Davina McCall fought back tears as she recalled a harrowing experience involving her oldest daughter, Tilly. The veteran presenter, 57, who shares three children with ex-husband Matthew Robertson, was speaking to therapist Marisa Peer about her difficult relationship with her own mother when she recalled a 'triggering' event with the now 22-year-old.
A Painful Memory
Revealing that she was late to pick up Tilly from nursery, Davina became emotional as she disclosed that her own mother told her she was going on a two-week skiing trip but never returned. Aged three, Davina went to live with her English father's grandparents in Surrey, occasionally travelling to see her mother in Paris. She has now bravely spoken out about a heartbreaking time as a mother herself, which left her 'crying' and unable 'to see.'
The Incident
Opening up to Marisa, she said: 'I went to pick her up at 12pm but it had already finished at 11am. The nursery teacher said: "Oh, Nicola picked her up." I sat in the car and started crying, and couldn't drive, I couldn't see. I had to just get it out. And then I drove, still crying to Nicola's house, she opened the door, and I collapsed, and she was like: "Oh my god, what's wrong?" I kept asking if Tilly was ok. Nicola was like: "Yes of course – she's husking corn in the garden," and was as happy as Larry. But I felt like this was how I used to feel with my own mother.'
Therapist and podcast host Marisa told the Long Lost Family star: 'She was ok because she wasn't you, she wasn't abandoned by her mother, but you felt it because you had felt it. Children take ownership of the problem in order to make sense of them, so when a mother abandons a child, the child has to own that and says "this is my fault" so once they buy into that they carry it with them.'
Strained Relationship
Recalling flying to Paris on her own to see her mother, Davina admitted she was never sure if she would be met at the airport. Lifting the lid on their strained relationship, she said: 'I was never 100% sure that I was going to get collected from the airport. My mum wouldn't be there. And then there would be phone calls, and then there would be, oh s**t, and then there would be somebody coming.'
Davina's mother, Florence, died in 2008. The TV presenter and fitness guru previously revealed on The Diary of a CEO podcast that she used to smoke cannabis with her mother when she was 12 years old. 'There's a lot of my mum in me,' she later told The Times. 'I don't want to slag her off. She was my mum, warts and all. She wasn't perfect. And she did make me, in so many ways, who I am.'
