60 Minutes’ Ally Langdon and Mike Willesee: our baby’s dramatic arrival
60 Minutes star Ally Langdon and husband Mike Willesee Jnr have just welcomed their first baby. Yet their son’s birth came at the end of a traumatic journey for them all, as they tell Michael Sheather.
When 60 Minutes reporter Ally Langdon finally held her baby son for the first time, he was already 12 hours old. Ally had given birth at 7am that morning after a 32-hour labour, but her baby was pale, floppy and unresponsive. Medical staff resuscitated her first-born with oxygen and immediately rushed the baby to the hospital’s postnatal special-care unit.
Physically exhausted and emotionally depleted, Ally and her husband, Mike Willesee Jnr, 49, spent the next 12 hours waiting anxiously on a knife’s edge, as their baby – known in utero as MJJ, for Mikey Jnr Jnr – struggled to recover.
“I would wheel Ally into the specialcare nursery,” says Mike. “And when she saw our baby lying there in his crib with a heating lamp and attached to an oxygen mask and feeding tubes, she would just burst into tears.”
“They are so helpless, so defenceless and tiny,” recalls Ally, 37. “And then they look up at you ... the love that you feel for this little human being. I just wanted to hold him in my arms.”
Here, Ally Langdon and Mike Willesee Jnr speak for the first time about the harrowing birth of their baby son
Mack James Willesee, who was born at a Sydney hospital on January 5.
Ally and Mike reveal not only the traumatic circumstances surrounding Mack’s birth, but also the relief at his recovery to full health and their joy at starting a family. They also speak for the first time about a miscarriage early last year that tragically ended their first pregnancy, but at the same time helped them realise just how much they wanted a child in their lives.
Yet, as traumatic as parts of their experience were for Ally and Mike, the journey has been worth it, especially now that they have a happy, healthy baby in their lives.
“It’s amazing how quickly you forget all the trauma when you finally get to hold them in your arms for the first time,” says Ally. “You look down at this tiny little being and say, ‘We created this’. It is an extraordinary feeling.”
Ally became part of the globetrotting 60 Minutes team six years ago, when her colleague, Tara Brown, became pregnant with her second child.
Ally, then 32 and already an award-winning reporter, was
Tara’s temporary replacement and about to follow in the footsteps of the legendary Jana Wendt.
“When Tara came back, I simply never left,” recalls Ally, the youngest reporter to join 60 Minutes since a 24-year-old Jana signed up nearly 30 years earlier in 1982. “I guess they must have liked what I was doing,” says Ally. “In fact, we never even had a discussion about whether I was staying or going; it just happened.”
At the time, Michael, son of TV veteran Mike Willesee, was a documentary maker and prominent television newsreader on Sky News. They were a young, high-profile media couple, content in both their jobs and life directions.
“We had spoken a lot about children,” explains Michael. “The truth is that we weren’t always driven to have children.
“However, at the same time, I clearly remember Ally saying many times, ‘I can’t imagine not having children. I can’t imagine going through life and not having a family’.
“At the back of our minds, we knew we would do it one day, but we were both engaged in our careers and loving that. Our relationship was great, so there was never that strong an impetus.”
Then, says Ally, there came a moment about 18 months ago when they both realised that, if a family was to figure in their futures, then they needed to make it happen.
“I’ve watched a lot of friends struggle with fertility over the past few years,” says Ally, “and we simply didn’t know if that was something that we would have to worry about.”
They decided that the time was right. “We fell pregnant almost immediately,” says Ally, “which was lucky and a surprise that it happened so quickly.”
However, the outcome wasn’t as happy as they expected. They lost their baby 12 weeks into Ally’s term. “It was very sad,” she says. “I was on a flight to Perth to cover Kim and Vaughn Tucci and the birth of their naturally conceived quintuplets. During the afternoon, before I jumped on the plane, I had something like a mild pain, but I didn’t think anything of it.
“But then, when we were about a quarter of the way through the flight, with two and a half hours to go, I knew something was wrong. It was nothing like how I imagined a miscarriage to be. I’d thought it would be like getting your period. But it’s nothing like that at all. I knew immediately what it was.”
Ally called Mike as soon as she landed. “I jumped on the first flight I could get,” he says. “All I could think of was how horrendous it was for Ally to have it happen on a plane and then be such a long way from home.”
“It was much better when Mike arrived,” says Ally. “I ended up in the same hospital as Kim.
“Kim was in a ward upstairs, preparing to give birth and I was downstairs losing my child. I was very happy for the couple, of course, but it made it a very difficult story for me to cover.”
“It was horrible,” recalls Mike. “Ally was able to keep working on the story, but it was a lot of juggling, a lot of filming. She was physically okay, but emotionally, it was difficult for her. She put on a brave face, as brave as she could and fought through.”
Incredibly, Ally kept the miscarriage a secret from both her crew and the team at 60 Minutes. “I simply couldn’t tell them,” she recalls. “No way. I couldn’t. If I’d told them, a kind word, a sympathetic look would have just broken me, so I didn’t tell them and just got on with the job.”
The experience rocked them both. Yet it also helped them focus on how much a baby really meant to them.
“To fall pregnant so quickly in the first place was a shock,” explains Mike. “Then, when we lost the baby, there was a sudden realisation that, wow, this really is so important for us. It’s something we really want.”
