Susanna: I wept as son left for uni...nest is emptying!
SUSANNA Reid cried when her eldest son went to university – and she now fears her other children leaving home.
The Good Morning Britain co-host said Sam, 18, left last autumn but admitted she is not ready for his brothers to follow. Susanna, 50, said: “It’s heartwrenching, isn’t it? Like all of them, he’s been at home a lot since starting university. We discussed whether he should defer for a year, but I thought, ‘He’s ready to go’. I did obviously cry when we dropped him off.”
She said the prospect of Finn, 16, and Jack, 15, moving out was not attractive: “The thing I found even more emotional was realising [Sam is] on a string of three. He goes, the next one goes, then the next one. “This is the start of three or four years with all my ducklings leaving, then there’s going to be an empty nest. I find that really hard.” The ITV presenter, whose co-host is Piers Morgan, had the boys with her journalist ex, Dominic Cotton, 53.
She spoke up about “mum guilt” over working long hours while the trio were growing up, telling a magazine: “There are moments when you think: ‘Why was I not present when they were tiny?’
“I was around a lot for them, but sometimes you can regret you weren’t there playing with them every single moment of every single day.
“You have that kind of guilt. Yet now I’m able to have a more grown-up, funny, chatty relationship with them where they’re hugely independent but they still need you. That’s lovely.”
She says reaching 50 is a “blessing. Age is not an issue any more. There is no longer a cut-off point for women in my job.” However, the abuse she gets online is “toxic and horrible...but we do a good job and we enjoy what we do.”