Photos: Babiche Martens, Tracey Scott.
In the past five years, Lizzie Marvelly has cancelled a wedding, got married, become a mother, recovered from a traumatic birth, postpartum anxiety and a brain injury, moved towns, and started a new career.
In her own words, life is “organised chaos”, but she wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I didn’t really know the meaning of ‘busy’ until I became a mum, but I really wouldn’t change it,” she smiles, talking about Ellis, her three-year-old daughter with wife Lisa Gerrard.
“My days are jam-packed at mahi [work], so that really sacred time in the afternoon and early evening spent with our little girl is so special, and makes me want to make every minute count.”
Lizzie, 35, has reinvented herself many times, from opera to pop singer, writer and media maven to Rotorua Museum director, and now she has a new career.
“I’m the Chief Executive of GirlGuiding New Zealand,” she says. “I’m so privileged to be in this position working for an organisation that has been around for over 100 years, and is responsible for helping to grow and develop young women and girls.”
While Lizzie wasn’t a Girl Guide, she jokes that, given the chance, she would have loved collecting every badge possible.
“I spent my youth on stage, which breeds a kind of resilience in itself,” she tells. “While I was young, I battled with really intense nerves. I would feel nauseous and get the shakes, but I was such a theatre bunny.”
The challenging role she’s been in for a year now marks her return to the workforce after maternity leave.
“I’m very lucky to have had two years at home with my little girl,” she tells. “When I think back to starting work again, it was a bit of a wrench and I had that adjustment of, ‘Where’s my little person?’
“There are so many moments I miss, like afternoon bottles snuggled up on the couch, taking her on adventures to the library or supermarket, or when she’d learn or see something for the first time.”
But there’s also been joy in taking on this new challenge.
“I’ve really enjoyed getting my teeth stuck into something much bigger than myself and my whānau, something that’s impacting potentially thousands of girls,” explains Lizzie.
“Thinking back 10 years, I don’t think this is where I saw myself going. I’ve had this really winding path and I’m very grateful for it because I’ve had all these random experiences. What I realised was that whether it was music, media or museums, I had to be really meaningfully engaged in the mahi.
“This particular role with GirlGuiding NZ, working with young people, helping to grow resilience and a generation of leaders, is such beautiful mahi to be involved in, but I couldn’t have foreseen that a decade ago. It’s been a very interesting journey.”
While professionally music isn’t part of her life these days, Lizzie says she still gets to perform nightly at bedtime, with catchy tunes Tūtira Mai Ngā Iwi and Miss Polly Had a Dolly often topping the set list.
“I’m an on-demand singer for a three-year-old and she’s very particular about which songs she likes,” laughs Lizzie, before sharing some of her dreams for her daughter.
“Two of the most important things I want for Ellis are for her to feel she can be brave and kind. That sense of having the bravery or confidence to take a step into something that is new and feels uncomfortable is so important because it’s in the learning to do hard things that you become resilient.”
Of Te Arawa descent, ensuring Ellis is connected to her culture is also incredibly important to Lizzie.
“She’s just bathed in Te Ao Māori at [full immersion te reo Māori early childhood education] Puna Reo, and that’s really beautiful, special and important,” says Lizzie, who moved from Rotorua to Auckland in 2022. “At home, we’re gently building her confidence with reo and tikanga [language and customs].”
Lizzie cherishes the little moments of motherhood – the afternoons with their dog Awhi in tow at their favourite playground while Ellis races her monster cars down the slide or as she sings her wee girl to sleep.
But it wasn’t always this way. Speaking honestly, Lizzie tells the Weekly that the first year of motherhood was plagued with challenges that were much harder than she had ever anticipated.
Like recovering from an emergency Caesarean and managing anxiety while transitioning to life with a newborn, then suffering an unexpected brain injury that still affects her today.
“In those first three months, I was working through the aftermath of that really traumatic birth and the ways I had felt so let down by the medical system,” she recalls.
