Breakfast presenter and author of a new autobiography Full Circle, Jenny-May Clarkson doesn't mince words on many topics, including her difficult first year as a mother to her cherished twin boys.
"I thought that motherhood would come easily." Watch this story on TVNZ+.
Every pregnant woman knows the drill. The minute you meet your new baby you'll feel a surge of oxytocin – the love hormone – so strong that the mewling little creature in your arms will strike you as human perfection. You'll be high as a kite, flooded with love, the rest is pure instinct.
Except, for many women, including Jenny-May Clarkson, it's not like that at all. And as with a lot of awkward issues, Clarkson's not afraid to talk about it.
In a frank and at times emotional interview with Seven Sharp's Daniel Faitaua, Clarkson wiped away tears as she recalled her massive sense of inadequacy when, aged 41, she gave birth to twin sons Charles Atawhai Te Waka and Anthony Te Manahau Maurice.
Clarkson had sailed into the experience a little under-prepared. "I never read anything [about motherhood] when I got pregnant. I thought ‘oh nah I’ve got this'," she says. "I thought that motherhood would come easily."
Things got tricky from the get go, with the twins entering the world via an emergency C-Section; but Clarkson still braced herself for love at first sight, times two. “Because that’s what you see in the movies," she tells Faitaua. "People talk to you about when you see your babies for the very first time, that you will have that instinct and that love that comes. And I didn’t have that."
"Why don’t I love my sons?" she recalls thinking. "What I’m supposed to experience is this overwhelming love for these beautiful babies that my husband and I have been able to produce!"
These days, Clarkson has no trouble accessing those emotions for her now 10-year-old twins. But that first year of motherhood still lingers in her memory as a painful one. And, if post-partum depression were partially to blame, she didn't know it. "I didn’t get a diagnosis at the time," she says. "I don’t know what was happening for me. But I know there are women who feel the same. And they feel, like I did, ‘what’s wrong with me?’"
Clarkson's new autobiography, Full Circle, is packed with searing honesty and plain talking. She doesn't shy away from the difficult stuff and, according to her mother, Paddy Coffin, it's always been that way with her daughter. "She was not afraid to use that," she says, pointing to her mouth, "I suppose we allowed it because she was the youngest."
Clarkson was also strong-willed and determined from the very beginning. "If she wanted to do something it was done," says her mother. "You know a lot of us, if we get an opportunity, we step back and say mmmm... ahhhhh... but she’d give it a go. I think that’s why she’s done so many things."
Silver Fern, policewoman, broadcaster, student of te reo. Clarkson has embraced many challenges. And always, behind the TV presenter's confidence and the athlete's strength, there's a vulnerability too. In Full Circle she writes about dealing with the devastating loss of two brothers.
There's also perimenopause, negative body image and the gutting blows faced by a top-level athlete – like the moment she learned she hadn't been selected for the 2003 World Netball Championships in Jamaica.
Netball was her entire life at that time, she tells Faitaua. "I was working fulltime as a police officer, that was the income part of it, but netball had been a part of pretty much most of my life," she says.
"When you throw your heart and your soul, every ounce of you, into something you love... and one person takes that away from you, it’s absolutely crushing," she says. "And more devastating because I felt like my whole identity was wrapped up in my life as a Silver Fern, I didn’t separate myself."
That was “a hard but beautiful lesson” for Clarkson who, these days, keeps a part of herself separate from her career, even when she's dragging herself out of bed at 3am to meet the commitments of a Breakfast presenter.
“My identity isn’t wrapped up in what I do, whatever that may be," she says. Instead, Clarkson focuses on who she is as a person – a wife, a daughter, a sister, an auntie, and of course, a mum.
That last role might not have come easily. But when Clarkson's love for her boys made itself felt, it was like no other. "My boys are my world," she says. "I'm grateful that I've been blessed with being a mum."
"I thought that motherhood would come easily." Watch this story on TVNZ+.
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