The comedian and star of Bryn and Ku’s Singles Club on life as a new mum.
People always ask me how I knew I wanted kids, but there was never a divine moment, rather a deep instinct that it was just something I wanted to do. It feels hopeful to me, and beautiful, and something I felt I would be good at and enjoy doing. As we talked about in season one of Singles Club, I didn’t want this big life opportunity to pass me by just because I was single, so freezing my eggs in 2024 was a huge moment for me taking control for the first time.
I eventually got to the top of the sperm donor list, right at the same time I met Mark.
It was maybe on our second or third date that I came in hot. I told him I really wanted to have a baby, that I had frozen my eggs, and I had six months to decide if I wanted to use a sperm donor or not. A few months later, we had moved in together, I had watched him be an amazing dad to his five-year-old son from his previous marriage, and I knew it would be OK to have a baby with him. So we started trying, and literally on our second pop, it happened.
We were going to Wellington to see my sister for the weekend and I just had this funny feeling that I needed to do a test. The next day I did one of those electronic pregnancy tests by myself in the bathroom at my sister’s house, and it was positive. I’ll never forget looking at it and being so stoked, and then getting to tell everyone that was in the house at the time. It turns out you can try to plan as much as you want, but ultimately life is going to do whatever.
I was pretty lucky to not have any bad nausea in my pregnancy, but I had such an aversion to smells that I couldn’t open the fridge for a month. There was a real feral, animalistic thing to it – Mark is not a smelly man, but we’d be lying on the couch, and I was like, “your feet stink”, and he would be like “they really don’t”. There was also the insatiable thirst and the hunger throughout, and I do laugh looking back at the early photos where I thought I had a bump.
My birth plan was “don’t die”, that was it. Baby don’t die, me don’t die. So when my waters broke at home at 38 weeks, four days before I was due to go in and have a stretch and sweep, I really didn’t mind what happened next as long as everyone was safe. We actually went back to bed and put a really shitty stoner movie on like Step Brothers or something we didn’t have to focus on, and I tried to get some more sleep before the contractions started to get real.
The next day I stayed in bed with the curtains closed while Mark and some friends pottered around and brought me toast and coffee. My parents arrived a few hours later and I was bouncing around on the Swiss ball because things were ramping up a bit. It was so nice to have my mum there – particularly because I was looking at her going, “I can’t believe you did this three times”. It was so crazy to suddenly be experiencing everything you have only read about.
I called the midwife a few times but she kept saying “you sound way too good, call me when you can’t talk”. At the same time I was worried about the 50-minute drive from our house in Muriwai in west Auckland to the hospital. We made it the hospital some time after 9pm, and I was in pretty significant pain but I was still only 3cm dilated. My obstetrician came in and told me I could be induced, which could take up to 15 more hours of labour, or I could have a C-section and meet my baby in an hour.
I felt so lucky that I got to have my waters break and I got to experience early labour, because I wasn’t counting on either of those things, so I felt really comfortable to say at that point that I’d like a C-section. I was buzzing out at all the medicine, cracking heaps of jokes and chatting away, and the most magical bit was when they held her up and I heard her cry for the first time. Mark stood up to see her come out and he was crying, and his tears were falling on my face.
Nine months is such a long time to dream about your baby and to wonder what they’re going to look like. There’s a moment in Singles Club where I confessed that I found it hard to talk out loud to my baby while she was in the belly because I was just petrified to make her real. Even though I knew she was real and I could feel her every day, it’s just so risky to fall in love, isn’t it? So suddenly hearing that cry from her made me go “I’m allowed to love her: she’s here”.
It is interesting reflecting on the whole experience because I was worried about my age – being over 40 meant they wrote AMA, or “advanced maternal age on all my stuff” – but I feel like my age only impacted things for the better. I often think thank goodness I’m doing this now at 41 because I just feel so much more capable and ready. I understood there were risks, but those risks are easier to weigh up when you’ve lived with yourself and your brain for 40 years.
My age has also meant I can take or leave people’s advice, and forgive myself more quickly. It’s kind of like when I travelled by myself overseas and I’d catch the wrong train or I’d catch the tube going the wrong way, and I would just quickly forgive myself and learn from it. Somebody pointed out to me that one of her newborn suits wasn’t fitting any more, and I felt bad, but they were like, “Well, you would have figured it out eventually, and now you know”.
Honestly, the only thing I’ve found hard about having a baby when you are a little bit older is that your bones are a bit wearier, and things are a little bit slower. I’m less fit than I used to be, so now that I’m spending a lot more time on the floor, I’m realising how hard it is to get off the floor. I hear that mum fitness kicks in eventually, but let’s just say I am still waiting.
–As told to Alex Casey
