How does Jenny-May Clarkson feel about leaving TVNZ?

Just days after announcing she would leave TVNZ after nearly two decades on air, Jenny-May Clarkson found herself in a place she had almost forgotten: the middle of a crowd, the music at a Lenny Kravitz concert pulsing around her.

For six years, the early alarms and unbroken cadence of Breakfast — the country's morning-news ritual — had kept her from much of life that unfolded outside studio hours: the late nights, the concerts, the small but accumulating milestones within her whānau.

That night, she turned to her husband and said: "The woman that you fell in love with is returning".

"He just looked at me and he smiled," she recalled in an interview with RNZ's Sunday Morning, "because he's the one that's had to deal with me being stretched, me being tired, all the anxiety that comes along with a job like fronting Breakfast, and he's the one that's seen it all, seen the long hours, the times that I've missed moments with our family because I'm stuck in front of the computer."

Listen to the full interview with Jenny-May Clarkson on RNZ's Sunday Morning with Stacey Morrison.

Feeling as if life was slipping beyond her control, she tried, in her own way, to impose some order. Vacuuming, every day.

"I mean, I'm way better now. I only vacuum maybe twice a week. That's it," she says. "Being at home [with] everything clean means that I have a clear mind and I can then rest."

Clarkson acknowledges that the intensity of the work was driven as much by her devotion to it as by the demands of the job. Still, she and TVNZ agreed it was time to part ways amid a broader plan to “refresh” the programme in the coming year.

"It has been a privilege to do what I do. But it's time. It's time for me at 51 to find other challenges now."

The announcement came on an already weighted date: seven years to the day after her father died.

"When that announcement came out on Thursday, I felt real strength because I knew he was with me and a lot of his lessons, I still continue to carry with me and I carry him with me throughout this entire process."

The clarity, she says, arrived about a month earlier, while caring for her nine-year-old twin boys when she was away from work for a week. A simple morning rhythm — cooking breakfast, offering a hug, sending them out the door with encouragement — had shifted something in the household.

"After a couple of days of that, I kid you not, the relationship changed between me and my boys.

"At the end of that week I said to my husband, this is the best week I've had that, I can remember, in such a long time…

"I saw them flourish and I knew in that moment that it was time for me to be at home."

For all the resolve, she acknowledges a realistic source of worry – paying the bills.

"It's so funny, somebody said to me the other day, 'I thought you'd have a private helicopter' and I'm like, 'Oh God, I'm J May, not J Lo'. That's the reality. I still have all those worries that everybody has."

Her name has been floated by fans in recent weeks as a possible leader for New Zealand netball, a sport in which she once represented the country and has continued to commentate.

Clarkson says she enjoyed her return to commentating the ANZ Premiership this year but is unsure about stepping into a senior leadership role. But she is angry, she says, about the decline of a sport that was once the dominant code for women.

Instead, she has been working on a course about "everyday confidence", a subject shaped by her own long-standing bouts of imposter syndrome — insecurities she also explores in her recent memoir, Full Circle, about reconnecting to her whakapapa.

She remembers standing on the stage at Eden Park during the world-record kapa haka event last year and feeling unworthy of being there.

“Sometimes we think too much of ourselves, like for me in that moment, it's like, actually it's not about you J-May, just move on. And actually nobody's thinking about you. Everybody's here for the kaupapa. So it's just things like that that we have to remind ourselves, actually this is bigger than you.”

Stepping down from a role that shaped so much of her daily life, Clarkson says she has no regrets.

"For me, it's really important just to be able to walk with my head high and feel incredibly blessed and grateful for all the experiences.

"I've had an amazing life. I've had an incredible career, and I look back on things with so much gratitude and that's how I choose to move into the next part of my life."