SONIA KRUGER
At 50, why I’d love another child
Sonia Kruger, 50, with toddler Maggie on her lap, couldn’t be happier. She talks to Susan Horsburgh about the delights of late motherhood, the loss of her dad and why she wants to erase the stigma of egg-donor IVF.
It was the moment Sonia Kruger first felt like a mum. Waking up after her caesarean in January last year, she looked across the hospital room and spied an impossibly perfect little bundle in the see-through baby bassinet. “I kind of came to,” says Sonia, “and [thought], that’s mine! It was amazing. I remember Craig came in and I started crying, and he was like, ‘What’s wrong?’ and I went, ‘I’m just so happy’.”
After years of longing for a child – and enduring multiple miscarriages and failed IVF attempts with her long-time partner, TV executive Craig McPherson – Sonia gave birth to daughter Maggie at the eleventh hour, at the age of 49, after a close friend donated an egg.
Since then, the TV presenter, who turns 51 in August, has careered along the wild, often mystifying road of first-time motherhood, transforming her celebrity life into a tamer, more Maggie-centric one. The glamorous holidays and cruisey weekends of window shopping and manicures may be long gone, but she knows it would be churlish to mourn her pre-baby freedom.
“I’m happy to be at home with her in our own little world,” says Sonia. “It’s been such a joy for me. It was such a relief to get through the pregnancy and to have a healthy baby that everything is a bonus.”
As any new mother could attest, though, a baby can bring even the most confident, accomplished woman to her knees. It is shocking how powerful one tiny person can be.
“It’s probably harder than anything I’ve had to do at work because there is so much emotion invested,” says Sonia. “No one can explain to you how you’re going to feel about a child, and sometimes those emotions can be so overwhelming you feel like you’re not in control anymore. Having to relinquish control is probably the weirdest thing for me. Everything is about her schedule, but I’m happy to do that because everyone tells me they’re only little for such a short time.”
Already a toddler, Maggie is learning to walk and talk, and becoming her own person. “Now she’s learnt how to kiss,” says Sonia. “It’s just the sweetest thing ever.” Her latest party trick is pulling faces to make her mother laugh. “She is by far the most entertaining person I’ve come across in a long time.”
Like many a besotted parent, Sonia marvels, only half-joking, at her bookloving little prodigy, “You know The Secret Language Of Birthdays? I’m going to sound really out-there now, but I looked up her birthday and she was born in the week of the genius. So there you go!”
The day before her mother-daughter photo shoot, Sonia meets The Weekly at the Nine Network studios in Willoughby, Sydney, on a drizzly autumn morning. Fresh off the Today Extra set, the seemingly ageless 50-year-old chats in the so-called Brian Henderson Room next to the staff cafeteria, a portrait of the veteran newsreader on the wall and a satellite dish and Nine chopper outside the window.
Since Maggie’s birth, Sonia has been riding a personal and professional high, savouring the joys of late-breaking
motherhood as she tops the morning ratings for the first time on Today Extra and takes the helm of The Voice this year as its sole presenter.
Yet she has also been grappling with the loss of her much-loved dad. Adrian Kruger, whom Sonia describes as “the life of the party”, died last June at the age of 80 after years of heart problems. Asked whether his death has marred the bliss of the past year, she replies, “I’m going to say no because I think Dad would be unhappy with me if I said anything else. He’d say, ‘No, you’ve got to get on with your life’.”
Grief, though, is ungovernable. Sonia was struck with a fresh wave of it recently when she was packing up some of Maggie’s clothes and came across the red romper suit her daughter wore the last time she saw “Poppy”.
“It’s not until you go through it that you realise how it never leaves you – and they never leave you,” says Sonia. “I still feel like Dad’s around. I do. Sometimes there are just little signs and you think, wow, it feels like he’s right here.”
Maggie was only five months old when he died, but she managed to see him a couple of times and now points to his photo on the wall at home. “I want her to know that she had a grandfather who adored her,” says Sonia. Her father’s death has inspired a period of reflection at a time when, post-baby, she was already feeling more emotionally fragile. “I’ll cry at a bank ad now,” she says, laughing. “It’s just embarrassing.”
Sonia was still breastfeeding when she returned to work on The Voice last year, five weeks after Maggie’s birth. “It’s a blur,” she says. “I felt like a hot, sweaty, hormonal mess the whole way through the show. That’s why it was nice to come back and do it this year – because I felt more together, more like myself.”
