U on Sunday: Sonia Kruger on being a mother over-40
SONIA Kruger was like a lot of women out there — over 40 and desperate to be a mother. This is the story of how her dream became a reality.
TINY babies are supposed to love dozing to soft, soothing, womblike white noise: dishwashers; washing machines; vacuum cleaners. Maggie McPherson prefers the roar of a crowd.
Her mother, Sonia Kruger, was filming live instalments of Big Brother into late pregnancy, and remembers walking on stage to a screaming audience and feeling Maggie wriggle to life.
“She’d give this huge kick,” Kruger laughs now, cradling her daughter.
“I think she really appreciated it.”
Maggie, born on January 24, has a taste for showbiz, and she also has high expectations of her mum.
“She smiles an awful lot at her daddy, and she smiles an awful lot at other people, but I feel like I have to perform to get her to smile; funny noises and funny faces,” Kruger says.
“Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I’ll be feeding her or nursing her and there will be a big smile on her face. I’m like, ‘What are you smiling at? It’s four o’clock in the morning.’ But that’s the great thing about babies, isn’t it? We work so hard to get them to smile for us, but they genuinely just wake up happy in the morning anyway.”
Maggie also loves the buzz of a hairdryer, which is fortunate, as Mum will be spending a lot of time in hair and make-up this year.
Kruger is one of Australia’s favourite TV personalities; co-host with David Campbell of the Nine Network’s Mornings and now presenter of The Voice Australia’s 2015 season, for which she’s already started shooting.
She has also become a heroine for older mothers everywhere; not just because she had Maggie, her first child, at the age of 49, but because she has been consistently honest about her painful struggle to become a mother and the decision to use a donor egg.
During years of unsuccessful attempts, including several miscarriages, Kruger refused to accept she was too old for motherhood, taking hope from the fact Hollywood celebrities routinely have children beyond 45 — from Kelly Preston at 47 to Geena Davis with twins at 48 and Holly Hunter, also with twins, at 47.
“I thought, like a lot of people, ‘That’s OK; if they can do it, so can I.’ And it wasn’t until the IVF doctor I was seeing at the time said to me, ‘Sonia, make no mistake (Kruger thumps the table to emphasise each word), they are egg-donor babies.”
Once the decision was made to accept the offer of a close girlfriend to donate an egg, Kruger says she decided to be as open as she possibly could.
“You can want something as much as you like, but it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen for you. And when it dawned on me that if I really wanted to have a baby, it was not going to happen using my own eggs, it took a long time for me to come to terms with that. I don’t think that’s ever an easy decision for a woman to make.”
Since her announcement of pregnancy at a nervous 16 weeks, her revelation about the egg donation and the subsequent birth of Maggie, much of Kruger’s feedback from the public, from old-fashioned letters to social media, is thanks for her honesty.
“I didn’t want to mislead any woman out there. I didn’t want them to look at me and for me to pretend I’d had a miracle pregnancy at my age.”
Still, being so honest about Maggie’s biological heritage will undoubtedly have an effect on Maggie herself, once she’s old enough to realise how famous her mother is.
“One of my girlfriends really didn’t want me to say anything about having an egg donor because she was concerned about the baby going forward — whether the child would be teased at school, that the kids would say, ‘She’s not your biological mother, she’s not your real mother,’ and that was a real concern. I totally respect that. If people do want to keep it private, they should be allowed to. I was never going to be afforded that opportunity because of what I do; I’m in the public eye.
“I felt I needed to be honest about it. Maybe it would have been different if I didn’t work in the media. Maybe I would have chosen not to say anything for her sake. But I’m just hoping that this way the stigma will evaporate to a certain degree.”
Speaking of evaporation, something is happening in Maggie’s nappy. Kruger, who is giving her daughter a bottle, feels a rumble and lets out a delighted snicker. We’re in a sunlit studio in Sydney’s Redfern, where photographic assistants and stylists are getting ready for this, Kruger’s first photoshoot since the birth.
