Ben Squires
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Tina Arena makes heartbreaking confession

Australian musician Tina Arena has made a heartbreaking confession about the struggles of suffering three miscarriages following the birth of her first son Gabriel.

The 49-year-old spoke candidly in an interview aired on the ABC program Anh’s Brush With Fame, saying she never truly dealt with the grief of losing those children.

Arena said, “I lost three after Gab. I miscarried a lot. Most women do — they miscarry. I miscarried three times after Gab,” she said. “I really wanted to add on to the family.”

Perhaps the most heartbreaking moment of the interview came when Arena spoke of the struggle of having a miscarriage in front of the then two-year-old Gabriel.

Arena said, “I think the thing that was tough was that Gab was there and watching it happen. And I didn’t know what was going on other than I went, ‘Something is not right. Something is definitely not right’. Gab was there watching me go through that pain. And (he) looked at me and was holding me going, ‘Mummy! Mummy!’.

“Sometimes you can still see that panic in his eyes if he doesn’t see me happy or something. I almost go back to that moment in time where I remember Gabriel at two years of age, who absolutely knew that something wasn’t right with his mum.”

This was the first of three miscarriages the singer experienced, and Arena said it wasn’t until she went through menopause at 46 that she dealt with the grief properly.

Arena said, “It wasn’t until a couple of years after that it really hit me and I fell apart. And I think it hit me when I turned 46 and I’d just finished Dancing With The Starsand I went into menopause. (My) Body just shut down, (my) body went, ‘That’s it’. That’s when I went, ‘I can never reproduce again. My body’s done, the machine’s broken down’. That was tough.”

The interview ended on a bright note, with Arena telling host Anh Do that she in now in a “happy place”.

She said, “It took being in a troubled place to get to a happy place because life is about pleasure and pain. You cannot just have wonderful things happen. Because you don’t always learn from that.”

Hero image credit: Facebook / ABC

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News, Tina Arena, Anh Dho, ABC