Our hearts are going out to musical actress Tina Arena who has revealed she had three miscarriages after having her only child Gabriel.
During an appearance on an Australian talk show, Tina opened up about her sad loss when asked by host Anh Do if she’d considered having more children after Gabriel.
“I lost three after Gab. I miscarried a lot,” she said. “I really wanted to add on to the family.”
One of the miscarriages happened while her partner Vincent Mancini was away and Tina was alone with two-year-old Gabriel.
Tina recalled how little Gabriel knew something was wrong with his mum.
"Gab was there and watching it happen,” she said. “And I didn’t know what was going on. I went, ‘Something is not right. Something is definitely not right’.”
“Gab was there watching me go through that pain. And (he) looked at me and was holding me going, ‘Mummy! Mummy!’."
“Sometimes you can still see that panic in his eyes if he doesn’t see me happy or something. I almost go back to that moment in time where I remember Gabriel at two years of age, who absolutely knew that something wasn’t right with his mum.”
Tina didn’t go to hospital until the next day despite being the miscarriage being “unbelievably painful.”
“The next morning, I took Gabriel to creche. I got on a bus and I took myself to a hospital,” she said. “Went through the operation, got myself back on a bus, caught the bus home by myself and went and picked up my son from creche.”
Tragically this was the first of three miscarriages she would endure but the actress didn’t grieve for her loss until years later.
When she hit the menopause at age 46, Tina realised she would never be a mum again and the enormous grief she had been hiding overwhelmed her, according to The Mail Online.
“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.”
However, Tina has since recovered and says she’s now in “a happy place”, living with her family in Melbourne.
“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.”