Kruger is lean and fit in her black workout gear, but once her hair and make-up are done, and she’s shimmied into a series of elegant gowns, she looks like the version of herself we’re most familiar with: the accomplished ballroom dancer who started out on screen as Tina Sparkle in
Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom in 1992, then transformed herself into an entertainment journalist and presenter through three decades in TV.
Despite being, as she says, “so happy, just so happy”, Kruger hasn’t been feeling very glamorous lately.
Soon after Maggie’s birth at the Mater Hospital, on Sydney’s north shore, Kruger was urged to attend a class for new parents in techniques for settling their newborns to sleep.
Deep in new-mother exhaustion, Kruger found herself standing in a crowded room feeling most unlike herself.
“I had on a pair of short pyjamas with a shirt thing, and my slippers, ’cause they say, ‘Bring slippers (to hospital),’ and I had on those white compression socks, so we go down the hallway to this class and there are all these people in this class and they’re all dressed normally.” Her eyes widen with the horror.
“And I’ve come dressed as a German sex worker. That’s what I looked like. It was so embarrassing. And I was thinking, ‘Please, nobody turn around and look at me.’”
Kruger says she feels like “a hot mess” most of the time, which is normal, but she’s also hyper-conscious of the paparazzi photographers sitting outside her house, all looking for an image of her looking like a hot mess, which is definitely not normal.
“In the first month, I felt like I couldn’t leave the house because every time I did there was some strange guy following me. It was really weird. I didn’t particularly feel like venturing out of the house, because I was covered in baby vomit and I didn’t have my act together. But then when I did, I remember I took the dog out for a walk and she stopped to sniff something and
I saw this shadow whip back behind a tree, and it was kind of creepy. You know, when you’re on your own as a woman, you feel a little bit vulnerable, let alone when you’re a woman and you’ve got a tiny baby, you feel even more vulnerable.”
Kruger’s partner, Nine Network executive Craig McPherson, finds it deeply irritating — particularly when photographers tailed them on a recent visit to his father in a nursing home.
Anyway, it’s something new for McPherson, who is an old hand at most other aspects of newborn wrangling, given he has six adult children from a previous relationship.
You might think he’d be a complete professional — but, no, says Kruger.
“Like every man out there, he takes shortcuts,” she says with a smile. “I love the fact that I can leave her with him and know she’ll be absolutely fine, but it’s really interesting to see what they do. He took her out for a walk in the pram the other day and sent me a picture. I wrote back and asked, ‘Is she strapped in?’ She wasn’t.
“And bottles. Even the construction of a bottle — you know how some have collars and some don’t? I’ve watched Craig pour milk all over her because he hasn’t assembled the bottle properly.”
But not even McPherson’s experience could soothe Kruger’s fears during the pregnancy. Having miscarried several times, her pregnancy with Maggie was a time of constant fear.
“I never relaxed. Ever,” she admits.
“I even Googled buying my own ultrasound machine, my own Doppler, so I could check her heartbeat constantly because I was so paranoid something would go wrong. When she was finally born, there was an enormous sense of relief. But then, driving home, I got in the front of the car. I didn’t even realise, you put them into that baby capsule and you can’t see them when you’re sitting in the front. So the whole way home I was panicking that she wasn’t breathing. It’s just ridiculous, really, that you can worry so much. And all my girlfriends who have children have said to me, ‘Well, that’s the rest of your life, basically.’”
Kruger likes to call herself “a natural-born worrywart”. It’s odd, then, in retrospect, that she never really worried about her chance of having a baby until it was almost too late.
She was married twice, most recently to banker James Davies, before falling in love with McPherson, then the producer of the Seven Network’s Today Tonight.
By the time Kruger really began thinking about having a baby, she was in her early forties, and although she was able to conceive with comparative ease, the pregnancies didn’t last.
