Mama Mia

by Mia Freedman

  Against that backdrop, I finalised my departure not just from Channel Nine but from ACP as well. I’d been consulting for some of the magazines as part of my contract but it was getting harder and harder to maintain my interest and they deserved more attention than I was willing to give them. It was time, after more than fifteen years with PBL, to say goodbye to the only company I’d worked for in my adult life. Itching to close the chapter of my brief and unimpressive TV career, we finally agreed on a departure date and I helped draft the press release that would go out that same day. There was no reason to stick around. I’d been ready to go for months. TV just wasn’t that into me and the feeling was mutual.

  But it wasn’t over yet. I knew there would be intense media interest in my exit because it was Channel Nine and because I was a woman and because I’d not even lasted a year in TV. On the day of my departure I met with an experienced PR friend for breakfast to receive some detailed instructions on how to handle the inevitable media fallout. I was nervous and skittish and wanted to hide under my bed. She gave me strength and advice. And with my Rescue Remedy in my jacket pocket, I headed in to work.

  On what was to be my last day at Channel Nine, as I prepared to tell my colleagues and the cast and crew of ‘The Catch-Up’ that I was leaving, I received a voicemail message. It was one of the Nine sales reps. ‘I just wanted to say I heard about “The Catch-Up” being axed and I’m sorry.’

  ‘Are those rumours about “The Catch-Up” being axed going around again?’ I called across the corridor to a colleague. Her expression changed. ‘They’re not rumours. It’s being axed today.’

  The blood rushed from my head and I felt disoriented. My meeting with the cast and crew after the show to tell them I was leaving the network had suddenly changed. Now I’d be announcing that the show had been axed and they were all out of a job.

  The hosts took it well. They were immediately concerned for the younger members of the production staff who had given up jobs elsewhere to join the team.

  While I was talking to the cast and crew, the press releases about my departure and the show’s axing were landing almost simultaneously, making my exit a far more dramatic and newsworthy story. My phone exploded.

  As everyone dispersed to attend to the sudden wreckage of their careers and finances, I hugged various people and headed quickly to my car. I may have left skid marks in the car park in my haste to get the hell out of there.

  I was free.

  AFTER NINE

  SMS to me from Karen:

  ‘OMG, I just heard! Are you OK?’

  I expected to feel huge relief when I left Channel Nine but it wasn’t so simple. There was definitely relief there, yes. But the anxiety I’d lived with for almost a year stuck around like a toxic hangover.

  My mind and body were taking their sweet damn time to catch up to my changed reality. After being on the defensive against hostility—real and imagined—for so long, I was stuck in a fight-or-flight response. Prickly with adrenaline but nothing to run from any more.

  The twenty-four hours after my departure was announced were mental. Having just learned that ‘The Catch-Up’ had been axed and that I had to tell the team, I was reeling and sought refuge in the only place at the network I felt safe—my car. From there, I quickly called my PR friend and filled her in. While we were on the phone, I got word via text that a newspaper was sending a photographer to Nine to try to get photos of me and ‘The Catch-Up’ hosts—hoping for a weepy group hug no doubt. ‘Get out of there,’ she instructed.

  At home, I went straight to Coco, who was playing happily with her wonderful new nanny, the polar opposite of Nanny Klepto. Kissing my little girl, I immediately remembered what was important in my life. I quickly changed into my trackies, closed my bedroom door and sat cross-legged on my bed with my laptop, landline, Blackberry and mobile laid out in front of me.

  With the caution of a bomb-disposal expert approaching an unexploded device, I turned on my phone and watched it implode. Twenty-seven messages. Thirty-four missed calls. Right.

  Among all the media inquiries were concerned messages from friends, family and a few former colleagues asking if I was okay and sending their love.

  One newspaper asked if I would agree to sit in a café so they could take a ‘surprise’ paparazzi photo from across the street. ‘It won’t look posed or anything,’ they said. No. Another reporter said, ‘I’m sorry but I have to ask this, can we send a photographer to your house to take a photo of you with your children?’ Sure thing, I’ll just put the kettle on for you now; how do you take your tea? No.

