The broadcaster Stacey Dooley gave birth to her daughter, Minnie, in January 2023. Though she has reported on women for almost two decades, she has been surprised by the transformations of motherhood. “I went into it so unprepared,” she says. “I cannot begin to tell you.” Like other soon-to-be parents, Dooley decided against attending antenatal classes and rejected manuals offered by friends. “You know, I used to see mums finding it tough and I’d think, ‘It can’t be that hard.’ I really used to think that. Which is fucking hilarious. I owe all of those women an apology.”
Dooley and I are in a hotel café in Knightsbridge, west London, where she is later due to meet her accountant. She has written a book, Dear Minnie, in which she profiles women who have had different experiences of conception, pregnancy and labour. Dooley’s own pregnancy was comparatively straightforward: some sickness, a scheduled C-section, though “the sleep deprivation knocked me for six,” she says. “I’ve never in my life been that tired.” In the book, Dooley describes the first six months of Minnie’s life as an overwhelm of struggle and vulnerability. “My living room looked like a teenager’s bedroom,” she writes. Her partner, the dancer Kevin Clifton, with whom Dooley was coupled during the 2018 series of Strictly Come Dancing, was given two weeks of paternity leave before being hauled back to work. (Clifton is currently appearing in a UK tour of Chicago.) “I remember him leaving and shutting the front door and being like, ‘What the hell am I going to do now?’” Dooley recalls. “And I felt envious. That he was going to be sleeping from 10pm to 8am. I remember feeling jealous of that.”