“My sister had children when she was quite young, so the family didn’t ever really pressure me. It wasn’t like I needed to give my parents grandchildren, because they already had them. And I suppose I was always viewed as being the person who was going to work. I loved what I did and I loved to travel, and I think I just did everything later in life, really.”
If she had her time again, one thing would be different: she would have frozen her eggs if the technology had been available, as it is now.
It’s a message Kruger isn’t shy about giving girlfriends who are single in their mid-thirties.
“I often say to them, ‘You should look at doing that. What happens if you don’t meet that person in the next couple of years? Or you get to the age of 40 and you decide you want to have a family then?’”
In her public statements during her IVF battle, Kruger was always almost defensively optimistic: you’re never too old; of course it can happen.
Privately, though, she found herself really pondering her own motivations, through all the physical and emotional pain.
“I’ve asked myself the question, ‘Why do you want a baby so badly?’”
Kruger still doesn’t really know the answer.
“It’s not for her to look after me in my old age — I know that I don’t want that burden to fall on her. It’s not so I can see a replica of myself, either. I think I said to somebody when I went down the egg-donor path, ‘I’m not that in love with my own DNA, so it’s fine.’
“I think it’s the nurturing thing. It really is that innate desire to nurture. It has to be. I can’t even explain it. I think it’s also wanting that shared experience with your partner. It felt like a natural progression for us.”
By now, Maggie is a few metres away, snoozing in the arms of Nine’s publicity boss, Victoria Buchan.
Kruger glances her way. “Maybe we (women) are slightly addicted to all those feelgood hormones you get when you look at a baby. You can see it with strangers, when you look at a baby you get this release of dopamine and all those feelgood hormones.”
It’s hard to drag herself away from that dreamy little face, but Kruger says she missed working with David Campbell and had been dying to share war stories from the parenthood battlefront; Campbell and his wife have recently welcomed twins.
“I’d love to take a whole year or more off, but like a lot of people I have a mortgage and I really need to go back to work. And I love the people I work with.”
This Mother’s Day is obviously poignant as Kruger’s first, but she doesn’t want the day to be all about herself. “My plans are to spend the day spoiling my own mum,” Kruger says. “I now have a new appreciation of everything she did for me.” She’d love her mother, Margaret, to be able to spend more time in Sydney, but Kruger’s father, Adrian, is unwell and it’s difficult for the couple to leave their home in Queensland.
Margaret, incidentally, has begun calling herself ‘Maggie’ since the baby’s birth, in a rush of delight at having a namesake — although when Kruger announced the birth, she said her daughter was named after both Mrs Kruger and “the baby from The Simpsons”.
“The name Maggie came up and Craig knew it was my mother’s name, and he said, ‘It’s not really a name for a baby, though, is it?’ I think he was thinking of Maggie Thatcher. And
I said, ‘Yeah, of course (it is), there’s Maggie from The Simpsons.’”
I get the distinct impression Kruger would happily chuck work in if it meant spending more time at home with her child. Could she be a stay-at-home mother?
“Yeah,” she says without hesitation.
“I certainly could while she’s a baby. I don’t want to miss a thing. I really don’t. When I’m not there, if I have to work, Craig has to send me pictures constantly. It doesn’t matter if she’s asleep, awake, in her bouncy chair — I need pictures.
“And I’m looking forward to all those stages. When she giggles, I can’t wait for that. I can’t wait for her to sit up. I don’t want to wish it all away because there is something about having a tiny baby that is amazing,” she says.
It sounds like Kruger might be up for another child, although she’ll be 50 in August.
“I would,” she says, “except I don’t want to push my luck. I feel like I’ve got what I always wanted, so I’m just going to be happy. If I were 38, I’d definitely be wanting more. I said to my sister, who has four children, ‘Every time the child starts to grow up, you want another baby,’ and she said, ‘I’m addicted to newborns.’”
Kruger’s laughing again.
“But now I can understand why. They are just so divine.”
Fears sand linked to asbestos sent home in school artwork
