Fern: I can finally stop being responsible now my kids are grown up
SHE’S spent more than two decades juggling her broadcasting career with raising her four children.
Now that they have flown the nest, however, Fern Britton is ‘re-powering’ and enjoying that fact she doesn’t have to be as responsible now that she’s in her 60s.
The former This Morning presenter, 62, said she and her friends are finally able to ‘go back to who we were at the beginning’ of their lives.
Miss Britton is mother to twin sons Jack and Harry, 25, and daughter Grace, 22, from her first marriage to TV executive Clive Jones, and daughter Winnie, 18, from her marriage to TV chef Phil Vickery.
‘I talk to a lot of my friends who are in their 50s and early 60s, and we’re all feeling the same,’ she told Good Housekeeping magazine.
‘The children are getting sorted and we can stop being quite so responsible as adults. We have to be responsible to an extent, but we can go back to who we were at the beginning, ng, before we did all the he responsible things we needed to.’
Miss Britton said that at her marriage to Vickery is as strong as ever, despite te not seeing much of each ch other in the past year – she has been busy writing t- a novel and starring g in the touring production n of the play Calendar r Girls. ‘Phil and I will be e celebrating our 20th h wedding anniversary y next year,’ she said. ‘He e is an incredible man and he does make me laugh a lot. He has always been my best friend and he always says I’m his best friend, too, which is amazing. Our solid base is absolutely there.’ Miss Britton has been open about her mental health issues and depression in the past, and has said that she felt lonely and isolated when she first became a mother. She also a admitted that she turned to alcohol to n numb the pa pain after the de death of her mother Ruth at the age of 94 last year, saying it was her ‘way of coping’ with the grief.
‘I’m a firm believer in talking about mental health. If you’re not happy, you’re prone to depression or you’ve spent the morning in tears, that’s OK, provided that you talk to someone about it,’ she said.
As well as having just published her eighth novel, The Newcomer, Miss Britton has designed her own range of beach robes, inspired by her love of the Cornish coast.
The full interview with Miss Britton appears in the September issue of Good Housekeeping, on sale tomorrow.