She may have a job as a high-profile TV star, but Melissa Doyle believes she’s just like every other stressed-out mum, juggling children, work and a relationship – and the occasional meltdown.
Most people think that the taxing part of Melissa Doyle’s job as co-host of the Seven Network’s popular Sunrise program is dragging herself, bleary-eyed and bedraggled, out of bed every weekday at an unspeakably early 3.30am.
Yet that is the easy part, says Melissa. The hard part is trying to be an effective, full-time mother to her two gorgeous children, Nicholas, four, and Talia, 18 months, and keep on top of a high-pressure, high-profile television career.
And with that delicate balancing act in mind, it’s actually the end of Melissa’s day — that forbidding, sometimes frightening period between 4.30pm and 6.30pm, known to weary, nerve-shot parents the world over as “the witching hours” — that is the most demanding and stressful.
That is when she is also expected to do all her preparation for the next morning’s show, after she has often been awake for more than 12 hours, completed three hours of live television and an afternoon caring for her children.
“That’s the real business end of the day at our house,” says Melissa, 35, who shares the Sunrise set with co-host, David Koch, every morning, in a highly successful partnership.
“That’s when the kids are tired and fractious, and need to have their dinner, have their baths and get ready for bed, and I need to have my dinner before I take the nightly conference call with the show’s producers and other presenters to talk about how we’re going to handle the next morning’s show and download all my e-mails and do my research and watch the news.
“It’s frantic and consistently the most stressful part of our lives, and I really have to be very disciplined for it all to work — I even have a computer in the kitchen, so I can log on while I’m cooking dinner.”
Not that Mel is complaining…
Discover how the life Melissa Doyle’s life is not all that far removed from the lives of hundreds of thousands of other working families across the country. Only in the August 2005 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
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