real life

"I fell apart." Tina Arena reflects on her experience of pregnancy loss.

Tina Arena and her husband, Vincent Mancini, always wanted more children; a sibling or two for their beautiful boy, Gabriel.

Sadly, it never happened for them.

On tonight’s episode of Ahn’s Brush with Fame, the Melbourne-based singer spoke stoically of her heartbreaking experience of pregnancy loss and of the early menopause that stymied her effort to grow her little family.

For the first of her three miscarriages, the 49-year-old said she endured the agony by herself. It was 10 years ago, she was living in London, and Mancini was more than 1000km away sailing along the Italian coast.

“I think the thing that was tough was that Gab was there watching me go through that pain, and looked at me and was holding me, going ‘Mummy? Mummy?'” she told the ABC program.

“I’m looking [at him] going, ‘It’s OK, darling. It’s OK. It’s OK.”

tina arena miscarriages
"Life's glamorous, isn't it?" Image: Getty.
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"The next morning I took Gabriel to crèche, I got on a bus and I took myself to the hospital. [I] went through the operation, got myself back on a bus, caught the bus home by myself and picked up my son from crèche," she said.

"Life's glamorous, isn't it?"

Arena says it took two years of stoicism after her last pregnancy loss before the grief truly hit her and she "fell apart".

"I'd just finished Dancing with the Stars and I went into menopause," she said.

Olympian Libby Trickett share her story of pregnancy loss. Post continues below.

"That's when I went, 'I can never reproduce again. My body's done. The machine's broken down.' That was tough."

"But I'm grateful that the universe gave me one magnificent little gremlin."

Arena met French artist Mancini in 2000, and gave birth to their son Gabriel in 2005.

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