The Hard Work of Being a Mother

Being A Mother is Hard Work

TO celebrate Mother’s Day — and raise funds for women seeking shelter across the country — five prominent Australian celebrities (and their loved ones) team up with Peter Alexander for a photo shoot with a good cause.

 

Samantha Armytage & mum Elizabeth
For Samantha Armytage, Mother’s Day has long served as the perfect opportunity to show off both her knack for selecting heartfelt tokens of appreciation (“I pride myself on being a very, very good gift giver”) and her unrivalled craft skills. “When you’re country kids, living far out of town, you’ve got to amuse yourselves,” the 41-year-old Sunrise co-host tells Stellar. “So there were a lot of homemade presents — macramé; macaroni stuck on paper plates.” Her mum Elizabeth, 66, still cherishes those childhood treasures. “I’ve kept all her lovely handmade cards,” she says. “Sam was a very studious little girl who would painstakingly draw something beautiful every time.”

Samantha Armytage and her mum Elizabeth. (Pic: Damian Bennett for Stellar)

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The spirit of giving is also at the heart of today’s Mother’s Day photo shoot, with Peter Alexander donating $10,000 to Women’s Community Shelters, who work with local communities to provide emergency accommodation and to provide access to health care, counselling and legal help for women and children fleeing domestic violence.

While the glamorous trappings of her current gig may seem worlds away from a childhood spent in a small town in the Snowy Mountains, Armytage says those formative years prepared her well for life on TV. “There’s a strength in country women that I see in my grandmothers, in my mother, in my sister and me. It’s been bred into us and that’s an absolute blessing. There’s not a propensity to wallow, or feel sorry for yourself, or be told you can’t do something. I’m very proud of those country values — honesty, loyalty, hard work, a good sense of humour... I’ve learnt them from my mum, and they’re very much ingrained in me now.”

Justine Clarke & children Nina, Max and Joe
Mother’s Day needs little fanfare in Justine Clarke’s household because, to this tight-knit family, every Sunday is cause for celebration (and maple syrup). “It’s officially called Pancake Day, not Sunday, at our place,” Clarke, 46, says. “It’s the ritual of family time, another way of coming together.”

Justine Clarke and her kids Nina, Max and Joe. (Pic: Damian Bennett for Stellar)

This year, Clarke handed over the frying pan to daughter Nina, 15, who now happily runs the show alongside her brothers Joe, 17, and Max, eight. Although the Play School star says she was “scared” about raising teenagers, she loves it. “I was worried they can be monsters. But they’re not scary at all. They’re just wonderful,” she says. “[Motherhood] keeps revealing itself as you go through stages with your children. The older they get, the more you reflect on yourself.” The admiration is mutual. As Nina tells Stellar, “My friends would always say, ‘What’s it like to have everyone else’s idol as your mum?’ Well, she was my idol, too.”

Sonia Kruger, sister Debra & mother Margaret

To most new mums, Mother’s Day is a date circled in red on the calendar. But if it weren’t for her attentive partner, sleep-deprived Sonia Kruger would have forgotten about the day entirely. “My very first one, Craig [McPherson] carried our daughter Maggie in, and she was too little to hold anything but he had beautiful flowers and a present. It was really, really cute, and a complete bonus — because I’d forgotten!” Kruger, 52, says.

The exclusive Peter Alexander shoot features in Stellar magazine.

It’s this sense of honesty that pyjama designer extraordinaire Peter Alexander finds particularly endearing about the Today Extra and The Voice Australia host. “I really admire Sonia’s honesty when discussing her experience of motherhood,” Alexander tells Stellar. “When she had a baby quite late in life, she stood up and said she wished the press would stop calling it a ‘miracle baby’ because saying that gives false hope. Becoming a mother was something that she really had to work hard for.”
As for Maggie, now that she is three, she is old enough to recognise what the day is really about. “It’s lovely now that she’s aware of giving to other people and what that means — that it’s more valuable to give than to receive,” Kruger says. Growing up, Kruger witnessed this firsthand through her father’s work at a women’s shelter in Queensland. “My parents taught me that the most important thing is to treat everyone equally and with respect. [Women’s Community Shelters] are so crucial because women need to have a place to go to feel safe. At the end of the day, I think every human has that right: to feel safe.”