
From the outside looking in, Kate Langbroek's decision to move her family of six halfway around the world to Italy may have seemed a crazy one.
First of all, moving four children - including teenagers - anywhere is not easy. Let alone to a whole new country, with an entirely new language and culture. Then there was her job as a radio host with Dave Hughes - the kind of dream media job you stay in for life. But for Langbroek and her husband Peter Allen Lewis, it all made sense.
Listen: Kate Langbroek talks to Mia Freedman on No Filter. Post continues below audio.
Langbroek grew up as a Jehovah's Witness and moved around a lot with her migrant parents. She was used to being an 'outsider'.
"I realised in retrospect that was formative for me to have gone to different places and to meet different people and to have had to start a new, not that it was easy," Langbroek told Mamamia's No Filter podcast.
"But if I then look at life, anything that I've ever done that's been worthwhile has not been easy. Nothing.
"I would say to Peter all the time, because it was such a sh*t show trying to get there, with visas and blah, blah, and schools, and there's six in our family. So anything we do, it's complicated, and Italy is also a complicated place... I'd go 'People do it all the time. It's totally possible, people do it all the time'. And then one day, Peter said to me, 'Darlin', who do you know, that's actually done it?' was like, 'Oh'.
"I think I thought people do it all the time. But people actually don't do it all the time."
The decision to up sticks came a few years after Langbroek went public about their now 18-year-old son Lewis' three-and-a-half-year journey with cancer.
Lewis was six when he was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in 2009.
Langbroek and Lewis had three other children under six, including their youngest son Jan, who was just a few months old. For three-and-a-half years, hospitals and doctors became the family's new normal.
Top Comments