Ally and Mike consulted their doctor and, as soon as they knew it was medically safe, they began trying for another baby. “We were lucky enough to have that happen for us very quickly, almost immediately,” recalls Ally.
What followed was three months of apprehension for both of them.
Ally was in the midst of a heavy workload at 60 Minutes, literally running from one story to the next with barely a stop in between. “I was on a plane almost every three days,” she says.
During just 12 weeks of her pregnancy, she visited Cambodia, South Korea, Japan, China, Singapore, Dubai, the US, Greece, Germany, Switzerland, France and a couple of far-flung spots in Australia.
“I was shattered,” she says.
Yet, even when they passed the crucial 12-week point, they kept the pregnancy secret. “We learned the hard way that you shouldn’t jump the gun in the first 12 weeks,” says Mike. “So we waited. We just wanted to make sure that the baby was coming along well.”
In fact, they waited until Ally was halfway through her term before they told family and friends. Even then, telling people was far harder than
Ally imagined.
“I’d get really teary when I did tell people,” she recalls. “I reckon that part of it was the fact that we’d had a miscarriage … I reckon I probably didn’t process it. I wasn’t able to deal with it.”
Even so, physically, Ally felt fine and strong during the pregnancy – until she popped a rib while training at the gym, something that suddenly made life both painful and awkward.
“Because of the baby, the rib wouldn’t go back into place,” she says. “It was so painful. I couldn’t sit for long periods. And, if you look at some of the out-takes from my interviews, you can see that. When I interviewed Michael and Kyly Clarke, it took about an hour and a half, but I could only sit for 40 minutes. So there are shots of Michael and Kyly next to each other, with me stretched out at their feet.
“Another couple ended up stopping the interview and saying, ‘You’re in so much pain, go and lie on our bed for 20 minutes.’ So I did.
“Whenever we travelled in the car, I’d be stretched out on the backseat. It got to the point where it was just too hard. But, you know, I only had a few moments of vomiting, so apart from the sore rib, it was a good pregnancy. A lot of people do it much tougher.”
While the pregnancy was relatively smooth, the delivery was another matter. Ally’s labour began late on Tuesday, January 3, a week before she was due to give birth, and lasted for another 32 hours, when she gave birth to Mack at 7am on Thursday morning. “It was such a long labour,” she says. “It took such a long time, but he just wouldn’t come out.
It’s not something we were prepared for in any way because everything had been so fine. I was healthy and fit – I’d been swimming, walking and doing Pilates. We just didn’t expect anything to go wrong.”
Ally’s labour was especially long – it was 28 hours before she actually started active birth. Yet, after two hours of pushing, her baby still wasn’t ready to be born.
“He just wouldn’t come out,” says Ally, explaining that her baby was in an awkward position in the womb. “He was very happy in there and we
“He was very happy in there ... then his heart rate started to go up.”
were okay, too, because he wasn’t under any kind of distress. But then his heart rate started to go up really high and then really low, and that’s when we needed intervention. The doctors hoped that he would rotate into position, but he didn’t.
“I was lucky that I was able to avoid surgery. The one thing I kept saying to our obstetrician was that, ‘I can keep going, I can keep going’ . After all that effort, I just didn’t want to end up needing surgery. If it had been required, that would have been fine, but we’re happy we avoided that.”
When she was finally able to hold Mack in her arms, it was the most incredible feeling, says Ally. “He bounced back so quickly and, once I got him in my arms, he was really good,” she says.
“I had a wonderful warm sense of love and achievement. Once we knew he was going to be okay, I marvelled at what my body was able to do and amazed at what the female body is capable of. It’s the most profound and moving experience you can ever have.”
Little Mack weighed 3.2 kilograms at birth and measured 52 centimetres. “He was a good weight and tall for a baby,” says Mike. “He’s grown a lot since then and he is around 4 kilograms now.”
Today, Mack James Willesee is happily wreaking havoc in the couple’s Sydney home. “During the pregnancy, we called him MJJ, Mikey Jnr Jnr,” explains Ally. “Our nieces and nephews got used to calling him MJJ, too.
“So, when it came to naming him, we just had to drop one of the Js. We wanted a strong short name and we liked Mack. It’s as simple as that.”
Though both Ally and Mike admit to being a little bleary eyed and sleep deprived, Mack is now the beating heart of their home.
“He is brilliant,” says Ally. “But I remember that within 40 minutes of bringing him through the front door it was carnage – nappies and towels from one end of the house to the other.
“We really made some big mistakes in the first couple of days after he came home. I think the first morning we were both still up at 4am and hadn’t been to sleep. I looked at Mike and said, ‘What have we done? We had this amazing life, we travelled ...’ And then we just burst into laughter.”
As newly minted parents, they admit they are learning as they go. “We’ve become much more of a tag team now,” says Mike. “And because we have had time off, we have both been around, which has been fantastic.”
The only disappointment, says Ally, is that she thinks Mack looks mostly like Mike.
“I didn’t get a look in – there is no Langdon in this baby,” says Ally, laughing. “He’s all his father. I keep hoping that as he grows older, I’ll start to see signs of me in there, but I’m not holding out that much hope. But you know what? I’m okay if he turns out looking like you, darling.”