Actress Charlene McKenna opens up about her first Christmas as a mum and since the loss of her dad
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Actress Charlene McKenna welcomed her first child, a little girl named Martha, with her husband Adam Rothenberg earlier this year, and sadly her father passed away just two weeks after she gave birth.
The Monaghan native, known for her work on Raw, Misfits, Breakfast on Pluto and more, opened up about that difficult time, as she approaches her first Christmas as a mum, and her first without her dad.
The Peaky Blinders star shared that she doesn't know what to expect from this Christmas.
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"I remember coming home [from hospital with Martha], and I remember putting her in the Moses basket on the table, and we tried to have dinner as normal, because we didn’t know any other routine,” she told Independent.ie.
“I just remember this lurch in my stomach, in both a good way and bad way. And then two weeks later, the night daddy dropped dead, I remember getting into bed, and I remember saying to Adam, ‘Do I try and sleep now?’
"Martha was one of those babies that fed every hour. Was I supposed to wake up and remember this in an hour, and another hour, and then another hour?”
Explaining how she has gotten through the year, she said candidly: "I mean, the body tries to cope, right?”
“My friends are like, ‘I don’t know how you’re doing it.’ Well, neither do I. I don’t know if something will hit soon, or if something is waiting for me down the line.”
“It’s the best and the worst — I wanted to have a child at Christmas for so many Christmases, and last year [when I was pregnant], I was like, ‘Please God, if everything goes well, I’ll have a baby for Christmas.’ I was never thinking I wouldn’t have daddy for Christmas."
"My friend was like, ‘You’re going to look at that empty chair and your heart is going to be in your stomach, but then you’ll turn and look at Martha’s chubby wee cheeks."
“And mammy said to us, ‘Let’s just do Christmas.’ So I’m gonna go home and put the tree up, and that’s something that’s really going to get me."
"Here [in Dublin], I’m in a bit of ‘la, la, la denial, it’s so Christmassy’, but when I go home… because me and him would always do the tree together. He’d go get it and I was always saying, ‘I’m not doing the tree unless you put the heating on.’ That was the running joke in our house.”
She has one photo of her dad Brendan with her daughter.
"Brendan had met Martha once. He met her and he never hugged her because he had like a flu,” she said.
“He wasn’t sick-sick, it wasn’t what killed him… and no, he didn’t hug me either because he didn’t want to get me sick. But yeah, we do have one picture of him where she is holding his finger.”
Describing what her Dad was like, she shared that his bright personality lit up any room he was in.
"His own father dropped dead when he was 14, and I think it bred in daddy some kind of ‘seize the day’ thing,” she said.
“He had a real thirst for craic and humour and joy. He was like that Christmas tree over there, he would light up any room."
"Some people are like that and I knew that about him, but I didn’t fully realise it until the light was gone.”