How do you immerse yourself into motherhood while keeping your career alive? It’s a juggle Tully Smyth is passionate about

Tully Smyth’s voice cracks a little as she apologises from the other end of the phone. 

“You can’t possibly really understand it until you’re in it,” she says, attempting to articulate how her life has changed over the past 15 weeks. 

The Australian reality star and writer, who shot to fame in Big Brother at its height of success and appeared again most recently in Australia’s first Celebrity Traitors, welcomed her first child in June. 

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She also just launched a podcast While We Have You, with Traitors co-stars Alex Nation and Kirby Bently, and signed on as ambassador of a brand beloved by parents around the world, Bugaboo. 

Her days are spent cradling Elke, the little girl she dreamed of for decades, and her nights are for work. It’s a juggling act akin to wrestling a crocodile: Immersing yourself fully into motherhood, while desperately making sure your career doesn’t slip away. 

“I often don’t sit down to start my workday until 1pm, when she’s [asleep], and then I’m furiously trying to catch up on emails,” she tells nine.com.au. “I eat late at night [and] I hop on my emails.” 

It’s then she poses the question many new mothers ask themselves: “When do I get to rest? When do I get to stop and take a breath?”

“It’s really, really hard,” Smyth concedes.

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“And then I think, ‘Oh gosh, I’m the worst mum in the world for dragging her to Sydney for a shoot’, when really what I’m trying to do is hustle and make money for her future so she can go to the best school in the world.” 

“My opinions and thoughts on it change every day, but again I think as long as I’m getting up and doing my very best, it’s all that counts.”

The 38-year-old says she just wants to be a good role model for her daughter, to show her ambition and drive and that you can be a mother and have a career that fulfils you. 

“My mum was working full-time,” she recalls of her mum, who she describes as an “original girl boss”.

“There was a joke that she brought a fax machine to the hospital when she had me.” 

Smyth lost her mother in 2019, 17 years after a cruel early onset dementia diagnosis. She describes her memories of her mum as “through the eyes of a child”. 

Now she’s a mother herself, she’s weaving some of those memories into her and Elke’s lives. 

“My mum’s love of reading and her encouragement of me to love reading is why I ended up a writer,” she tells nine.com.au. “And Elke’s only toy on her pram is a book that says My First Book.”  

She says as she’s talking to Elke it feels like she’s watching home videos. 

“My voice… I sound like my mum.” 

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Smyth is navigating the early days of motherhood with what she describes as her “DIY village” as her family all live in Sydney. Her partner Ned is a shining light during those inevitable harder days. 

“Ned went back to work two weeks after she was born, so suddenly you’re left to your own devices and your post-natal anxiety is just sort of yelling at you constantly.

“I felt like I was talking very meanly to myself in my head a lot. Nothing was good enough. Nothing was right. 

“But we’re yin and yang. He’s very rational,” she says. “We work so well together.”

Despite those harder days, Smyth says, “it’s all I’ve ever wanted”. 

Case in point: she underwent two rounds of egg freezing in her mid-30s as she dreamed of having multiple children, but hadn’t yet met the man who would become the father of her children. 

Smyth and Ned conceived Elke naturally after meeting on a dating app and falling head over heels, something she describes as “unbelievably lucky”.

“I’ve kept every single needle because I wanted to show Elke one day how much I wanted to be a mum,” she admits.

“I think that anyone who goes through egg freezing or IVF, that’s cool to be able to tell your kids one day, ‘I wanted you so badly’. 

“I’ve never loved something so much in my entire life,” she tells nine.com.au.

“Every day gets better and better.”