  Agreeing to a photo would have meant the story would run bigger and earlier in the news section of the paper which was the last thing I wanted. I just wanted to crawl under a rock and make it all go away. As it was, the next day it ran anyway. They all made do with file pictures. Damn those file pictures.

  Under strict tutelage from my PR guru, I kept all conversations brief and tried to remain diplomatic, discreet and neutral. ‘After fifteen years with PBL, I just felt it was time to move on,’ I said. ‘I really enjoyed my time in TV even though it was brief and I wish everyone at Nine all the very best.’ I knew the mere whiff of scandal or bitterness would make the story bigger and keep it running longer.

  Still, journalists knew that no one left Nine without controversy. Did I know ‘The Catch-Up’ was going to be axed? Uh no, it was a surprise to me. Had the blokiness of Nine driven me away? Um, no, I made some great friends there. Is it impossible for a woman to succeed in commercial television? I hope not; it just wasn’t the right place for me.

  Finally, after four hours of returning calls, I emerged from my bedroom, utterly drained. My parents came over to look after the kids and Jason and I headed to the pub to meet half a dozen close friends for champagne and pizza. I’d survived with my reputation massively dented (as is the fate of virtually every Channel Nine ex-employee) but my sanity intact. Mostly.

  In many ways, the hardest bit was still to come.

  For more than fifteen years, my identity had been inextricably linked to what I did. I had a title. A business card. And, for the past ten years, an assistant. Staff. A nice office. A car spot. An infrastructure that supplied me with magazines and newspapers. Couriers. IT support. A helpdesk. I had someone to buy my lunch, open my mail, screen my calls, RSVP to my invitations and make me tea, although I usually did this myself. I’m very particular about my tea.

  This all sounds terribly princessy because it was. I’d become used to the trappings of my job and they were lovely. I would miss them. But all that was nothing compared to the mental adjustment I now had to make.

  Who was I if I didn’t have an impressive title and work at a big media company? Deborah Thomas’s words came back to me yet again. ‘It’s not about you; it’s about your job. Don’t confuse the two.’

  And so it was. Once again, with my perceived influence gone, I found myself dropped from invitation lists overnight. Fortunately, after more than a decade of being obliged to attend work functions, staying home was a gift and a blessing rather than a loss.

  As petulant as it sounds, however, even though I went to virtually nothing I was invited to unless I absolutely had to, I still liked being invited. The instant evaporation of invitations to parties, movie premieres, watch launches, lipstick lunches, bar openings and various other red-carpet nonsense was slightly bittersweet. There was mostly relief that I no longer had to feel guilty about saying no 99.9 per cent of the time. There was also a splash of disappointment that the choice to say no was no longer mine. All of this was silly window dressing compared to the far more overwhelming anxiety: what now?

  I stuck around at home and spent time with the kids, although I was not in the least bit present. My mind was a million miles away, wondering whether going to Nine had been the biggest mistake of my life. I spent every day convinced that I’d totally fucked my career.

  Looking for distraction and perspective, I began to think about going overseas for
a long break, just as we’d promised ourselves at the beginning of the year. It was time to start making plans.

  Except I couldn’t. To my extreme bewilderment, I couldn’t do anything. With nothing to actually do each day, I was confounded by my inability to accomplish the simplest task. If I had one thing to achieve in a day—say, going to the bank to deposit a cheque, or buying a barbecued chicken for dinner—I’d manage not to do it. Not because I was lazy or busy. I didn’t know why it was, actually. I just knew that I was flat and incredibly anxious at the same time.

  After years of managing multi-million-dollar budgets and dozens of staff and a thousand appointments and meetings and emails every day, the fact I couldn’t get my head straight enough to buy a chicken was frustrating. And distressing.

  What the hell was wrong with me? I didn’t recognise myself in the mirror—I hadn’t for months. I was extremely thin, my eyes were sunken into my pinched face and there was no light in them. I felt hollow and I looked grey.

