Popular weatherman’s escape from “toxic” life

Rose Jacobs, television presenter and the wife of former Today weatherman Steve Jacobs has penned an article for Kidspot detailing what made the Jacobs family decide to pack up and leave Australia for Vanuatu. 

Rose described how a year ago she was living a life which appeared to be wonderful on the outside, with a great job in television, two beautiful daughters, married to “a beautiful man”, and living in a five bedroom house in the Eastern suburbs of Sydney, but that she was “spiralling in a direction I didn’t want it to go in and I was struggling to get through a day without yelling at the kids and completely losing my cool.”

Contributing to the stress, Rose says, was the fact that her four-year-old daughter was being bullied at daycare. Although staff recognised the issues and worked to resolve them, she said “it made me sick to my stomach”.

Finding herself “screaming” at her husband and children daily, Rose was compelled to seek professional help, questioning her own sanity and ability to handle stress, and briefly considered medication may be the solution to her problems. 

“But in the end, I listened to something really raw inside. I knew it wasn’t me. I knew it wasn’t my kids or my husband. It was our environment. I also knew we would never be perfectly happy people without our human issues but I figured the idea of staying in this toxic life was far worse than giving anything else at least a shot.”

The decision to make a real change came about when Rose and Steve realised that their girls were “obsessed with iPads, sugar, any type of ‘Frozen’ paraphernalia” and preferred to stay indoors watching TV. Realising that this wasn’t the life they wanted for their family, they made the decision to move their family to Vanuatu, after a work vacation saw them “fall in love with the people and the pace”of the islands. 

 

Awesome time had in Hawaii thanks to @hawaiianairlines #gohawaiiau @thetodayshow

A post shared by Steven Jacobs (@sjweather) on Apr 29, 2017 at 4:42pm PDT

 

It took guts for me to sit down and write this story but I’m glad I did. http://www.kidspot.com.au/parenting/real-life/in-the-news/the-misery-that-made-steve-jacobs-family-leave-australia-for-good?utm_source=kidspot&utm_medium=Facebook&utm_campaign=EditorialSF&utm_content=SocialFlow

A post shared by Rose Jacobs (@rosejacobs1) on May 1, 2017 at 2:45pm PDT

Rose said that while they worried that the isolation and time together would be detrimental, “none of those reasons were big enough compared to the misery we felt in our current life”.

It looks like they made an excellent choice!

Do you think it was brave of the Jacobs’ to pack up and make such a huge move? Is it something you would consider?