Every mum experiences mixed emotions when they have a child, but few would admit to how much they struggle during pregnancy and in the early days of being a mother.
But Amanda Keller has now shared her hidden heartache and pain in a deeply honest chat, revealing she was left feeling “desperate” as she struggled to have kids, before experiencing an “awful” birth and “horror” sleepless nights.
Chatting to Chezzi Denyer on her podcast Mum Stories, Amanda, 56, said she’s never felt “maternal” and feels no guilt over continuing to juggle work with motherhood – but said she’d ultimately drop everything if her sons needed her.
“The mother I pictured myself to be isn’t necessarily the mother I am,” she said, referring to her two now-teenage sons. “I thought I would love reading stories at night time and pushing children on swings; I am not good at that stuff. I think I’m a good mother but I’m not mumsy in that way. I didn’t feel maternal.”
However, becoming a mum wasn’t easy for Amanda, and it took her three years to fall pregnant after several attempts at IVF.
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“When you’re told you can’t [fall pregnant] it becomes something quite different. I’d been set a task – three years of IVF and I kept failing. I became more desperate the longer it went on,” she explained.
The TV star finally got the news she’d been waiting for in 2000, but it didn’t stop her stressing – only this time she was worried about miscarrying.
“I started to bleed and just thought I’d been so close,” she told Chezzi on the show, “Please, please, please, I kept praying. That [bleeding] was the other embryos coming away and [eldest son] Liam stuck.
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“I could feel the whiff of change and after I saw the heartbeat following a trip to the doctor, I stopped the car and just cried. [My husband] Harley had been guarded, protecting his emotions. Once I was six weeks pregnant I was terrified and I could barely admit it to anyone, but Harley was the opposite, wearing his heart on his sleeve.”
She made it through but admitted, while many women say they forgot the pain of child birth, hers was “awful”, and she was left almost missing having her son inside her, where she felt more in control.
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“It felt like my insides had been scraped,” she recalled. “I used to dread the night and I was terrified. Like a horror film. That cry that pierces the night. The fatigue.”
It wasn’t only sleepless nights that proved a major hurdle for the star, as she also struggled to get her son to breastfeed – but it ended up being her short maternity leave, and the need to be back at work in just four months, that helped her organise her thoughts a little more.
However, asked if she’d ever experienced any guilt over returning to work so soon, Amanda insisted: “I think it’s a choice and I chose not to. I don’t read a lot of the emails from school and that’s when I feel it. When the other mums know what’s going on at school and I don’t know. Now I say to the boys, ‘If there’s something that really matters, and you want me to be there, I’ll drop everything to do it.’
“I don’t feel guilty for working and I’m happy the boys see someone who loves their career. But there are the bits where I feel bad, if I miss something, like an award. If I’m not there, I hate that. Real life kicks in and on you go. There are moments like that that I take a deep breath and I say I’m sorry.”