For the past two months, she has been filming The Voice, as well as Today Extra (the rebranded Mornings) with co-host and “big softy” David Campbell. “David and I get paid to come to work and have a good time,” she says. On a typical day, she is out the door of her northern beaches home by 6.45am, in the hair and make-up chair from 7 to 8, “and then David and I will gossip in my dressing room like a couple of old women until about 9, when we go out and do the show,” she says.
“Essentially, I feel like I’m part-time – I’m home by 1 o’clock. And then there are days when I’ll work until midnight. But it’s really manageable.”
Her sister-in-law looks after Maggie every morning and on the odd occasion she can’t, Sonia imports her mum, Margaret (Maggie’s namesake), from Queensland.
For the former dancer, who rose to fame as Tina Sparkle in 1992’s Strictly Ballroom and went on to front Dancing With The Stars and Big Brother Australia, nothing beats the rush of live TV. Her self-censorship mechanism may not always be up to scratch, but viewers love it when she drops a clanger – because it’s the kind of thing they are probably thinking at home.
“She proved she was fearless with her edgy jokes on Dancing With The Stars,” says media commentator Andrew Mercado. “It’s no wonder Nine wanted to steal her from Seven.
She’s at her best when she’s allowed to be a bit naughty.”
Craig puts his partner’s appeal down to authenticity. “There is nothing fake or pretend about Sonia,” says the Seven Network news boss, who agrees to send a few comments via email. “I think it’s what’s made her such an enduring talent on TV. She’s genuine.” Her happy-go-lucky attitude, he says, is also mixed with a steely resolve. “She fought very hard to become a mum later in life and went through a hell of a lot.”
Revealing the details of her pregnancy in The Weekly in 2014, Sonia was open about her baby’s egg-donor conception from the start, in stark contrast to a string of older Hollywood mums who have blithely led the public to believe that baby-making can be delayed until the late 40s. Sonia says she was fooled, too, which is why she was floored when, at 45, her IVF doctor gave her zero chance of conceiving with her own eggs.
She never wanted to be the poster girl for donor-egg IVF – she’d prefer not to talk publicly about something so private – but she also didn’t want women to read about her pregnancy and be deluded about their fertility. “I knew I just could not lie,” she says. “For me to sit there and pretend that I’d had some miracle pregnancy, it’s not me.”
Still, friends advised her to keep quiet. “They said, ‘Think about the child and what they will go through at school. Will other kids say, she’s not your biological mother, she’s not your real mother?’ But if we keep shutting [the discussion] down, then we do nothing to erase the stigma … The more common it becomes and the more transparent people are, the easier it will be to accept it.”
IVF has come a long way since the days when children were called “testtube babies”, she says, but a stigma still surrounds donor IVF – because the issue isn’t out in the open. Since Sonia has spoken out, women as well as organisations have thanked her for her candour. And if having Maggie has taught her anything, it’s that shared genes are immaterial. “I wasn’t that in love with my own DNA. It doesn’t matter that much to me … Whether you adopt a child or whether that child grows inside you, you’re going to feel love for that baby. I mean, it’s not possible for me to love Maggie any more.”
Sonia has already thought about how she’ll explain Maggie’s conception to her daughter as she gets older. “There are really good books for little ones to explain to them an egg mummy and a tummy mummy,” she says. “I’m just hoping that by the time Maggie is in school – it’s another five years down the track – there is acceptance and tolerance.”
To protect her donor friend’s privacy, Sonia won’t reveal the woman’s identity or discuss their relationship.
As for having another baby, “I would love to,” she says, “but I really feel like I shouldn’t push my luck.” Craig also has six grown-up children from a previous relationship. According to Sonia, he has been happily sucked back into the baby vortex. “I did talk to him long and hard about that because I would have fully understood if he didn’t want to have another child. To me, it seems that they do have a really strong bond. She’s the spitting image of him, especially when she scowls.”
The newsman apparently dissolves around his daughter. “He turns into this mooshy, cuddly … he just loves her,” says Sonia. “And it’s funny because he’s a really tough guy. But the reason I fell in love with him is because he has a kind heart underneath that tough exterior, and I see that.
“[A baby] either makes you stronger or it can, in a lot of cases, sadly push people apart. I think we work as a pretty good team.”
Even now, more than a year after Maggie’s arrival, Sonia still can’t quite believe they have a child.
“I still have to pinch myself,” she says. “The only time it really occurs to me is when she says ‘Mama’ – and I go, ‘Oh, that’s right, I’m your mama!’ I love that feeling.”