Lisa Vanderpump Reveals the Big Fear She Had to Face to Join RHOBH — and Why It Could Still Become a Reality

Lisa Vanderpump may be one of the stars of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, but there was one major — and personal — fear that she had to confront to join the Bravo reality series.

Speaking with Jenny McCarthy on Wednesday, Vanderpump, 56, revealed to the Jenny McCarthy Show host that the big fear she was forced to face dealt with her son Max’s adoption.

“My first fear of — god, I haven’t talked about this before. My first fear when I signed up to do Housewives was my son was 18 and I said, ‘You know, it really does worry me that maybe this family would come forward.’ I said, ‘I want to be very sensitive about that.’ I thought because they met me, that if I was on Dancing with the Stars — at the time I didn’t know that it would be as big, the show, in such public forum — that maybe I would kind of hear from them and I never did,” Vanderpump admitted.

Although the Bravo personality has not heard from her son’s biological parents — Max was adopted by Lisa and her husband, Ken, when he was an infant — it could potentially occur in the near future. Vanderpump, who has starred on the show since 2010, also revealed that the “confusing” storyline will “play out” on the reality series.

While the topic was — and is — personal to Vanderpump, she doesn’t want to allow her own feelings to interfere with her son’s journey.

“You never know how long you’re going to be on this planet and I always wanted to support him, that if ever he went down that road, that we were there to support him,” Vanderpump told McCarthy. “And also, I didn’t want to put my feelings first because he might think … ‘I don’t want to hurt my parents. I don’t want to think after everything they’ve done for me that I’m not thinking of them as my real parents.’ ”

The Bravo star added: “I always felt very, very vulnerable about that.”

In December, Vanderpump admitted that she almost didn’t return for the current season of RHOBH.

“I was reticent because I felt the last season was just so aggressive towards me. I’m not a victim in it because I did hit back and the audience were great and really supported me, but it just went down a road I just thought, ‘I don’t think I can do this anymore,’ ” Vanderpump told Access Hollywood Live.

“I’d been on it for quite a few years, but then I met with them — I didn’t start until a couple of weeks after everybody else — and I’ve had such a great time on it and it was just really a couple of really negative episodes and I thought that shouldn’t define the whole experience because it’s given me so much in terms of, as I say, going to Congress for Yulin and they said that they would include a lot of the things that I was doing in my life and that was very important to me,” she added.

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills airs Tuesdays (9 p.m. ET) on Bravo.