COURTESY OF NATALIE BARR; ELLIS PARRINDER/CAMERA PRESS/AUSTRALSCOPEA lot can happen in 12 months. Four prominent
Australian women reflect on a challenging
time that led to greater personal strength
The Channel 7 newsreader, 48, was
pregnant with her first child when
she received a call that decimated
her happiness and made those first
months of motherhood doubly hard.
Only when she returned to work did
she begin to see the light again.I
t was around midnight when my
brother rang to say my dad had
died of a sudden heart attack^
at 61. I couldn’t comprehend it.
It was horrible.
“Just a month earlier he and Mum
had come to my pregnancy ultrasound.
Of course, men in that age group have
never seen an ultrasound before. And
he was like ‘No, no, I won’t come in, I’ll
go and get a coffee.’ But we talked him
into it. He couldn’t believe it. He was
shocked he could see this little baby
moving around. We like to think that’s
how he met Lachlan.
“After my brother called I woke my
husband. I didn’t know what to do. I
stayed up all night and got a flight back
to Perth and then Bunbury. I was sickfor the full 40 weeks of my pregnancy
and so I vomited in the pot plants at the
airport and I bawled on the plane.
“I was in total shock. Your world
stops. The combination of being
pregnant and someone you love dying
was overwhelming. For so many years
you cry. And then you stop crying
because you just can’t cry any more.
“I looked up to my Dad. He taught
me my love of news and I admired him
so much. We were as close as a father
and daughter could be.
“When my son was born three
months later, it was happy – kind of –
but it was so painfully sad. Three
months is not a long time between
losing someone and having a baby.
“Then, Lachlan didn’t sleep for 18
months. It was a terrible time. I was
completely unable to cope. I went to
counsellors and they thought I was
depressed but the tests said I wasn’t. I
was mourning and just finding it so
hard to be a mum.
“The thing that saved me was going(^2001) back to work. When I was pregnant,
“My dad died while I was pregnant”
NATALIE BARR, TV PRESENTER
that nearly
broke me
The
Natalie Barr with
her father on her
wedding day
in 1995.