Health & Baby

My Baby or My Job

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MC: How’s maternity leave treating you? You look beautiful, but a little . . . fuzzy around the edges.
EV: There are no regular going-to-bed and waking-up times, which is part of the problem. I’m in that fog that every new mother experiences, and that we all conveniently forget later.

MC: You’re tired? I can’t imagine why!
EV: I keep saying to my husband [singer/songwriter Marc Cohn] that I wasn’t this tired when I had Zachary. He did point out, logically, “Well, you didn’t have another baby then!” The mantra of “sleep when the baby sleeps” doesn’t work when you also have a 3-and-a-half-year-old who needs his share of TLC and looks like he feels betrayed every time he looks at you . . . like, “Why did you bring this other per- son home?”

MC: You have been gone from 20/20 for several months, but you’re still often on the air.
EV: I banked a lot of work before I left, and I just had this two-hour special on called “Last Days on Earth,” about all the ways, potentially, humanity could come to an end.

MC: So . . . 20/20’s version of a romantic comedy, then.
EV: Um . . .

MC: That should be the show’s promo: “Rely on us to scare the [bleep] out of you.” So work must seem far away right now . . .
EV: Hey, I have this job I can’t wait to get back to! And I know I would be under pressure to come back a lot sooner if I were in the anchor chair on World News Tonight. Those hours were non-negotiable. You had to be out the door at 8 a.m., and you weren’t back till 8 p.m.

MC: What was that like?
EV: I’ll be honest: My husband felt that Zachary really paid the price for that.

MC: Take me back in time a little, to April of last year, when Peter Jennings was diagnosed with lung cancer.
EV: I had been filling in, myself and Charlie [Gibson], from the day Peter was diagnosed. Charlie and I did it until August, when Peter died. Then, starting in September, Bob [Woodruff] and I switched off. In December, they offered the job to Bob and me. We had this blueprint for the show, which generally involved one of us at the desk and the other out in the field. It was exciting and a huge success, we felt. Then I found out I was pregnant.

MC: You mean, you didn’t plan it?
EV: It was a big surprise. A friend of ours said, “Who gets pregnant naturally at your age?” My parents are very strong Catholics, and they’ve always said they believe things happen for a reason. Now, nine months later, with this beautiful baby boy, I couldn’t feel better about this. But I admit, my initial reaction was, I can’t be pregnant. I just signed on to this big job! I told my husband, “Let’s wait three months before you freak out, sweet- heart.” So many women my age have early miscarriages. But then I started to feel really sick. And the pace was pedal-to-the-metal, no time off. People must have known something was up—I was nauseous all the time. And then everything went down with Bob.