She’s happily married to veteran journalist Peter FitzSimons and the proud mother to sons Jake, Louis and daughter Billi.
But in a new interview with Kate “Monty” Diamond on web-series Show and Tell, Lisa Wilkinson revealed her heartbreaking struggle to carry a much-longed for fourth child to full term.
Despite being thrilled with three children, the 56-year-old confessed she’d always wanted a big tribe so she and Peter began trying for a fourth baby.
“You’ve got to be careful when you’re comfortable with the fact you can fall pregnant just like that,” Lisa began.
“So we’re pregnant with number four. And I’m just thinking ‘Wow! We lucked out again! [We are] So, so lucky.'”
However things soon took a horrifying turn for the worst.
“And, then we were about 11 weeks and just…I woke up one morning and something was very obviously wrong,” the journalist recalled.
Lisa, pictured with sons Jake, Louis, daughter Billi and husband Peter, has spoken candidly of her three miscarriages.
“There is really nothing that prepares you for that moment when they do a scan and say ‘the baby’s dead.’”
“Nothing prepares you for that because you know, when you’ve been lucky enough to give birth and you meet that little person for the first time and you just think ‘wow! You’re that little person. Look at you!’”
“And then when you see on the scan all that lost opportunity, missed potential… And you think about your own children – they were that at eight weeks and something went wrong,” she explained.
The couple weighed up the stats and learnt one in four pregnancies result in a miscarriage so they decided to try again.
But it sadly wasn’t meant to be. “The same thing happened, but this one only latest til about six weeks,” Lisa said.
Tragically, their third attempt for baby number four also resulted in a miscarriage.
After chatting to her friends and realising they had had similar struggles, Lisa concluded that miscarriages “seem to be the great secret so many women carry.”
But, despite her heartache she is still counting her blessings.
“Three [kids] in a row, you turn around and think ‘I’m so lucky.’”
Watch Lisa’s raw interview in the player above.
“There is really nothing that prepares you for that moment when they do a scan and say ‘the baby’s dead,'” Lisa recalled.
