WARNING: This article discusses pregnancy loss which some readers may find distressing
Monday Haircare co-founder Jaimee Lupton and her fiance, Zuru’s Nick Mowbray have everything they could wish for - except a child. In this exclusive interview, Lupton talks to Jane Phare about the heartache of losing a baby and struggling with infertility.
We look like two women meeting for a catch-up in an Auckland cafe, chatting about this and that. No one would guess, glancing at us, that the subject is about heartbreak, loss, unimaginable grief.
Jaimee Lupton is talking about losing her baby daughter “Gingernut” at 24 weeks, the result of a much tried-for pregnancy after IVF treatment. And a miscarriage after that, and more rounds of failed embryo implants.
The memories are still painful but Lupton, at least from outward appearances, is calm and controlled. She wants to share what she calls an “incredibly isolating” journey so other women going through it don’t feel alone.
At first she thought she’d talk later on, “After I’ve got my baby and my happy ending”.
But she realised that would be pointless. How could she connect with couples trying unsuccessfully to have a child while she was bouncing a baby on her knee?
“I think that’s the worst thing I could do because I’m in the trenches now. I’d be doing others who have gone through the same thing a disservice if I didn’t speak about my experience.”
And by speaking out, she wants to change the perception that women’s health issues are a private issue. (More than 300 babies are born stillborn - loss of a baby after 20 weeks - each year in New Zealand according to the Perinatal and Maternal Mortality Review Committee.)
Lupton doesn’t know if she will ever become a mother, or why she can’t get pregnant, and that’s part of the agony.
“I think it’s the not knowing that is the hardest, and it’s an important thing to share.”
She lives with that anguish daily. For a woman who seemingly has everything – beauty, youth, wealth, a stunningly successful business career and lives in the vast Coatesville mansion she shares with Zuru guru Nick Mowbray - she feels “a failure”. Lupton can’t have the one thing she wants most in life, to have a baby.
Failure is not something Lupton is used to. Neither is Mowbray. They’re used to success; “no” isn’t part of their conscious vocabulary.
“Nick’s like me. If someone says ‘no’ we take that on as a challenge and I think this is the biggest ‘no’ either of us have ever heard, so now we’re both determined to make it work.”
For Lupton, not being in control of the outcome is a nightmare scenario.
“I’m a massive control freak, a massive over-planner. This is one thing that’s out of my control and the most important thing to me.”
Too soon, Gingernut
It’s been 15 months since that horrific day when her waters broke at 24 weeks. No, no, she thought, not yet; that wasn’t the plan. Mowbray was in Los Angeles and they were going to brainstorm baby names when he got home. In the meantime, the baby was nicknamed Gingernut after the biscuits Lupton ate during her pregnancy to help with overwhelming nausea, and because of Mowbray’s ginger hair which they thought their baby girl might inherit.
But now their baby was coming early. Auckland Hospital was still under strict Covid restrictions so Lupton was allowed only one support person, her sister, and only one swap. Her mother had to stand aside to allow Mowbray to take that place when his flight landed.
The date is indelibly imprinted in her memory: March 25, 2022. A four-hour labour and, at the end, a tiny baby no longer than a mobile phone. Lupton shares a memory - being pushed out of the hospital in a wheelchair, cradling a little basket in her lap. Nestled inside is her dead baby. The song Forever Young is playing on the sound system – “Let us die young or let us live forever”- and everyone is crying: Lupton and Mowbray, Lupton’s sister and her partner.
“Going home postpartum without a baby was excruciating,” she says, as was watching Mowbray walk in through the front door of their home carrying the basket.
“I just broke down. It was awful. A special time that I had planned my whole life for was nothing like I imagined. “
Family on both sides clustered around the couple. Mowbray’s brother Andrew organised for photos to be taken, and asked Angel Casts Charitable Trust to make casts of the baby’s hands and feet, before she was placed in a tiny white coffin.
“I was in so much shock I would never have thought to do that at the time,” Lupton says. “That was the most precious thing he could do for us and something that is so special to us now.”
She has the ashes in a tiny container in her jewellery box, unsure of what to do with them. The casts of the baby’s hands and feet are on Mowbray’s bedside table. In the meantime, trying to create another Gingernut has consumed Lupton.
There were other kindnesses amid all the heartache, for which Lupton is grateful. Who, she wondered, thought to provide miniature baby clothes and tiny beanies to dress stillborn babies at Auckland Hospital? Who made the tiny baskets to carry them home in?
“I thought, ‘In all this chaos and heartbreak there are these little moments. Someone has woven that basket’.”
Lupton went back to Auckland Hospital a month later to donate towards that thoughtfulness.
She had Nick’s eyes
There are still “overwhelming” triggers – the road she drove down in a panic when she went into early labour, visiting the IVF clinic, a friend’s pregnancy announcement, when someone asks if she has any children of her own, her due date, things she specifically ate during her pregnancy, including gingernuts, even Mowbray’s eyes.
