Beloved former Sunrise host Melissa Doyle has gotten surprisingly candid in a new podcast called And We’re Rolling with Stephanie Hunt.
Doyle spoke about how difficult it was to juggle filming breakfast television while still supporting her family as a new mother.
“What was it like when you were juggling work and babies and not getting much sleep?” asked Stephanie.
“It was bloody hard,” Doyle said.
“You know, I won’t lie and maybe that’s why I do want to check in with others because I wish I’d probably had a bit more.
“You know Kochie (David Koch) was fantastic. We’re doing Sunrise together and he was a dad of four and was very aware to a degree of some of the things I was going through.
“I started at Sunrise when Nick was six-months-old, I just finished maternity leave. And then I had Talia while I was doing the program I only took a few weeks off to have her and then I came back and we had to go on the road every Friday for the first month of me coming back.
“Our wonderful boss at the time thought that it would be great to take the show around the country. And you know, I’ve got a three-week-old baby at home and I was still breastfeeding and everything still hurts, and everything was still leaking.
It was just, it was really, really hard.”
“I’d get up at two o’clock in the morning and feed her and then go to work and do the job and get home. And it meant that while my kids were in primary school, I could pick them up every day while they were toddlers, I could spend the day with them.
“I always remind myself that it was my choice to do it. But I do feel very much that you know, as a as a mum in that newsroom, 20 years ago, you know, I’m not saying I was the first by any means, but there wasn’t too many other mums around.
“Let’s be honest, it can be quite a competitive industry, so sometimes the last thing you ever want to do is admit a weakness or a chink in the armour. You just you become this stoic person that says, ‘I’ll keep on doing it, I’ll find a way I’ll manage’, which is dumb, really, but I don’t know what how I would have done it differently.”
She said that her routine at the time was “gruelling”.
“But I do know for probably a good decade of my life, it was just, you get up early, go to work, you come home, you do your home job, you get up and you go into your paid job, and you come back into your home job and I wouldn’t swap it for anything.
“But it was really gruelling. So I feel for any mum who is trying to juggle the two that sometimes we don’t actually have enough compassion and tenderness and support.”
This article originally appeared on Over60.