New pregnancy book features LI actresses Abigail Hawk and Bianca Jamotte LeRoux

Two Long Island mothers, both actresses and writers, are part of a new anthology about pregnancy. “The Unofficial Guide to Surviving Pregnancy Without Losing Your Mind” ($14.99, HCCR Books) features personal stories by 37 bloggers, including Bianca Jamotte LeRoux, creator of the web series “Real Mommy Confessions,” and Abigail Hawk, a star of CBS’s “Blue Bloods.”

In her essay “Pregnancy Is All The Rage,” LeRoux, 36, who lives in New Hyde Park, recounts an incident of road rage in her third trimester, a time when she says she was prone to overreacting. “I took everything personally. Anything would make me cry. Anything would make me angry,” LeRoux says of the last three months of her pregnancy.

Driving in Brooklyn, where she was living at the time, she chased down a driver who had gestured at her rather impolitely. She cut him off in the middle of the intersection, got out of the car and starting yelling at him.

“He just started laughing at me, because I was this huge pregnant lady waddling at his tinted windows, yelling at him. And then I saw his girlfriend and said, ‘You should do better. You should pick nicer men!’ It was just so ridiculous.”

The Brooklyn road rage experience was not an isolated incident, Jamotte LeRoux admits. “My hormones just made me so volatile. There was one woman who insulted my dog and I threatened to beat her up,” she says.

LeRoux, who has also contributed to the “Surviving Life With Boys” book anthology, has a 6-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son.

Starkly different in tone from most of the book’s comedic essays, Hawk’s “How Strange: The Second Pregnancy is Different From The First,” is a poetic prose piece about her experience with postpartum depression.

In penning her essay, Hawk, also 36 and also living on Long Island, says she hopes to normalize an experience that many new mothers have but are reluctant to admit.

“It was cathartic for me, because it was the first time that I had publicly shared that,” says Hawk, who has 6-year-old and 19-month-old sons. “So most people don’t even know that I suffered from it. It was a big deal for me to let that out, but it was part of the healing process for me as well. And, I think it’s important to be as honest as possible.”

For Hawk, postpartum depression was totally unexpected since she says she didn’t experience anything like it during her first pregnancy.

Jamotte LeRoux and Hawk are shooting  “The Only Woman in the World,” a Long Island feature film directed by Debra Markowitz, director of the Nassau County Film Office.

The paperback's authors are Tiffany O’Connor and Lyndee Brown.