Kelly Müller on childhood, loss and life lessons.

In late 2020, I started working on what I thought would be ‘Bonny Co’ with a long-time friend. We were both parents living in Australia without a lot of family support and the initial concept was to support families through modern parenthood; our aim was to recruit doulas and home helpers to help make the mental, emotional and physical load less heavy in those precious postpartum weeks and months. 

During the development stage, I lost one of the most important people in my life to depression and this amplified my desire to help as many people as we could. The project was put on hold due to very boring (but very important) things like insurance and covid, and by doing so, we were able to pivot on our original idea and ‘Bonny Co’ turned into what you see here today.

Mental health has always been incredibly important to me; I have seen too many people struggling their way through life, not knowing where to go or who to see to get the help they need. I have seen firsthand the challenges with the existing model and I wanted to do something. Anything.

I believe sharing our stories helps to create connection and cultivate normalcy around mental health. My hope is that Bonny Co serves us all - on the one hand, we need to get better at listening, giving people the space to share their feelings, their experiences, their stories. And on the other hand, we need to recognise that no one is perfect, we all have our challenges and there is always hope. No matter how big or small, simple or significant, we all have a story to tell - this is a small part of mine.

BC: Can you share a little bit about yourself, your family and your childhood? What aspects have contributed to the person you are today?

KM: I would describe myself as an independent, strong, empowered woman, wife and mother - which I believe has come from both lived experiences and ‘doing the work’. I live on Bundjalung land in the beautiful Lennox Head with my husband and our two daughters. We’ve worked really hard and really consciously to create a life that enables a lot of family time combined with the chaos, privilege and pleasure of running a brand and marketing consultancy.

I was born in the 80s in New Plymouth, New Zealand. My parents were working class - my father was a printer and my mum used to work at night, washing dishes at a hotel restaurant, after caring for my sister and I all day. My parents split up when I was 12. They married young and after 20-something years, from what I understand, my mum just wasn’t in love with my dad anymore. He was the generational provider, he went to work each day and my mum looked after the house and us kids and had dinner on the table when he got home. She was (and is) a selfless and exceptional human being who has always put everyone else before herself. She has been my number one supporter since day one, even when I didn’t give her the same grace in return, and she gave me the independence to figure out the kind of person I wanted to be. We are similar in many ways, and very different in others, which leads to a relationship as close as it is complicated. She is, and will always be, one of the most important and influential people in my life.

My sister chose to stay with my dad when our parents separated and in some ways, I felt like it was Mum and I against the world. In others, I felt a deep sense of responsibility from a young age which has stayed with me throughout my life. I knew how much money Mum earned each week, how much had to go towards expenses, how much I needed for sport and school and general teenage stuff, and I felt immense internal pressure not to fuck up as I didn’t want to cause my mum any more stress.

My sister and I weren’t overly close, even before our parents split up but even less so following that. We didn’t have the kind of sisterhood where we had each other’s backs - there are three and a half years between us and the age gap always felt so big. Hayley left school at 16 and got into all kinds of trouble; she had her first baby at 21 and around the same time, I was the first on either side of our families to ever go to university. Her questionable choices infuriated me. It felt like we had nothing in common and it took me years to understand that we could still have a relationship despite our differences.

My relationship with both my sister and particularly, my father has been difficult, distant and mentally exhausting. As a kid, I was meant to spend every second weekend with my dad, but for as long as my memory serves me, I felt like he didn’t care whether I was there or not and I don’t recall my sister ever being around. The weekends simply became fewer and further between and so did any kind of relationship my dad and I had. He didn’t come to my high school graduation because it ‘wasn’t his thing’ and when I was accepted into university, I remember him scoffing that it was too expensive and suggesting I get a trade at the local polytech. That broke my heart as all I wanted was for him to tell me he was proud of me. I spent several years wondering why he didn’t love me and I tried to reach out several times without much response. I was often met with justifications that he ‘didn’t know how to communicate’ or ‘that was just him’ and that was my first real understanding that we all have a choice as to who we want to be.