She has a photo of their baby daughter, taken shortly after her birth.
“She had Nick’s eyes,” Lupton says. She shares a photo of Gingernut, a tiny miniature version of Mowbray. It meant Lupton couldn’t look at him for two or three days afterwards.
Grief, she says, is like a ball inside a cube. “It doesn’t always hit the sides but when it does the pain is as agonising as when it first happened.”
There are moments when Lupton’s story has me reaching for a tissue. I’ve been down the same path – endless IVF rounds, miscarriages and worse. Waiting, and waiting, for that positive pregnancy test while friends’ children grow up. Eighteen years after the birth of my million-dollar IVF baby, the triggers are still there.
It is one of the reasons Lupton is comfortable sharing her story. She knows she won’t have to explain anything to someone who’s been through it, many times, before.
Facing grief
For months after the loss, Lupton would wake in a panic and grab her belly to check if she’d just had a bad dream. And when she left the house, she’d often feel like she’d left something behind.
Lupton says Mowbray handled his grief differently, throwing himself into work to keep busy.
“We connected every day on a business level. We had to, we have this huge business to keep running. He was there for me in all those work instances picking up a lot when I was struggling. But it’s challenging to have two people under the same roof who grieve so differently.
“We found a balance. I don’t know how I would have got through that time in my life without him. We will share this trauma until the day we die.”
Mowbray has nothing but admiration for his partner.
“It’s been an eye-opening journey and I have been amazed at what Jaimee has had to go through and how resilient she has been,” he says.
Adding to the stress was social media. Lupton, as co-founder of the Monday Haircare brand, with more than 200,000 followers, has more than 19,000 Instagram followers as well as other social media accounts. She had uploaded a video of the “baby reveal” in which a delighted Lupton, wearing a short, floaty Aje dress, leaps around and shrieks in excitement when pink confetti and tiny balloons explode out of a popped black balloon.
And there were Instagram posts after that.
“We are beyond excited to meet you! Dad hopes you like sport.”
And others of a smiling Lupton cradling her bump. One, in which she wears a sunflower yellow dress, is captioned, “Nick’s little sidekick arriving July 2022.”
At 20 weeks, with Mowbray away overseas, she’d gone “a bit mad” with baby shopping: a closet full of beautiful clothes, two prams – one each for Lupton and Mowbray’s cars – and a Snoo bassinet. It was the type of nursery featured in Hello magazine.
But that joyous day in July never arrived. After the baby died, Lupton and Mowbray kept coming across people they knew. She’d watch them look at her face, look down at her flat stomach and back to her face. Lupton couldn’t bear to see the dreaded confusion on their faces.
Mowbray would blurt out, “We lost the baby.”
In the end, Lupton realised she had to go public, taking three weeks to come up with wording that seemed right for the post.
“There is no rule book on how to share such sad news,” she says.
Beneath a photo of Gingernut’s tiny hand protruding from a blanket, she wrote, “Even the tiniest of hands can leave the biggest impression on your heart. On the 25th of March our little girl was born too soon.”
Ironically it was this post that resulted in the most comforting messages, mostly from strangers on Instagram, “friends” who had also lost a baby or were struggling to fall pregnant.
And a video the couple shared on Instagram, which covers the joyous news of Lupton’s long-awaited pregnancy, and their heartbreaking loss at the end, had nearly three million views and attracted thousands of comments from people sharing similar stories.
“Losing a baby is like being part of a club no one wants to be part of,” Lupton says. “One in four couples experience miscarriage and I’m so thankful to all of those people who reached out to me.”
Lupton admits that in many ways she connected more with those who have contacted her online than with her own family and friends. Those close to her, who have not been through the same experience, can offer support but they don’t understand, she says.
“I’m finding I can connect with people on a whole other level than people who have known me for my whole life.”
Every Monday one woman sends Lupton a photo of her little girl, a prem baby conceived after much heartache and IVF attempts. “Keep going,” she says. “Your miracle is around the corner.”
Lupton and Mowbray will keep going. She says more than once how lucky they are that money for IVF is not an issue. Lupton won’t put a figure on how much they have spent so far but says it’s “a lot”. Ahead are IVF cycles at $15,000 a time, and thousands of dollars more for genetic embryo testing.
Lupton’s aware that options for other women are more limited. Couples can apply for two publicly funded IVF cycles in New Zealand but have to fit the criteria and there is a 12 to 18-month wait to begin treatment. And she knows that while many may be able to save up for an IVF cycle, they won’t be able to afford the fee for genetic testing to check which embryos are viable.
With that in mind, Lupton plans to set up Gingernut’s Angels in the future, a foundation that will help fund couples who cannot afford private IVF treatment. Privately she has already supported two families through IVF cycles.
“So many people I know right now have to delay IVF treatment to be able to afford mortgage repayments, and anyone who is going through IVF knows age plays such a significant factor. I want to help as many people as I can in my daughter’s honour.”
