MODEL MOTHER:
at home with Rebecca Judd
Presenter and style blogger Rebecca Judd tells Genevieve Gannon about putting aside glamour and embracing the messy side of motherhood.
When Rebecca Judd married the love of her life on a sultry New Year’s Eve, the scalloped lace couture gown she wore quickly became one of the most coveted in Australia. Brides-to-be swooned over the delicate beadwork and 30 kilograms of hand-cut fabric skirt that cascaded to the floor. They would be horrified to learn that moments after the dress was photographed, its creators were cutting through it so Bec could breathe.
“The plan was to put something lighter on later in the night,” she says. “But I was so hot. The corset was digging in on my hips. As soon as we did the photos I got it off. The J’Aton couture boys literally cut it off me.”
Bec was carrying an unexpected and carefully guarded secret when she wed AFL footballer Chris Judd on that 45 degree day – she was 10 weeks pregnant. A few days before the
2010 ceremony, J’Aton couturiers Anthony Pittorino and Jacob Luppino had been urgently altering the bodice to accommodate Bec’s expanding bust-line. “I was in shock because I’m the type of person who has to plan out everything in their life,” Bec says.
Her wedding day was her first inkling that the demands of motherhood would play havoc with her carefully organised life.
Flash forward eight years and Bec is wearing a long-sleeved white T-shirt and black leggings as she settles herself onto a couch in her Brighton home in Melbourne. Her eldest son, Oscar, six, shyly crawls into the nook behind her while four-year-old Billie, dressed in tulle and sequins, unpacks the contents of the sideboard. The youngest Judd children, 20-month-old twin boys Tom and Darcy, are asleep upstairs.
The Weekly has dropped into the Judds’ stylish home to talk about Bec’s new pregnancy book, The Baby Bible. The mother-of-four chats effusively about how she is still amazed she has four kids, and why she felt compelled to write about her experiences. Then she sips her coffee and speaks frankly: “Nobody tells you your fanny will be on fire”.
The doe-eyed beauty tucks her long legs up onto the couch and side-rolls onto a pastel-coloured bank of cushions. “After Oscar was born I couldn’t sit for two weeks. I was like this,” she says, demonstrating. “No one tells you that, so I put it in the book.”
The former model’s red carpet turns in J’Aton Couture, Aurelio Costarella and that notorious red dress have earned her more than 670,000 Instagram acolytes who hang on her every post. But in her new endeavour
as author and baby guru she wanted to be completely candid about her experiences of pregnancy and motherhood. “We wanted it to be relatable and real,” she says.
With the help of a team of experts, Bec has produced a 285-page manual featuring tips on sleep deprivation, bladder control issues and all the things she wishes she’d been told before she got “knocked up”. She delves into the nitty and very gritty details of creating a person. From the reality of when your waters break (“It’s not like in the movies where it all happens at once. I ruined a pair of new Country Road tracksuit pants”) to not getting that rush of love when you first hold your child, she does not hold back. There’s a section headed: “Gross things that are going to happen” in which Bec details her struggles with blood noses.
I have to ask, did she worry about baring all? She nods. There were a few things that made her pause. “But then it’s like: this is what it’s about. Let it go.
“I just want people to feel relaxed about it and know that we’re all doing it and we can all do it in slightly different ways, but we’re all doing it together as a team.”
Cupping her latte, and whispering to Oscar, Bec is the picture of a chilled-out mother, but she says family life isn’t always so calm.
“I think I’ll be in shock till the day I die that I have four kids and especially identical twin boys,” she says. Her life as a mother has been one surprise after another.
It started the day before her hen’s party, when Bec experienced unusual cramps. Her girlfriends had spent months planning the perfect send-off for their wing woman. Not wanting illness to derail her big day, Bec googled her symptoms. She learned that the pains could be a sign of implantation, but she thought nothing of it.
“We were actively trying to not get pregnant,” she says. “We were about to get married.” She just happened to be hunting around in her bathroom cupboard when she saw an old pregnancy test.
“It was weird – you know those weird moments – and I thought, ‘Oh well, it’s there, I may as well just do it’, thinking nothing of it.”
The test returned a negative result
– as Bec expected – so she tossed it into the bin and forgot about it.
“I circled back to the bathroom later and looked in the bin and saw it there and I was like: ‘Oh’.” It now indicated that she was pregnant.
“I wouldn’t say I was overly happy about it,” she says. “I’m the type of person who has to plan out everything in their life.”
The wedding she and Chris had been planning for months was only a few weeks away. “We had spent all this money on this cocktail bar because we wanted everyone to have a big party and get wild ... I thought,
‘It’s my hen’s tomorrow, this sucks.’”
Once they were over the initial shock, the pregnancy progressed smoothly and their first child, Oscar, was born. After some trouble with reflux and sleeping, he soon settled and became a happy and healthy little Vegemite. Billie, who was born in 2014, was a wonderfully relaxed baby. But there were more surprises in store for Bec.
She was at a Nine Network party early in 2016 when someone handed her a glass of red wine and she got whiff of an unholy stench. She screwed up her nose and
said, “Does anyone else think that wine smells like poo?”
Bec had never had the strong aversion to smells that is common in pregnancy, but in much the same way she had with her first pregnancy, she felt compelled to take a pregnancy test.
“As soon as I peed on the stick the ‘you’re pregnant’ line came up,” she says. “The hormones were so strong.”
When she described her strange symptoms to her doctor, he suggested that maybe she was pregnant with twins.
“So he checked me and he said, ‘Look, it’s just one’.”
Two weeks later she went back for a routine scan. Her doctor was conducting an ultrasound when Bec noticed something unusual. “There was a blob floating up here. And I said, ‘What’s that, it’s weird. It looks like a placenta but it’s far too early for the placenta to be that big.’ He moved the ultrasound onto the blob and I was like: ‘Aargh! Oh my God, there are two’. I started screaming.”
The prospect of twins was scary, and overwhelming. Bec was worried, she says, that she would not have enough love to go around. She was already brimming with love for Oscar and
Billie, she didn’t know if she had more to give. The lead-up to the birth was one of the scariest times in her life, she confides. But as soon as she held her tiny boys in her arms, the rush of love was instant. “I just said, ‘give them to me, they’re mine. This is amazing’.”
“I remember the obstetrician saying, ‘Take your baby’, and it dawned on me with a thud: he’s your responsibility.”
Pregnancy and childbirth is a roller-coaster of emotions, and Bec knew that if she was going to write about her experiences as a mother, she could not sugar-coat the truth. From bursting into tears over a bowl of lumpy risotto to the unexpected, and not always entirely positive, feeling of holding your child for the first time, she wanted to challenge the expectations society heaps on mothers.
“When Oscar came out I didn’t have that instant bond,” she says. “It was a shock. You hear when this baby comes out and it’s all tears and it’s almost like you can hear this magical music playing, and it wasn’t like that. I was in shock. The obstetrician was saying, ‘Take your baby’, and it dawned on me with a thud: he’s your responsibility.”
Of course it didn’t take long for her love for Oscar to fill her heart. “When it came, it was overwhelming and amazing,” she says. “People don’t say that and I want mums to know that, if it’s not immediate, don’t worry, it will come.”