As an experienced journalist, Tim Wilson is used to reading people’s faces. But the Seven Sharp funnyman took his well-honed powers of observation to a whole new level recently when he guessed that his wife was expecting for a second time before she’d even done a pregnancy test!
It was only in March last year that Tim, 50, and Rachel, 30, proudly welcomed their first child, a son called Roman, into the world. Having tied the knot a year earlier, the pair were definitely planning on a big family, but Roman was just three months old when Rachel voiced her hunch that she might be pregnant for the second time. Laughs Tim, “We were in the car, driving from Auckland to Tauranga, and I said to Rachel, ‘Well, we don’t know yet, do we?’ But then I looked over and noticed her eyes. They were blazingly white, just like they were with Roman, and I thought, ‘She’s pregnant.’”
The Wilsons’ baby number two is due on February 27 – five days before Roman’s first birthday – and the relaxed couple can’t wait to meet the new addition to their brood. “We’d like four or five kids and people’s jaws drop when we say that,” says Tim, who spent seven years working as TVNZ’s New York correspondent and is now the guy who “tries to put the pop, sparkle and fizz” into the news story of the day on Seven Sharp. “But I’m the second eldest of nine,” tells Nelson-born Rachel, a singer/songwriter and former music teacher. “And to me, that sounds like a proper family-sized number. Having two children so close in age might be difficult at first, but in six months’ time, they will be playing with one another. That was my experience growing up. The more, the easier!”
Expecting a second baby is a dream come true for Tim, who just five years ago was living in Spanish Harlem, writing his novel Their Faces were Shining – which went on to receive critical acclaim – and travelling extensively. It seemed like he had it all, but Tim confides, “After a while, you realise there’s more to being alive than just parties, late nights, good jobs and endless accumulation. Inside, there was this hollowness.”
Although Tim was raised Presbyterian, he started going to mass and was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 2012, not long before returning to Aotearoa, where he spotted Rachel across the pews at Auckland’s St Patrick’s Cathedral.
Tim and Rachel have found raising 11-month-old Roman a doddle, and they’re looking forward to their new arrival next month.
The rest is history and Tim says, “I can’t believe how my life has changed. This is the life I was dreaming of five years ago. “I distinctly remember thinking, ‘I would love to find the love of my life, get married and have some babies,’ and here I am with Rachel, a delightful little boy and a truffle on the way,” says Tim, using the couple’s pet name for their unborn baby. Fatherhood has been a revelation for Tim, who was given up for adoption soon after he was born. He made contact with his birth mother, Christine, when he was 33. “She was 15 when she had me,” explains Tim. “Now that I’m a father, I can understand much better some of what she must have gone through. But there was never a time in my life when I questioned why I was given away. I was just adored by my parents.”
Christine now lives in New Jersey and, during his time in New York, she and Tim would meet up regularly.“She’s like Roman’s third grandmother. She’s just taken up the ukulele at the ripe age
of 65, and she and her husband Skyped us on Saturday to play a version of Johnny Cash’s ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’.” There is a smaller age gap between Tim and his birth mother than there is between Tim and Rachel, but the couple say their 20-year difference is a strength.
“I guess you could say Rachel is more grown-up than your average 30-year-old,” says Tim, “and I am more immature than the average 50-year-old. We don’t really notice it.” After her gruelling 35-hour labour with Roman, Rachel’s hoping for an easier birth the second time around, and reports that Tim is the perfect birthing partner, doing everything from mopping her face to timing her contractions. The couple say this will be the last baby they bring home to their beloved two-bedroom apartment in central Auckland.
“We love inner-city living,” admits Rachel. “Everything’s so handy, but it would be extremely difficult living here with three young children.” Tim – who, in addition to his TV work, also co-hosts Newstalk ZB talkback show The Two on Sunday evenings – quips, “I’d like to put off moving to the suburbs as long as possible because I don’t own a motor mower!”
“We’d like four or five kids,” he tells.
He’s a natural!
With cheeky one-liners always on the tip of his tongue, it’s not surprising that as well as his two jobs, Tim is currently putting the finishing touches on his new novel, The Straight Banana, a sequel to his 2014 novel News Pigs, “about a drunk, middle-aged journalist in New York”. “I’ve been getting up at 5.30am in the hopes of finishing it because you can’t do a baby and a book at the same time.”
Not that he’s expecting child number two to cause too much disruption. “Having our first baby didn’t live up to the billing lots of people gave it, like, ‘Your life will be over, you won’t sleep again until it turns 16.’ All that stuff,” says Tim. “We actually found that life was quite normal. “Now we’re getting, ‘Our first kid was an angel too. Just you wait until the demon second baby comes along.’ People love horror stories!”
But whatever the future holds, Tim’s exactly where he wants to be. “Parenthood has really deepened our marriage. I put off marriage for such a long time, but I really love being married
to Rachel. It’s lots of fun, and my hope for our future is to have a big family who all see being together as a fun gig. There are in-jokes and there are serious conversations, but these are the people you want to be with.”
