Sophie Ellis-Bextor “just wanted to have babies”.
The singer and podcaster loves people she explains, which is handy seeing as she went on to birth five of her own.
As the eldest of six siblings she’s had plenty of experience of younger children.
She thinks this “must have been” a driver in having such a big family.
“When my first sibling was born, which was when I was eight, I was so obsessed with him ... I think the visceral feeling of having a baby that I would look after, have on my hip, give him his bottle, that kind of thing, and all the happiness that came with it. It just felt very wholesome and very pure, and it kind of hard-wired a good association with bringing new people along”.
Sophie is married to Richard Jones from The Feeling and the couple were only dating six weeks when she discovered she was pregnant with their first child.
In the Irish Times Conversations With Parents podcast, Sophie discusses how the couple dealt with impending parenthood so early in their relationship.
And shares how her mother’s important advice “it might not be the right time, and it might not be the right man, but it’s the right baby”, helped her view things more clearly.
Sophie also shares how she coped after her phone was hacked and news of her pregnancy was released before she had a chance to tell many of her friends.
“Now I realise none of that’s very fair. I was only ten weeks”, she explains.
“From my perspective at that time, I didn’t feel like I knew a lot of pop stars that had got pregnant and had babies. It was seen as a very, sort of, frumpy, ill-fitting thing to bring into a pop career in the mid-twenties”. She also chats with me about the challenges of not being at the same stage of life as her friends when her first child was born.
While Sophie admits she may have been a little bit addicted to having babies, pregnancy hasn’t always been straightforward.
She shares how she coped with having premature babies, and her personal experience of miscarriage.
Sophie’s mum is Janet Ellis, who presented Blue Peter.
She reveals what it was like growing up with a famous mum and how it prepared her for raising children whose parent is in the public eye.
Sophie co-slept with her babies and she tells me why she believes it saved her son’s life.
And she discusses her new album Perimenopop, why she’s “proud of the years going by”.
“I am a mid-forty-year-old woman, and the algorithm starts shifting towards conversations around ageing. And there’s absolutely some positives, but a lot of it sounds a little bit gloomy. It might make you feel you need to shrink a little bit, or be a little bit diminished or a little bit invisible. And I don’t feel like that”, she explains.
Plus she takes our “how well do you know your Irish terms” test with some interesting results.
You can listen to the latest episode of Conversations with Parents on the link above or wherever you get your podcasts.
Presented by Jen Hogan. Produced by Aideen Finnegan.
Brought to you in association with Avonmore Super Milk.
