‘I was crying every day for two weeks’
AS she prepares to return to work after giving birth to her second child, Sarah Harris shares how she handles the guilt, the gossip — and the social-media lynch mob.
Stellar
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AS the Stellar photographer checks the light, Sarah Harris steals a moment to feed her newborn baby Harry — and encourage her two-year-old son Paul to stand still by offering him a toy truck. “Being in television has put me in good stead for raising a toddler,” she smiles as she tries, again, to get her boys to hold their position for the photographer.
“It’s like constant negotiation and diplomacy. And if that doesn’t work, bribery does.”
Her shoot with Stellaris the first public appearance the host of Network Ten’s Studio 10 and Shark Tank has undertaken since she and husband Tom Ward welcomed their second son in December. And in a way, it’s a microcosm of what life will be like when she returns to the popular morning program next month. “I’m looking forward to going back. Doing this shoot is like stepping back into that world. It’s fun to get dressed up and wash the vomit out of your hair, put make-up and Spanx on and get out of activewear,” she says. “But then it’s nice to go home after it and be Mum.”
If the images on these pages make it look like the 36-year-old has life under control, though, she’s about to remove the filter. “I always thought I would have three children, and moments after Harry was born I said to my obstetrician with a knowing smile, ‘I’ll definitely be back!’.
“But when I got home it really hit me how hard two is. To the point where I was crying every day for about two weeks,” she says of life with her “demanding humans”. “Everyone keeps saying when you have two kids you didn’t know you could love so much. But I felt guilt. Heaps of it. Like, how can I keep forgetting my new kid’s name? And is Paul going to be scarred for life because I can’t pay him attention all the time?”
Despite the intensity — and at times insanity — of having two under two-and-a-half years, Harris says motherhood has made her a “better person”. Which is a strange admission from the tough-as-nails journalist, who was raised by a single mother in housing commission in Sydney’s western suburbs and dreamed of reporting from war zones after doing work experience in the Seven Network newsroom. “I’m certainly not of the opinion you’re a lesser person if you don’t have children, but it has grounded me in a way I never thought possible,” Harris says. “It’s given a greater meaning. It’s made life better. Having kids forces you to see the simple things in life. Some women will go, ‘That’s not feminism.’ But feminism is about doing what you want to do.”
As Studio 10 co-host Joe Hildebrand says of the change he has seen in his friend, “In that rough-as-guts, tough-as-bootstraps girl from the working class, there was a nice, churchgoing middle-class girl waiting to get out. She’s not a wolf in sheep’s clothing, she’s a sheep in wolf’s clothing. She can still tell a filthy joke. Sarah loves a party — I think those people often make the best parents. She’s a really natural mum and I’m not surprised that she is. It’s not like, ‘That’s Sarah Harris, a she’s a bit wild but now she has settled down.’ She’s always been a warm person. She still loves the bottle... it’s just the nature of the bottle has changed and contains heated breast milk.”
The one-time chain smoker is not the only one who has undergone a significant change. When Harris returns to Studio 10, a show she has co-hosted since its inception in November 2013, it will be under a new executive producer (founding producer Rob McKnight left Ten late last year) and without co-host Jessica Rowe who will depart the show later this month. It will also be alongside supposedly warring colleagues (reports claim Ita Buttrose and Denise Drysdale are at odds after Drysdale threw brussels sprouts at Buttrose on a Christmas shoot). “A bit of gossip is good for the show,” Harris says, dismissing talk of any tension on the set. “When you throw five people together and get them to work three-and-a-half hours a day, there is going to be the odd brouhaha. But we all love each other. We are close. We are a totally dysfunctional family.”
Harris also wishes people would jump to outrage less frequently: she believes many TV hosts sanitise their views for fear of the social-media lynch mob. “People feel they can’t be frank and have an honest opinion. I’m not saying go out and offend everyone, but people are so quick to jump to offence. They can quickly mount a campaign to have someone fired on social media, which is completely unfair,” she says.
“It’s good we are taking a stand against racism and sexism. But for goodness’ sake, are we really going to be offended at every perceived slight we hear, see or read? Come on! Let’s stop this victimhood. Let’s be resilient as a society. That’s what I want to teach my boys, too: be resilient.”
It’s a sentiment she shares with husband Ward, who runs his own IT company. The two have been happily married for four years, but avoid gushing about each other on social media. “He’s a brilliant father but hates the limelight, which I love,” she explains. “It’s not that he’s too good for it or anything, but he’s in IT, man. He just wants to watch YouTube! He does love the news, just not the fluffiness of TV. He would not be caught dead at a premiere. The peripheral stuff, he does not care for. And I love that. That’s how we want to bring up the boys, too. I came from nothing and I don’t want the boys to think this [glamorous] life is normal.
“I make sure that Harry is in hand-me-down clothes and we get some of our toys from the council clean-up. Tom and I have both agreed that for the next 10 years, our biggest trip is going to be to the Gold Coast. I don’t want our kids growing up thinking that skiing in Aspen or all the fluff that comes with typical television stuff is the norm, because it’s not. I want them to be good, thoughtful young men. Not little dickheads that are given everything.”
Her down-to-earth nature is a reason why Harris’s name was last year added to the list of Silver Logie nominees — and why she was also thrown into the ring as a potential candidate to replace Lisa Wilkinson when she left the Today show. At the time, Harris, who first rose to prominence on the Nine breakfast show, ruled it out. But that decision is not binding. “I feel at the moment, in terms of balancing work life and motherhood, that I’ve hit the jackpot,” she tells Stellar. “I get to host a show which has heated discussions about a range of things ... but down the track, definitely, I would love to move back to breakfast TV. But that’s way down the track.”
In the meantime, Harris wants to take Studio 10 to number one and believes the show is making inroads on its competitors. “The show wasn’t doing that great at the start; I think that we had only 20,000 viewers at one point. I remember Joe [Hildebrand] at the time said, ‘I have three times more Twitter followers than we have people who watch the show.’ But at times we’ve been neck and neck,” she says. “I’m excited about this new chapter. We’ve been on air for four years and in that time I’ve gained a husband, two kids and 10 kilos. And I’ve never been happier.”