Mika's Do-Over

During Brzezinski’s six-week maternity leave, WABC in Manhattan hired her husband, television journalist Jim Hoffer, as an investigative reporter. This meant that when Brzezinski returned to work, both parents were pulling crazy, intense hours, commuting from their suburban Westchester home and working flat out at their respective studios. “Jim never slept. I never slept,” she says.

Two months later, Brzezinski’s exhaustion took a horrible toll on the family. She hurried home to relieve her nanny so she could take the afternoon off. “I rushed upstairs and grabbed my baby. I was talking a hundred miles an hour, and I walked right off the top of the stairs. I fell down the complete flight.”

Brzezinski landed on top of her daughter. The baby was not moving from the chin down.

Instantly, Brzezinski began to repeat: “ ‘She’s got to be OK. She’s got to be OK,’ because I knew Carlie wasn’t OK,” she says, tearing up even now, years later. “Her cry was all wrong. I thought she had a head injury. I took her straight to the hospital.”

There, doctors strapped the baby to a board and began tests. Brzezinski realized they thought the child’s back was broken, which meant she might have made the prognosis worse by moving her. “I fell apart,” Brzezinski says. “I slid down the wall. My face was on the floor, and I wept.” It took eight hours for the medical team to determine that Carlie’s main injury was a broken femur.

Still, the incident was serious enough that child protective services investigated Brzezinski on suspicion of child abuse. She felt so guilty that “when the social worker came to our house,” Brzezinski says, “I told her, ‘Put the hand-cuffs on me.’ ” The social worker interviewed her nanny and husband, inspected the home and examined the children. Then she recommended that Brzezinski get some rest and closed the case.

That was it. Brzezinski told her husband she was quitting her job. “I had it all worked out,” she says. “We would downsize to an apartment, and I’d be a stay-at-home mom.” Hoffer agreed a huge change was necessary but believed if she up gave up the work she loved out of guilt and exhaustion, she’d be miserable. “We’ve been cheap,” he told Brzezinski. “Now we’re going to get all the help you need. If after six months you still want to quit, you can, but you can’t quit like this.”