Why Jackie Gillies is leaving The Real Housewives
In an exclusive interview, The Real Housewives of Melbourne star Jackie Gillies reveals the heartbreak behind her struggles to start a family with husband Ben Gillies and the reason she’s leaving the show that made her a household name.
Stellar
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Being a psychic medium means that The Real Housewives Of Melbourne cast member Jackie Gillies is confident in her future. She knows she’s going to be a mother. She’s been told as much. What she hasn’t been told is when it will happen.
“I’m not shown everything in life,” she explains to Stellar. “No psychic medium is. Do I know I’m definitely going to have children? From the depths of my heart, yes. But what I haven’t been prepared for is the way it was going to come.”
On a show about rich women behaving badly, Gillies, 39, became a fan favourite for her honesty, her optimism and the mantra she trilled regularly: “Shine, shine, shine!”
But for the past 18 months things have not been all that sunny for the Croatian-born reality TV star and her husband, Silverchair drummer Ben Gillies – particularly around the topic of starting a family.
For the first time, Gillies is publicly revealing she is on her fourth round of IVF. “I am a person that is really authentic and walks my talk,” she says.
“But I wasn’t walking my talk. I didn’t tell anybody I was doing IVF for the first two rounds because I was a bit ashamed. I felt I wasn’t good enough and people would judge me. But keeping it hidden meant I also wasn’t being honest to who I am. And since I’ve started telling people, everyone has been so supportive.”
That includes the show’s producers, who after signing Gillies’s contract for a new season in November, would end up needing to find her replacement.
“Ben and I really talked about it and we wanted to put everything on pause, including Housewives, to focus on starting a family,” she says. “Because I’m not getting any younger...”
Biological clocks can often be an uncomfortable topic for women to discuss, but in true Gillies style, she tackles the issue headfirst.
After deciding in 2018 she wanted to become a mother and then not falling pregnant for nearly a year, she sought medical advice. Assessments revealed no medical explanation for the infertility.
“I’d just turned 39,” she tells Stellar. “And the doctor said, ‘You don’t have time to waste.’ And I knew that. [So] the next week I was doing IVF.”
Gillies quickly discovered that the process wasn’t exactly straightforward. “I literally thought you go in, you do your round, and you get pregnant,” she says. “That was my headspace. I was so unprepared for everything.” That included what the increased hormones would do to her body, as well as the home-pregnancy tests, which led her to believe she was pregnant when she wasn’t.
“And don’t get me started on the f*cking fluid retention,” she jokes. “I upped two sizes in a week. Losing control over your body was not something I was prepared for. At least when you’re pregnant, you know these things are going to happen.”
Still, the biggest adjustment has been the mental one. “It’s a head f*ck,” she says. “Feeling tired. Feeling angry. Going through these thoughts when it doesn’t work like, ‘Am I good enough? Am I really a woman?’”
Gillies gives talks across the country on the power of a positive mindset, but even she admits to questioning whether she’d left it too late to start a family. “I was scared to become a mother; I was scared to have children. I thought I had all the time in the world and was really quite selfish with my time,” she says, explaining that a stint on I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! was, of all things, what changed her mind.
“I had so much time to think in the jungle and I had this moment where I realised I didn’t want to miss out on being a mother. I didn’t want to be 70 and look back on my life and go, ‘What have I done?’”
Acting as her support counsellor and nurse – he administers all the injections – has been her husband, who she married in 2010. “Ben and I haven’t put a time limit on IVF, and fortunately we are in a financial position where we can keep doing it,” she says.
“But if the doctors suddenly said there was something wrong and I couldn’t carry a child, of course I would be devastated – but there are other ways to have children. I would try surrogacy or adoption.”
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Ben tells Stellar he has felt helpless seeing his “tough cookie” of a wife struggle with the fluctuating hormones.
“I’ve seen her break down crying over things that would normally be a non-issue, but you just need to go with it,” he says, adding he’s been surprised how natural the IVF process has felt. “It doesn’t feel artificial. It’s just a little helping hand.”
Her best friend from the show, Janet Roach, has been calling Gillies every second day offering her support. And Gillies jokingly admits that she is disappointed that her efforts to become a mother won’t play out on the screen, as she reckons it probably would have made great viewing content.
“I don’t know what it’s like to be pregnant, but I’ve got friends who are complete psychos,” she says. “Imagine that on the girls’ overseas trip.”
She will miss gallivanting around her second home of Melbourne with her dysfunctional TV family, but Gillies tells Stellar she is confident in her decision to walk away from the show and focus on building her own family in the NSW city of Newcastle, where she grew up and where she and Ben live.
As for other women who might be going through something similar, she has some advice. “The biggest thing I’ve learnt, and the reason I’m speaking about this now, is to never hide things – when you talk, it’s like you become lighter,” she says, adding she’s been inspired by comedian Amy Schumer’s decision to share her own IVF story.
“And please don’t feel like you’re not good enough. Because you are enough. It’s OK. It’s not your fault.”
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Originally published as Why Jackie Gillies is leaving The Real Housewives