After announcing she was leaving Channel Nine’s Today show in October, Lisa Wilkinson has made a triumphant return to TV on Sunday night’s episode of The Project.
Her first act? To turn the audience into balls of blubbering mess with a beautiful story about a man who lost his wife, and months later welcomed their baby boy.
As Lisa explained, young Queensland couple Bec and Gareth Arena wanted to have children, but realised Bec’s cystic fibrosis diagnosis would make it difficult, even life-threatening for her to carry a child to full-term.
Then Jessica Brockie, who already had two children of her own with New Zealand soccer player Jeremy Brockie, had an idea.
“I asked her, ‘what is it, Bec, is it eggs, what’s the issue?’,” Jessica said on The Project. “She said, ‘yeah with my lung capacity, you know, it’s going to be risky, I’m not going to be able to carry.’ I said, ‘well, I carry babies, I could probably carry a baby for you.'”
Bec and Gareth accepted and Jessica fell pregnant with the couple’s first child in May.
“Bec rang me and said, ‘We’re going to be parents.’ I was at the front of work, just pacing up and down the front of the workshop. We just couldn’t believe it,” Gareth said.