  Finally realising I couldn’t untangle my state of mind by myself, I went to see my therapist. She looked at me and she listened and after half an hour she said, ‘I think you are quite seriously depressed and you’re also suffering from anxiety.’

  It was a shock to hear those words because they sounded so serious. But it was also a comfort. Apparently, an inability to complete even the simplest task is a classic symptom of depression. Hence the chook. I didn’t feel quite ready to go on anti-depressants because we were about to go overseas and I was hopeful our trip would be the circuit-breaker I needed. I had no previous history of depression so it seemed what I was going through was situational rather than chemical. That’s what my therapist thought and I hoped she was right.

  Our plans for the holiday had begun to take shape, despite my inability to make anything resembling a decision. Once he understood I was depressed, not just hopeless, Jason stepped in to pick up the slack.

  The trip was amazing, despite my fears. I’ve never been a natural traveller. Perhaps that’s why on every holiday I’ve ever taken, I’ve come home early. Or tried to. In the first few days after arriving anywhere from Noosa to Positano, it is not unusual to find me perched on my hotel bed on the phone to Qantas, planning an early escape. Flexible fares are my friend.

  This is particularly fun for those travelling with me. They are always—understandably—baffled and frustrated by my inability to kick back and enjoy myself. I even tried to come home early from my honeymoon although, in my defence, I did have food poisoning. As with so many of my odd quirks, Jason has learned to live with my eccentric holiday aversion and doesn’t take it personally.

  I’ve given a lot of thought to my travelling aversion and I’ve come up with two key reasons for it. The first is my fear of flying, which I’m finally getting a handle on. But there is another major obstacle between me and happy holidays: routine and my love of it.

  For many years until recently, I’ve enjoyed being a goat on a goat track. I ate the same thing for breakfast. I drank the same number of cups of tea made in the same way. I did the same exercise for the same amount of time. I put on the same amount of make-up using the same products. I surfed the same websites. I dined at the same restaurants with the same friends and I ordered the same thing. I got the same spicy chicken noodles from the same Thai takeaway. Part control freak, part borderline OCD.

  And thus my problem: routine and travel are not compatible. They are sworn enemies, in fact. The specific purpose of travel is to blow up your daily grind. To embrace the mystery meat of life with a large order of spontaneity on the side. And my problem is that I’ve always struggled with spontaneity.

  But somehow, embarking on this trip in such a scrambled headspace where I barely knew which way was up freed me to embrace a proper holiday—and its inherent spontaneity—for the first time since I was a kid.

  We made a conscious decision to cut off from home and I went cold turkey from the internet. No news from Australia. No email. No gossip. For two months, as we travelled through Europe, we had virtually no contact with home and absolutely no idea what was going on in the news.

  After the past year of extreme work pressure for both Jason and me, it was an intense but exhilarating re-entry into the lives of our children—and each other. The saturation method you might call it. We were together as a family 24/7 and everyone benefited. It was magic.

  Before we’d left, I’d hoped that by the end of the two months, I’d be able to look in the mirror and recognise the person staring back. That the life would eventually come back into my eyes. It took around two weeks. Being physically away from Australia gave me invaluable perspective about what a tiny place the media industry was and ultimately, how inconsequential. More importantly, I realised what an insignificant part of it I was. I wasn’t going to let myself be defined by my CV.

  In my head I’d become so obsessed with what everyone thought and said and wrote about me and that was a recipe for insecurity, paranoia, anxiety and depression. Tick, tick, tick, tick.

  As I wrestled with the idea that I was not defined by my job and contemplated Relevance Deficiency Syndrome, I thought again of Helen Gurley Brown. In one of the many interviews she gave as she prepared to end her thirty-one-year tenure at the top of US Cosmo, she was disarmingly candid about her fears. ‘I’m worried about not being as popular,’ she told a journalist. ‘People seek me out to dine with me and talk to me because my publication is important. Now all that will be gone…’

  I’d heard her say the same thing one night to a table of editors at one of our conferences around the same time. When we insisted it was her they wanted to dine with, not just her job, she wasn’t convinced. ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ she said sadly in her small, breathy voice. ‘I’m not anybody special. I won’t be asked to so many of those things.’

