says she found out about her pregnancy the day before she was set to go to Canada to shoot A Sisterly Christmas.

"Being in the worst pain of my life and not having my husband, that was a really, really difficult time," she shares.

deborah winan
deborah winan

A Turner Archives

The actress tells PEOPLE that her baby boy was named after both his dad and his great-grandfather.

"We were always considering his first name being after his dad, and so we were pretty settled on that," she says. "Then in thinking about a middle name, I was so close to my grandfather. He passed in 2009, but I was so close to him and really myriad things I loved about him, but just the confidence and the favor that he walked in that I just was privy to all my life was something that was very strong to me."

As for her husband, Winans says Williams is "very happy" and that the pair love to watch their son "connect with our voices and really learn us."

"It's such an overwhelming feeling every time we look at him," she adds.