Tully Smyth | finding love, egg freezing, elective caesarean, breastfeeding, grief and motherhood

Tully’s journey to motherhood began with a long stretch of being single. “I was kind of always the relationship girl. I thought I’d be married by twenty five, first kid by thirty,” she recalls. When a relationship ended at thirty five, she made the decision to freeze her eggs. “It gave me so much peace and it definitely changed the way I thought about dating,” she explains. “Once I froze my eggs and I felt like I had that safety net, I just breathed a little lighter.”

She met her partner Ned on a dating app and their first date was a whole family barbecue on Grand Final Day. “Rather than sitting at a bar and making small talk, I got to see him in his element, with his friends, with his family,” she says. Early on, Tully was upfront about wanting marriage and children soon. “I said, if you don’t want to get married and have kids relatively soon, that’s fine, but I’m going to have to end it here.” The pair went on to conceive naturally, sooner than they expected. “Five weeks later I found out I was pregnant,” Tully says. “It shook me. I mentally thought six months at least.”

When it came to birth, Tully knew from very early in her pregnancy that she wanted an elective caesarean. “The minute I found out I was pregnant, I was like, nope. I want to know the date, I want to know the time,” she says. Having heard many friends’ stories of vaginal births not going to plan, she felt more comfortable with a planned approach. “I really did think naively that it was the easy way out,” she admits. “I didn’t understand why more people didn’t do it.”

Choosing her obstetrician came down to a chance encounter with fellow podcast guest and friend Laura Henshaw, who had also had an elective caesarean. “I tried to be really casual and asked, do you like her, is she smart, is she great at her job? And they were singing her praises.” Her obstetrician, Dr Amanda Ward, offered reassurance and flexibility throughout the pregnancy. “She said, if it comes to the morning of and you change your mind, that’s fine too,” Tully recalls. “Having that flexibility made me feel really safe and secure.”

Despite her confidence in her decision, Tully admits there was an element of shame around sharing it publicly. “I found myself scrambling for reasons as to why, even with my closest friends,” she says. “I didn’t need to explain myself, but I did.” She chose to share her birth story only after Elke was born and settled. “I don’t have anything to prove. I’ll share it after she’s here and she’s healthy.”

Tully describes her pregnancy as largely smooth. “I had a dream run. No nausea, no vomiting, I felt great,” she says, though the third trimester brought discomfort. “It felt like she had outgrown my body but my body stopped growing with her.” She used the time to prepare thoroughly, including antenatal classes, pelvic floor physiotherapy and a lactation consultation ahead of time, something she credits with helping her through early breastfeeding struggles.

On the day of her caesarean, Tully recalls feeling almost detached from the experience. “I think I disassociated a little bit. I think I left the room,” she says of the theatre. She had a clear birth plan for the caesarean itself, asking her medical team to keep things calm and positive. “I don’t want to know if something’s going wrong, don’t tell me, just deal with it,” she explains. When Elke was born, the reality hit hard. “I kept saying, what the fuck, what the fuck just happened. I was shocked, even though we’d had nine months to plan.”

Breastfeeding did not come easily at first. “She didn’t latch immediately and I remember thinking, I’ve already failed at the first hurdle,” Tully says. The experience gave her new empathy for other mothers who have struggled to breastfeed. “I really understood where they were coming from. You feel like your one job is to be able to feed this baby.”

Recovery from her caesarean proved far tougher than Tully anticipated. “Not one of my friends who’d had an elective caesarean mentioned anything about the recovery,” she says. Determined to bounce back quickly, she avoided rest in the early days, which led to complications. “I had nerve pain that felt like white hot searing pain,” she describes. She later discovered a small amount of retained placenta and then developed an infection in her incision. “It was a lot. I felt like I didn’t deserve to rest because I barely gave birth.”

Throughout the conversation, Tully speaks movingly about the grief of becoming a mother without her own mother present, who she lost to early onset dementia. “I really feel like this having a daughter was her gift to me,” she says. “There is a really weird sort of grief that continues to happen, moments that knock the breath out of me.” She reflects on the new questions motherhood has raised for her. “I now have four hundred other questions I want to ask her about being a mum that I can’t.”

Tully is candid about the emotional rollercoaster of early motherhood and the pressure of being a perfectionist in a role with no instant mastery. “If I’m not good at something immediately, I think I’m bad at it,” she admits. “I’m working on being kinder to myself and realising that as long as I’m loving her and keeping her safe and feeding her, then I’m doing a good job.”