“Our upbringing absolutely plays a part in who we are, but we get to choose whether it defines us.”

It’s been well over a decade since my father and I have spoken. He’s never met my husband nor acknowledged or met my children. But I have no ill-feelings towards him; to be brutally honest, I feel nothing at all. As a parent, I know that I would do anything to repair a rift with my daughters and there is nothing in this world that would stop me from trying. My father is not deliberately a mean or malicious person - he is a product of his own parenting, but he chose to use that as an excuse and that’s one thing I cannot and will not ever accept.

I was broken and bitter about it for many years, but therapy helped and I’ve found peace with it. I haven’t missed out on feeling loved and I forgive him.

BC: Reflecting on your life so far, what have been the greatest lessons you’ve learned?

KM: My life is a constant work in progress so I have many! If I had to choose in this moment…

1. ‘Nothing others say or do is because of you’: In my mid twenties, I read The Four Agreements - actually, I read the summary not the book itself, but that alone changed my life.

“It taught me not to waste energy on things I couldn’t control. It taught me to identify when my ego was at play and it taught me to show mercy for others.”

2. ‘Sometimes love isn’t enough...and sometimes, it is everything’: My first boyfriend and I met when I was 15. We were together right up to my first year of uni, but I probably tried to make it work longer than I should have. He was done but I wanted to keep trying. He cheated on me, got the girl pregnant and was the first boy to break my heart. 

My second serious boyfriend knocked me off my feet. I was wrapped around his finger from the second we met - he was attentive, sweet and charming, but the relationship was built on lies, manipulation and control. He was emotionally and, years later, physically abusive. He had cheated on every girlfriend he’d had before me but was convinced I’d be the one to do it to him. He would hide my phone so he could monitor messages I was receiving and sending. He was paranoid and jealous, and used to hold me down before I went to work and leave love bites on my neck so people knew ‘I had a boyfriend’. He isolated me from my support system, told me who I could be friends with and constantly questioned where I was going, what I was wearing and who I was talking to. On top of that, he had a gambling addiction and often spent our rent money or ticked up credit cards, leaving me to figure out how to pay it all back. Despite this, I thought I could help him - that if I loved him just a little bit more, I’d be the one who could change him. 

After three years of coercive control, fuelled on alcohol, he hit me. He tackled me to the ground and punched my chest and stomach, over and over again. Even intoxicated, he knew that if he hit my face other people would be able to see it and it haunts me to this day - not what he did, but that he was conscious enough to know how to keep the abuse hidden. I fled the house with no money, no shoes and no idea what I was going to do. 

I didn’t tell my friends and I certainly didn’t tell my mum. Unbeknown to her, she flew over to Sydney, where I was living at the time, to tell me in person that she had stage 3 bowel cancer. My world came crashing down around me but I know for sure that my mum saved me. I’d like to think I’d have been strong enough not to go back to that relationship, but because I was strong, there was a lot of internal confusion as to whether I was deserting him in a time of need. 

But the love for my mother trumped everything. I packed my bags, left a job and a city that I loved and moved home to New Zealand.

“I had to unpack and rebuild myself after that. I realised that every relationship I’d had to that point was one where I was desperate to be loved. To be important. I wanted them to fight for me.”

I stood by my mother’s side as she fought for her life in a state of utter heartbreak and despair. I grieved for a hopeless and toxic relationship, I worried about what was going to happen to my mum, I stressed about finding a job and paying back debt, I told myself I didn’t need anyone and I built up a wall around myself. That first year back in New Zealand is a bit of a blur. It’s like I was there, doing what needed to be done, but I wasn’t there at all.

Then, at a time I least expected it, I met my now-husband. For the first time in my life, I felt properly seen, loved and protected. My grandmother always told me that ‘when you know, you know’, and I knew. 