Mowbray, too, faced his own health battles after suffering from Crohn’s disease and now supports Crohn’s & Colitis New Zealand’s annual Camp Purple Live for children living with inflammatory bowel disease.
Feeling helpless
For Lupton, not knowing why she can’t conceive, or why her babies don’t last the distance, adds to the feeling of helplessness. Lupton’s mother had her three daughters between the age of 23 and 26, and had her tubes tied at 27. Lupton’s older sister had two children in her early 20s and her third not long after Lupton lost her baby.
Lupton’s tried everything – vitamins, expensive health products, acupuncture, craniology, Chinese herbs, diet, meditation, exercise and fertility massage. Now she’s waiting for the results of an endometrial BCL-6 test to check if it’s likely she has undiagnosed endometriosis.
“I’m about to turn 31 and it feels like I’m further away from my dream of being a mother than when I first started four years ago.”
She wonders why so many women she knows are having problems conceiving. Are women under too much pressure, she wants to know.
“Are we doing too much? Back when I was growing up, we’d hang around home for the weekend. That’s unheard of now. Our weekends are scheduled in, we schedule in relax time it’s that busy.”
That busyness is a result of Zuru Group and Monday’s phenomenal success.
Monday Haircare alone is on track to hit $200 million in retail sales this year, selling in more than 30 countries with 70 of the world’s major retailers. Another 20 new products are scheduled to launch later this year and in 2024.
People constantly congratulate Lupton on her business success, not knowing that she often drives home from work in tears, crying over the one thing in the world she wants the most.
She would, she says, give it all up tomorrow, and the feeling of success that goes with it, in exchange for a baby.
“All I want to be is a mum.”
She’s learned some lessons from this, one of them being that outward appearances can be deceiving.
“You don’t know what people are actually dealing with under everything else. Some people may look at Nick and me, and think ‘they’ve got everything’. But it’s actually the things you can’t have that are the most important to you.”
Lupton says she started negotiating with herself, which she puts down to guilt because of her full-on lifestyle.
She’d think, “Okay I’m not going to work this day and the baby’s going to stay. I’m not going out to that party and see friends, or I’m not taking that work trip and then the baby’s going to stay.”
Lupton thought she’d had her fair share of life’s cruelty after the loss of Gingernut. “I’d think, there’s no way I’ll be punished twice. I haven’t done anything that bad in my life and I don’t deserve this.”
But Lupton miscarried at nine weeks, after falling pregnant again in the next IVF cycle. At home, she could no longer bear to see the beautiful nursery full of her baby’s things so she packed it all up and gave them away.
Her father came with a trailer and out went the bassinet, the prams and piles of tiny outfits. Most of the baby gear is still close, shared between her sister who was pregnant at the same time and one of her closest friends who is expecting now.
She’s kept a few special items, including a tiny version of the Aje dress Lupton was wearing in the baby reveal video.
“I got her that matching little dress. I still have it. So one day, hopefully ...”
Lupton has one embryo left from her last IVF cycle. Keep going, I tell her. That could be the one.
The infertility story
- Although no official statistics are kept for pregnancy loss before 20 weeks, the Ministry of Health estimates one to two out of every 10 pregnancies results in miscarriage, making for between 7500 and 14,750 miscarriages a year. One in four women in New Zealand will experience a miscarriage.
- The prevalence of miscarriage per pregnancy increases with a woman’s age: between 35-39, 16 per cent; 40-44, 32 per cent; over 45, 53 per cent.
- In 2020, 310 stillbirths (loss of a baby after 20 weeks) were recorded by the Perinatal and Maternal Mortality Review Committee. Of those, just over a third were classified as unexplained antepartum foetal death.
- One in four people will experience infertility; one in eight require some form of medical assistance to achieve a pregnancy.
- New Zealand’s fertility rate has dropped steadily since 2010. In the year ending March 2023, 1.65 births per woman were recorded, down from 1.69 last year. Factors are thought to include social and economic reasons, and women having children later in life.
- Cost of IVF cycle: between $11,500 and $17,000. More complex procedures including egg/sperm/embryo donation, and surrogacy, cost extra. Pre-implantation genetic testing costs about $1500 per embryo. Adult genetic testing is $690.
- Couples are entitled to two publicly-funded IVF cycles but there is a waiting time of between a year and 18 months. Couples must meet criteria that are stricter than for private treatment. That criteria includes: an age limit of 39 for women, and a BMI of less that 32 at the time of treatment; an age limit of 54 for men and a BMI of less than 40. The couple will need to achieve a score of 65 (out of 100) for the Clinical Priority Assessment Criteria (CPAC) system, which takes into account various conditions including severe endometriosis and ovarian reserve.
- There is a three-year waiting list for egg donors and a two-year wait for sperm donors.
Jane Phare is a senior Auckland-based features and investigations journalist.