‘I don’t want to have any regrets,” model and former broadcaster Michelle Doherty tells me. “But this is the last... because I’m 45, and Max is already eight, it’s like, are you sure you want to do this? So I’ve gone into it, saying, ‘right, whatever will be, will be.’”
Max is Michelle’s son with her partner, Kerry man Mark O’Shea. She’s talking about their attempts to have a second baby. The couple, who are home from Australia for the first time since Christmas 2019, have just returned from Prague, where Michelle has undergone an embryo transfer.
“I won’t know for two weeks whether it’s been a success,” Co Donegal native Michelle says. “So it’s just a waiting game.”
Is she sure she wants to talk about her fertility at such a raw and anxious time?
She nods. “Because I know this is something that people don’t talk about. And they think, ‘oh, you’ve this rosy life’.”
It’s important to talk about her experiences with fertility, she says, to help others who might feel alone.
“Because all you ever see is people getting pregnant no problem, and having two children or whatever they want, and it seems easy-peasy. And that’s why I couldn’t accept it. Because we conceived Max so easily. Had a perfect pregnancy.
“And I couldn’t accept that this was happening to me. So I don’t mind at all talking about it.”
Michelle Doherty with her son Max, 8 months. Photo by Jonathan Goldberg
Before Michelle’s career led her into broadcasting, with Phantom FM, and as a presenter on TV3’s magazine show Xposé, she had long been one of Ireland’s most successful models. But for the last five years, she’s lived in Australia with Mark and Max.
“We had four miscarriages in a row after Max,” she says, grimacing. “I had just gotten pregnant when we moved to Melbourne. They tested the embryo, and the little one had Turner Syndrome [a condition in which one of the X chromosomes is missing or partially missing]. So it was definitely a sign that my eggs were not of good quality anymore.”
They decided to try IVF.
“That didn’t work out either,” Michelle says, pausing to take a deep breath.
“I had to make this massive decision then. We decided to try an egg donor in Prague,” she says. “But I just thought if I carry [the pregnancy] in my body, it’s going to be mine. And I just wanted a baby so much.
“So we went and we did our first embryo transfer – didn’t work. That nearly killed me more,” she says, shaking her head. “Because I was like, ‘sorry, hang on a minute, this was a no-brainer. My eggs are gone out of the equation, but it’s still not working?’ It was so hard for me to accept.
“Then we went for a second one. Didn’t work.” She closes her eyes for a minute, shakes her head again and presses her hand to her chest.
Xposé hosts Michelle Doherty, Karen Koster, Lisa Cannon and Glenda Gilson.
That last Christmas before the pandemic, in 2019, they were home in Ireland and supposed to try a third transfer.
“But my body was just so tired. Because I was doing injections all the time. And my [uterine] lining wouldn’t thicken, so I was unable to do it. For the last two years we’ve had this wee embryo sitting in Prague, so I’ve just had it implanted now.”
I ask about the toll the experiences have taken on her mental health. She looks strained.
“It was a lot. Brutal. I don’t know how I’m still standing. And that’s why I’m still on tablets because it just...” she says, referring to antidepressants, then she quietly starts to cry.
“It’s very hard to accept, because you’re like, ‘I’m a good mum, I’m a good person’. You just can’t understand. It’s really cruel. But it makes you stronger, I guess.”
It was tough, she recalls, when she saw others had no problem conceiving,
“You’re like: ‘Why? Why does it happen to certain people?’ It’s very hard to accept, and I was very bitter about it.
“Not now, but we couldn’t get back [to Prague] over the last few years, and I think I needed that bit of time to accept that, whatever the reason is behind it, I’ll never know, and to try and get over that bitterness and anger.”
She realised she had become consumed by having another baby, and that lockdown had taken the choice of whether to keep pursuing treatment out of her hands. She was able to focus on enjoying her “miracle” son, Max.
It’s hard to know when to stop in a fertility journey, she says.
“You just go as far as you think you can go. But then we don’t know how far we can go, that’s the problem. You’re willing to put yourself though so much pain.”
The hardest thing is to say, “that’s it now, we’ll stop”.
Michelle and Mark were connected by a friend years before they got together as a couple. The story goes that a friend of hers, Fergus, told her he knew the perfect man for her.
“But of course, I was going out with somebody else. Every time we met, [Mark] was a party animal, out on the piss with the lads. I was like, ‘oh my God, thanks, Fergus, what the hell?’” she laughs.
“And then when we went on our first date, it was like, ‘who is this guy?’ He’s an absolute gentleman. He’s a good guy.”
Then came Max. And while his conception and birth were easy, the aftermath was not.
“You put it down to being so tired. But when you’re crying as much as the child is crying, then that’s not ever good. You were just with this child all the time. And I think me and Mark were gunning for each other as well. He was like, ‘I don’t even know who you are’. Because I completely changed.”
She and Mark were living in London at the time, and she recalls struggling with breastfeeding and feeling alone, isolated from her family back in Donegal.