On January 17, 2022, Lizzie’s waters broke at home at 9.15pm.
There’s a 24-hour window after waters break in which it’s medically advised that a baby should be born to reduce the chances of infection. So when labour hadn’t started the next morning, she was instructed to go to the hospital.
Despite the medical risks, staffing shortages at the hospital meant it wasn’t possible for her to be induced and later meant she couldn’t access an epidural.
As labour progressed, Lizzie remembers passing in and out of consciousness between contractions as the pain relief on offer proved ineffective. She would later find out that Ellis had turned to a posterior position, making labour much more painful.
More than 30 hours after her waters broke, it was decided a C-section was the best option to safely deliver Ellis, whose heart rate was dropping.
Her GP later told her that if it had been 100 years ago, it’s likely neither Lizzie nor Ellis would have survived the ordeal.
“When you’re in that state of terror, it really does different things you don’t realise in the moment, and those impacts can surface for weeks and months afterwards,” she shares. “For me, it really ramped up this sense of anxiety.
“I remember as a new mum people would say, ‘You think this is hard, just you wait.’ I wanted to slap them – it’s not what you need to hear. For any parent in the throes of the first months reading this, especially if you had a traumatic birth, it only gets better,” reassures Lizzie.
Then, six months later, just as things were starting to ease, Lizzie suffered a concussion.
“I bent down to put Awhi’s collar on and came back up quite quickly and smashed my head into a sizeable metal round door knob, bigger than my fist,” she says. “The room spun, but I didn’t pass out and being a mum of a baby, I had things to do, so I carried on but I felt really unwell.”
Later that same day, she hit her head again in the same spot on the sink while bathing Ellis.
“I didn’t know what concussion felt like so I just kept going. Three days after that, I ended up in hospital diagnosed with concussion.”
After testing ruled out a brain bleed, Lizzie was discharged, believing she’d be feeling much better soon.
“A few days to two weeks is the standard expectation, but mine just didn’t get better,” she says. “It’s awful. I felt dizzy, like I was on a boat and kind of hungover a lot of the time, but I wasn’t even drinking. I also had really bad light and noise sensitivity.
“You’re meant to rest but when you have a six-month-old, how does that happen? I wasn’t able to get the rest I needed to recover.”
It took around nine months to mostly heal, but Lizzie still lives with migraines as a result.
“I’m on medication for it, so they’re pretty well controlled, but it’s a little reminder of this brain injury that I might live with forever,” she reflects.
“It was really tough. My wife is an amazing woman. She was working full-time as a lawyer but really stepped up and was incredible.”
Lizzie will also be forever grateful for the support from her mum Vlasta Marvelly, who helped her with Ellis three days a week for months.
“My daughter would sell me to anyone for her Babs [short for babička – Vlasta is of Czech descent] and their bond was really established during that time. I was so lucky and my heart breaks for people who don’t have that support.”
Lizzie just hopes her experience raises awareness that concussion can affect anyone. She also wants more support to be made available for primary caregivers with head injuries.
“Three years on, I don’t have that anxiety any more,” she smiles. “I have the odd worry, but we’re at a much more even keel and in a rhythm with our little girl. She grows and learns, and says new hilarious things every day. It’s a totally different stage.”
This year will also mark half a decade of marriage for Lizzie and Lisa, 45, who had to cancel their first wedding – initially booked for March 28, 2020 – when the country went into level four lockdown on the 25th.
Later that year, in December, they were able to finally tie the knot.
“When we did marry, it was beautiful,” she says. “We pared things back, so it was smaller and more meaningful. Ultimately, everything turned out the way it was meant to, except devastatingly, one close family friend passed away and wasn’t able to be there.
“We’ve had a wild ride with concussion, baby and moving, but I’m endlessly lucky to be married to my beautiful wife and that she’s been on this ride with me.”
Laughing, she adds, “I’m grateful she’s decided to stay on the rollercoaster.”
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