I knew it from the minute I met him. 

He looked after me while I looked after my mum, despite my best efforts to keep him at arm’s length. He taught me how to be strong without being an ice queen. He was the first person to make me see that needing someone wasn’t a sign of weakness. He believed in me, supported me and walked beside me like no one else ever had. He showed me what being equal in a relationship truly looked like and he never asked me to be anything other than myself. Because of all of that, he gifted me the freedom to heal, to love myself and to live my best life. For the past 12 years (and counting), he has inspired me to be the best version of myself and has shown me time and time again that love, in its purest form, is absolutely everything.

3. ‘We never really lose the people we lose’: In early 2021, my best friend Michele died from depression. She was the most vibrant, generous, ambitious person I know and I felt (and still feel) her death to my core. Day after day, I am brought to my knees but slowly, I am coming to understand that her energy hasn’t gone, it’s simply transformed. I see and feel her in everything.

BC: Tell us about your community. How have the people in your life influenced you?

KM: Because of my fragmented relationships with family, I have always held my friendships in the highest regard.

“I don’t believe that blood is the only thing that makes a family, love does, and I would do anything for the people that I love”.

I’ve always been a bit of a ‘mother hen’, perhaps because I’ve been independent for so long, and it’s in my nature to help and protect people. Because of this, the connections I have are deep and intimate. I have a pretty small group of very close friends, all of whom I consider family - Michele being one of those.

She was one of the biggest influences of my life. Losing her has been unimaginable, incomprehensible. I’ve struggled to find my feet over this past year, but in my darkest moments, I think ‘what would Michele do?’ She was the bravest, most courageous person I know. She showed up every day and tried to be better despite what she was feeling deep down. She never gave up, so I won’t either. To honour her is to make her proud, so that’s what I’m trying to do.

Being friends with Michele also gifted me her fiancé Reeve. I met them at the same time and we often laugh about who I was friends with first. Reeve is all the good things a human can be and just talking to him makes me feel calmer, stronger and loved. I gravitate towards ambitious, inspiring and kind humans and Michele and Reeve, like all of my friends, have a bit of magic inside of them.

I am also drawn to hard-working and inspiring female entrepreneurs - several of whom I have been able to witness in action first-hand - but more recently, family owned, conscious businesses where husband / wife teams are juggling family life and work life. I am forever inspired by our clients (almost all female founded and of those, all mothers) and the exceptional work that they do. 

Perhaps most of all, mothers inspire me and a quote that I once read by Anna Harrison has never left me: “Every mother – every woman – is the hurricane and the rainbow, the ordinary human with the badass superpowers”.

BC: What kind of role has therapy played in your life?

KM: I’m a very practical, logical and sensible person so often, I can identify a problem and work through it myself or with the support of my ever-inspiring husband. However, I am a big advocate for therapy as I don’t think we need to be at crisis point to get an outside perspective. I believe that therapy can come in many shapes and forms, from exercise to eating well to weekends away, indulging in self-care to seeing mental health professionals.

“Just like we look after our bodies, our minds deserve time, care and attention too.” 

I’ve seen different kinds of therapists throughout the years for many different reasons and each has helped me make sense of my mind at a time I couldn’t make sense of it myself. 

As someone with a self-sacrifice personality, I am conscious of sharing my feelings with those I love as I don’t want to burden anyone. Having regular sessions with a psychologist lets me download, vent and cry without worrying about what energy I might need to take on in return. It’s one of the best investments I have made in myself.

BC: What does happiness mean to you?

KM: Coffee in bed in the morning before a long, salty, sunny morning at the beach with Josh, Sunny and Ari. Hosting friends and family at my home, margaritas at dusk and sunset swims. Above all, being healthy, safe and loved.

Interview by Bonny Co. | Images by Lisa Sorgini, shot for Natalie Marie Jewellery | Connect @kellymuller__