Appearing on Wednesday’s episode of Anh’s Brush With Fame, Tina Arena tearfully recounted the three miscarriages she experienced following the 1999 birth of her son, Gabriel.
“I lost three after Gab. I miscarried a lot. Most women do — they miscarry. I miscarried three times after Gab,” she told the ABC program. “I really wanted to add on to the family.”
Tina, 49, revealed that she experienced the first of her three miscarriages in front of her then two-year-old son. She was living in London at the time and, her partner, French artist Vincent Mancini, was sailing along the Italian coast when the tragedy occurred.
“I think the thing that was tough was that Gab was there watching me go through that pain, and looked at me and was holding me, going ‘Mummy? Mummy?’” she said. “I’m looking [at him] going, ‘It’s OK, darling. It’s OK. It’s OK.”
She recalled acting stoically in the hours that followed the “unbelievably painful” experience, even taking herself to hospital the next day.
“The next morning I took Gabriel to crèche, I got on a bus and I took myself to the hospital,” she said. “[I] went through the operation, got myself back on a bus, caught the bus home by myself and picked up my son from crèche.”
She added: “Life’s glamorous, isn’t it?”
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After a stint in both Britain and France, Tina now resides in her hometown of Melbourne with her family.
The music icon went on to explain that it wasn’t until she went through menopause that she began to process what had happened.
“It wasn’t until a couple of years after that it really hit me and I fell apart,” she said. “And I think it hit me when I turned 46 and I’d just finished Dancing With The Stars and I went into menopause. (My) Body just shut down, (my) body went, ‘That’s it’. That’s when I went, ‘I can never reproduce again. My body’s done, the machine’s broken down’. That was tough.”
Thankfully, the singer-songwriter told host Anh Do she’s now in a “happy place.”
“It took being in a troubled place to get to a happy place because life is about pleasure and pain,” she said. “You cannot just have wonderful things happen. Because you don’t always learn from that.”
