“She was enough for me”: Albo makes Grace Tame cry
Anthony Albanese triggered an emotional reaction in Grace Tame and her fiance during a heartbreaking conversation about being raised by a single mum.
Ms Tame asked Mr Albanese for an example of someone who shaped his “views on gender issues and policy” during an interview for InStyle Australia, and his poignant response brought her to tears.
Mr Albanaese explained that when his mother was pregnant with him out of wedlock in 1963, “the fashion of the day” was that neither parent would keep the baby.
“She was going to have got the news that my father had died and then lost the baby and I was going to be adopted out,” Mr Albanese told Ms Tame.
“Because in 1963, when I was born, it was acceptable to be a widow but it wasn’t acceptable to be an unmarried mother.”
Despite this, his mother decided to give the future Labor leader his dad’s last name and raise him on her own, even as his father told her he planned to marry someone else from his home town in Italy.
“Now she was a strong woman who made the decision to have me, and to raise me by herself,” he continued.
“She worked originally when I was a bub, cleaning office buildings at night, looking after me during the day, she then had rheumatoid arthritis and was really crippled up.”
As a result, he said he and his mother were “particularly close”.
“So it was just me and her - and a two-person family, I think, is particularly close. It’s one of the things that has focused me and a part of who I am,” Mr Albanese said.
“She always respected everyone and I grew up with the confidence of having a mum who lived a lot of her aspirations through me. She couldn’t work. And so she’s the most important role model in my life and she’s very much still part of who I am today.”
When he saw Ms Tame and Mr Heerey were in tears, Albanese quickly apologised.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you there,” he said.
“No it’s just, yeah, I respect that so much,” she replied, laughing and crying, before looking off camera and laughing when she realised her fiance had also become emotional.
“Max is crying! Oh, I want to give you a hug,” she said.
Mr Albanese then elaborated on his experience by referring to the common argument that a family needs both parents used to oppose marriage equality.
“One of the things that some of the opponents said was, you know, you need a mum, a dad and two kids - that’s a family, I hear that message and go well, hang on, you know, families are diverse and made up of all sorts of different groups,” he said.
“People are different. Relationships are complex. The one thing that really, really matters - the essential ingredient - is love.”
Mr Albanese also explained how he waited until his mother passed away to look for his father “because I didn’t want her to think that she wasn’t enough”.
“Because she was enough for me,” he said.
Ms Tame also shared insights about how being surrounded by strong women while growing up gave her a lot of the courage and strength she now had.
“And all I knew was strong women. All around me, all the time. We had a trans family member; I knew diversity, I lived and breathed diversity,” she said.
She added that would likely be processing his story and will “probably go and cry about it later and I’m not ashamed of that”.
When Mr Albanese conceded he had “done okay” in his life, Ms Tame emphasised that he had done “better than okay”.
“A lot of respect for you, Anthony,” she said.
Image: @instyleaus (Instagram)