It was Mark who encouraged her to seek counselling, saying: “‘Michelle, we can’t go on like this.’ And then I had to fill out, you know that lovely form, where it’s 1-10, how you’re feeling on this scale,” she laughs.
“And you get handed the results back, ‘let me tell you that you’ve got depression’ and it’s like, what?”
She felt the stigma keenly, she says. “I was like, ‘no, no, no, I can’t, I’m not going on medication’.” There is a history of depression in her family, Michelle adds, as her grandmother had bipolar disorder.
“And that’s all I could think of, ‘no, I can’t be on medication like she was, I just can’t deal with this’.”
Instead, she started attending counselling, but after 10 weeks her counsellor advised a course of antidepressants.
“As she explained it, it was a chemical imbalance. I needed this medication to even me out. Get me back on my feet.”
The medication made a huge difference.
“Only for the [antidepressants]... As somebody said, ‘if you’ve got a headache, you take a tablet for it.’ There’s a reason that they’re there. And some of them don’t suit you – I had to try a few. And then I found one that suited me, and it was fine.”
She is still on antidepressants, she adds. “I’ve been through an awful lot of stuff. But yeah, I’m not ashamed to say it, because I need them, and I will take them for as long as I need them.”
She has continued with counselling too, especially around the time she was experiencing her miscarriages.
Most recently, she also had a treatment with a kinesiologist, which she believes has transformed the anxiety around egg implantation for her.
“Normally at this stage, even doing the transfer and stuff, I would be up to 90. I’d already be playing everything over in my head.
“Whereas this time I’m like, ‘it’s fine, just stay calm, see what happens’. She basically just realigned my energy. Because even when I’d have to take the medication, it brought back so much trauma that my body would start shaking, and I’d be like a big baby going ‘ugh’.”
Now, she doesn’t think about it, she says. And she is taking things one day at a time.
“The last two times [with the embryo transfers], I was like, ‘I want to do the [pregnancy] test now, I want to do the test now’. Whereas I’m going to wait until I get back to Sydney.”
Michelle Doherty and Jen Kelly at the Absolut Handbag exhibition at the Bridge Gallery in 2000.
Michelle and Mark moved to Melbourne when Max was three. Mark had lived in LA for years and wanted somewhere that offered a similar lifestyle – the US was out, Michelle says, as Trump was in office.
They fell in love with Sydney after visiting friends there, and decided to move. They now live a four-minute walk from Bondi Beach.
“We live in an apartment block that’s a bit like Melrose Place. We all live in each other’s pockets, our neighbours became our family pretty much.”
Not being able to come home during the pandemic was especially difficult for Michelle as her father was unwell.
“I suppose because you couldn’t get home you suppressed emotions, didn’t deal with reality. It was like, I can’t actually think about this bigger picture. My dad was very sick [with cancer] at the time, so that broke my heart. But I had to be really strong.”
Michelle is the second of five, the eldest girl, and very close to her family.
“He’s doing good,” she says of her father, who had to have a tumour removed. “Seeing us all together probably gave him this new lease of life.”
Michelle left Donegal for Dublin when she finished school, and became a flight attendant with Aer Lingus.
“We lived in the country, there was no such thing as knowing what a model was back then,” she laughs.
When she first moved to Dublin, she became friends with designer Jen Kelly, and through him met photographer Barry McCall, who wanted to shoot her. Her first job was a test with the hairdresser Michael Leong when she was about 21.
Though she enjoyed modelling, she never seemed consumed by the glamorous world she found herself in.
“I didn’t need it,” she says now. “I was an air hostess. I had this lovely job, I could fly in and out of Ireland, that was always my full-time job. So I didn’t need to model.
“And I think that’s why it worked so well for me. I was able to dip in and out, so that’s what kept me level-headed as well. It was lovely.”
Her upbringing also helped. “My parents are so normal. ‘Get over yourself’ would have been the attitude to any kind of ego. ‘We didn’t bring up a girl to be like this.’”
She still models in Australia, although sporadically for now. “Not young enough, not old enough. Out to pasture I am, for a while now. But that’s OK as well, I don’t mind. Being asked to do it every now and again is lovely.”
But her focus is on work that allows her to spend time with her son.
“I had wanted to be a mum for so long, and I’m so glad I did now,” she says of cutting back on her workload since his birth. “Because I had so much trouble after having him. He was my everything then, and I just thought I won’t get this time back with him.
“Modelling, presenting... Max is more important to me than any career or any job.”
Now she works in a beauty salon on Bondi Beach, run by a fellow Donegal woman.
“I’m around people again, and you know me, I’d chat to the bloody wall if it would chat back,” she says.
“I wanted to get back into the workplace, but I still wanted to be able to be around for Max. Because he’s not going to need me for much longer. I’m prepared for that. For now I just want to be able to pick him up from school, even a couple of days a week.
Is she looking forward to returning to Sydney?
“I do love my life over there. It’s pretty special. We live on the doorstep of Bondi Beach. It almost doesn’t feel real a lot of the time. Is this a joke? How am I living here? How did that happen?
“That’s the important thing in life. If you wake up in the morning and you’re still thankful for where you are, you’re doing all right.”
