We may all know her from the GOP debates in 2016, especially when Donald Trump began a major feud with the newscaster, but mother of three Megyn Kelly (of the Kelly File) knows how being a working mom has taught her how to deal with tough situations.
In April’s issue of More, Kelly opens up about juggling the demands of motherhood with the responsibilities of anchoring her own television show.
The Kelly File tv host and her spouse Doug Brunt have three beautiful kids to juggle day to day parenting: sons Edward Yates, 6, and Thatcher Bray, 2½, and daughter Yardley Evans, 5, who turns 5 next month.
Kelly returned to hosting her primetime show just nine weeks after giving birth to Thatcher, a move she now feels she should have waited to do. She remembers her first assignment, which was to appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. During the show, an unexpected breakdown occurred for both the newborn and the new mother.
“Five minutes before I had to go onstage, Thatcher was having a meltdown,” Kelly recalls. “So I yank my dress open and start breastfeeding as I’m mic’d up. And everybody’s like, ‘Ehhhh…’ ” A bold move indeed, but an natural and instinctive reaction that any nurturing mom would do for a newborn.
“We set the expectations too high for new mothers….Don’t expect to not hate it. You’re going to feel and look terrible and you’re going to wonder if you blew up your life. The cruel irony of it is, just at the time you’re loving it and you’ve got it down, you have to go back to work.”
Don’t expect to not hate it. How refreshing to hear someone who has been-there-done-that share such a true sentiment. Being a new mother is very difficult and our expectations on the matriarch of the family are incredibly high. We measure ourselves against our own mothers, against our sisters, against our neighbors and friends, but we fail to see that we are brand new at this. This is something that we will need to work at, practice at, even hate a little bit before we begin to love it and master it.
We applaud you, Megyn Kelly, for putting into words (and into a magazine so many women will be reading) the feelings that many of us have felt as new moms. Thank you for being real and sharing such true thoughts so that other moms can feel comforted and encouraged.
