Even international pop stars can succumb to the pressures of a family Christmas.
“Christmas can be intense at our place,” Jessica Mauboy tells the Christmas edition of The Australian Women’s Weekly. “Sometimes it’s so intense we end up having a fight.”
In an exclusive interview with The Weekly, the 27-year-old Aussie songstress and TV star talks about her family and reveals just how important Christmas is for both her and them when they spend so much time apart.
Jess spends much of her “down south” in Sydney, where she lives, and other southern states, where she performs. Time away from her family, which Jess describes as her “essential foundation”, sometimes generates a lot of pent up emotion.
“We end up yelling and jumping up and down,” Jess explains. “The, suddenly, we’re laughing and crying, and eventually we’ll all be singing, packed into mum and dad’s lounge room dancing. It’s wild and crazy but it’s family and that’s what it’s all about.”
If family is the foundation The Sapphires star has built her life upon, then her relationship with her boyfriend of nine years Themeli Magripilis is the bedrock.
Them, as Jess calls him, has just moved to Sydney to share Jessica’s life. It is, she says, a decision that is both a long time coming and indicative of how deeply they feel about each other.
“There was a moment the other day,” recalls Jess. “We were cleaning up after breakfast in our apartment and I was saying, ‘No, not with that cloth; don’t wipe the table with that cloth.’ It was so serious and we both stopped and looked at each other and burst out laughing together.”
And while that story was funny, Jess says it was also very special for them as a couple because it was the moment they consciously acknowledged their new life together.
“We’re finally living under the same roof,” says Jess. “Waking up with each other and seeing each other every night when we come home.
“It’s all so new and lovely. It’s lovely to know that our relationship is so solid that we can actually grow with each other now and not be at a distance only connecting over the telephone with all those huge phone bills.
“There’s a sense of being there for each other, not just emotionally but physically being there and that has made a huge difference for us.”
The truth though is that while Jess and Them have been an item for nine years, they’ve been around each other almost from the time they born.
Themeli, a 28-year-old former Darwin council worker, is the son of “Big Nick” Magripilis who, Jessica discovered during an early conversation with Them, is a friend of both her mother and father, though she was unaware of the connection.
“One night when we were out, Them told me: ‘I know your dad Ferdy. He used to change my nappies.’ I was like, what? Are you kidding me?”
But when she asked her father, it turned out at that not only did they know each other but Jess’ mum went to school with Themelis’ dad and that his parents used to hang out with him and play soccer.
“It blew my mind,” she says. “It was so freaky.”
Read more of Jessica’s exclusive interview with The Australian Women’s Weekly’s Christmas issue, and to follow AWW on Facebook, click here.