  I thought that was unspeakably sad. To be such an icon and yet so insecure about your work. To peg your identity and self-esteem so completely to your job. To define yourself so utterly by your business card.

  I was determined not to fall into that abyss. I’d forge a different path.

  When we returned home, I felt reborn. I needed to look as different as I felt inside, so I went and had all my hair lopped off. Always cathartic. Time for phase three of my life and my career.

  ROLE OF A LIFETIME

  Voicemail to Jason from me:

  ‘Um, babe, call me.’

  And then I was pregnant again. It had been a few months now since I’d left Channel Nine and I was settling into a brand-new, post-management phase.

  I soon discovered I was a nicer mother, wife and person away from the stress of a full-time office job. I also remembered that being a domestic goddess was not my thing. The feminist in me knows I shouldn’t define myself by my husband and my children. But some deeply ingrained belief—possibly gleaned from watching too many episodes of ‘The Brady Bunch’—whispers that being a mother should be enough. But it’s not enough. Not for me. To be the best mother I can be, I need to feed myself in other ways too.

  For me, this means working. But after so many years in senior management, I knew I wanted something different.

  The higher I’d risen up the corporate ladder, I realised, the further I’d distanced myself from my true love: hands-on creativity. And communicating directly to an audience.

  So I resisted the temptation to jump straight into another high-pressure, high-paying, high-profile media job. My ego really wanted to but my head and my heart weren’t keen. This wasn’t so hard because once I’d left Nine the phone didn’t ring nearly as much as I expected it to. Whenever it did, though, I said no.

  I wanted a break from the treadmill, from staff, from stress, from the exhausting politics of management and office life. Fortunately, I still had my newspaper column, something I’d hung onto through my time in magazines and TV. During those years, it was always my favourite thing, a way to be creative and express myself without layers and politics. Just me and my laptop.


  So despite having a massively reduced income after leaving PBL, I still had an income. And since I’d stopped shopping and was wearing jeans and T-shirts every day, my expenditure was also drastically less.

  Before I left Nine, I’d decided I wanted to start my own website. Magazines no longer floated my boat but I was still a pop-culture junkie. Now, instead of mags and TV, I gorged on the internet. As a consumer, I was moving from old media to new media. So why not as a content provider too? Like my column, the idea of having a direct channel to communicate with an audience was hugely appealing. I registered a domain name, found someone to design my site and began writing every day. And mamamia.com.au was launched.

  The word ‘launched’ sounds far more exciting than what actually happened, which was that I didn’t know quite what to say. So it was stilted at first. Eventually, I found my groove: a mix of opinion, news, body image, fashion and motherhood. It was whatever I felt like writing about and exactly like producing my own magazine every single day, with no barrier between me and my audience—which started slowly and then, as I became more comfortable, began to build.

  I started writing occasional freelance features for magazines like the Australian Women’s Weekly, Madison and The Good Weekend. I took on some consulting work for media companies. I did some radio. Wrote for the newspaper. Said yes to corporate speaking work. Started writing this book. And then, unexpectedly, two lines on the stick.

  I was shocked. Happily so. It had been so difficult to fall pregnant with Coco, I’d assumed my fertility was compromised. Apparently it wasn’t.

  I was elated by this pregnancy. It felt right. And somehow it took away the angst I’d felt about this new stage of my career—which had now become a new stage in my life. I’d found some perspective about my time at Nine, as difficult as it had been. My fifteen cosy years cosseted at ACP had been the other extreme. Did I really wish I’d just stayed put and churned out another few dozen sealed sections? Absolutely not. Sometimes, experiencing what you don’t want helps you work out what you do want. And it also helped me define what was important to me in my career and in my life as a wife and a mother. Suddenly, working from home, for myself, being creative and spending more time with my family was exactly what I wanted to do.