‘The first time we kissed, the chemistry was unmistakeable’: Kerryn Phelps’ love story

I have been married twice. The first was a conventional boy-meets-girl story.

Michael and I met in our first year of high school when we were 12, and started dating at 15 when we were in year 10. When I went to medical school at 18, it would have made sense to leave home, live in student accommodation near the university and engage fully in university life, but my parents had made it clear that their expectation was for me not to leave home until after I was married. Ever the “obedient child”, I was not prepared at that stage to buck the system. So I made the daily drive from Sydney’s northern beaches to the university.

Dr Kerryn Phelps and Jackie Stricker “fell quickly and profoundly in love”.Credit: Getty

When Michael and I married, we were both just 22 years old. He had recently graduated from an electrical engineering degree at the University of Sydney, and I was in the final year of my medical degree. We had been together for seven years. I thought that would be it for the rest of our lives, but it was not to be.

The plan was to finish medical school, do my two years as a hospital resident and then go into a specialist training program, most likely surgery – although that was not a well-worn path for women at that time. Women are still underrepresented in most surgical subspecialties. But when I realised I was pregnant, I knew I would have to pivot away from that plan.

In those days, whatever maternity leave you took was unpaid. In the months after I returned to my internship, I was grateful to have help with childcare from my mother, my mother-in-law and my gorgeous aunt Shirley. I could then go back to work to complete the interrupted year of postgraduate training required to be registered for independent practice as a doctor.

As a junior doctor, you are on a steep learning curve. You have to apply all of the knowledge you have acquired through medical school to the real world of medicine. You also have to learn to deal with the psychological aspects of the situations you are faced with, such as emergency room traumas, delivering devastating news to patients about a prognosis, or consoling grieving relatives. As much as you try not to let emotion get in the way of clinical reasoning, as much as you try to maintain a clinical distance, there are times when the personal tragedies of your patients hit a nerve. You need to deal with the patient in front of you first, then go with the emotion later, talking to a trusted colleague and preparing for the next time.

Doctors are, after all, human.

After a couple of years working for a doctor in Newport, I bought a small medical practice in Mosman, in partnership with Dr Penny Adams. Around this time, I started doing regular reports on television for Network Ten.

While I was running the medical practice and working as a GP part-time, I had to find new ways of staying healthy and finding balance while juggling the demands of family and work. We regularly went to the beach or the park, to playgroups or to the local bike path.

It was around this time that I discovered aerobics at a local gym called the Physical Factory, near my medical practice. The Olivia Newton-John song Physical had inspired a generation of young people to “get physical”, and these were the glory days of shiny leotards, headbands, big socks and Reebok pumps. It became fashionable for women to have “big guns”, awesome “abs” and quality quadriceps. And bonus! The gym also had childcare.

After a couple of years of going to classes, I decided to learn how to be an instructor.

On the day that Michael and I separated, I was put in the difficult and distressing situation of also having to tell my parents I was gay.

KERRYN PHELPS

During the time I was teaching aerobics, I started to question my sexuality. That was a big issue, but it wasn’t the only issue in my marriage to Michael. I had been growing increasingly miserable for some time. It sounds like a cliché, but we had grown apart. I have heard that state of profound confusion and emotional desolation referred to as “the dark night of the soul”.

At 35, I was faced with the agonising dilemma of whether I should tread water for a decade or so until the children finished school and university, or to disrupt all of our lives by doing what needed to be done if I was going to find that elusive sense of happiness and an authentic sense of self.

On the day that Michael and I separated, I was put in the difficult and distressing situation of also having to tell my parents I was gay. I would have preferred to tell them that in my own way and in my own time. Looking back, I would have handled things very differently.

I was stunned by my mother’s initial response that I should get out of the house and leave my children with their father, so they could “have a chance at a normal life”. That would have been in nobody’s best interest.

Regardless of my inner turmoil, I had to maintain two children in their usual school routines and activities as much as possible, manage my medical practice and continue my clinical work, keep running the household and paying the bills and keep up with my media commitments as if nothing had changed.

After a while, I made the decision to move back to the northern beaches for a new start and, with time, I managed to come to terms with my parents’ initial reaction when my first marriage ended and I told them I was gay. I figured they needed time to adjust.

It would take some time for me to find the right path.

In 1993, a few months after Michael and I had separated, I was introduced to Jackie Stricker on Oxford Street in Paddington. Jackie was a teacher at Ascham, a private girls’ school in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. After that initial meeting, we saw each other only occasionally at parties or in groups. I remember always enjoying her company and gravitating towards her at social events.

When Jackie and I were outed as a couple, my parents appeared to be supportive of us at first. They even gave a couple of key media interviews.

KERRYN PHELPS

Then, four years later, a wonderful thing happened. We spent some time together, just the two of us. I found her to be an intriguing combination: vivacious, intelligent, fearless and compassionate. She had a cheeky sense of humour and very strong opinions. She had extraordinary intuition.

The first time we kissed, the chemistry was unmistakeable. We fell quickly and profoundly in love.

Jackie and I knew each other well enough by then to recognise the inevitability of a future life together. As in many blended families, we had to establish ourselves as a cohabiting, co-parenting couple with shared custody of my two teenage children with their father. Jackie was delighted to become a step-parent. I quickly learned that there was a sense of reciprocity, of mutuality to our relationship that I had not experienced before.

When Jackie and I were outed as a couple, my parents appeared to be supportive of us at first. They even gave a couple of key media interviews. But after a while, my mother wanted us to stop talking about LGBT+ issues. We clashed over some family issues, too.

Over time, our interactions became more and more hostile. I tried reasoning but it was useless. Eventually, contact between us stopped. It was heartbreaking.

For a long time, Jackie and I tried to reconcile with my family of origin and we tried to be as inclusive as we could with invitations to our home and to all of our celebrations. It took a while, years in fact, for us to get the message not to expect return invitations. My parents eventually said that I could see them, but not with Jackie. Years later, I found out that my father’s parents had done the same to their daughter, my aunt, who was in a lifelong relationship with another woman. It placed me in an almost unbearable predicament, but I could not allow my relationship to be disrespected in that way.

I had bucked the system big time and, deep down, I had known what the consequences could be.

When my father died, I went to the sea and thought about my childhood: my father teaching me to surf and to swim and to fix things. I thought about Christmas mornings and birthday parties and camping trips by the sea and freshly squeezed orange juice on weekends. I tried to process the hurt of those years of estrangement as an adult.

That week, Jackie, [our daughter] Gabi and I went to the Friday night service at Emanuel Synagogue and recited the mourner’s prayer together. Later that year I would have to gather all of my emotional and intellectual reserves as I became engaged in an intense political campaign for the federal seat of Wentworth.

Edited extract from Power of Balance: A Life of Changemaking (Hardie Grant) by Dr Kerryn Phelps out April 3.

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