Kerryana – Auckland
“What I think children can teach us, speaking for myself, is how to tell the truth. I’m not saying innocence is bliss, but they don’t have as many preconceived ideas as we do as we grow older, and the other thing is that they teach us how to be friends, because I notice with really young children they don’t sort of get too suspicious about each other. It’s like you’re three years old, I’m three years old, let’s be friends, and so it brings that innocence back.
Well, originally I was brought up in Dunedin but when I left high school there wasn’t a lot of jobs and employment, so I came to Auckland to work, and then I got married, and had a whole lot of sons, and so I’ve been here for about 35 years. Yeah, so it’s home now. I was fortunate that I had my sons all in three and a half years, so it was kind of bang, bang, bang.
They all went off to school together and they grew up together, and I was a single parent for all those years, and I really just enjoyed engaging with them, going to rugby, getting them to do all the things they needed to do to become good adults. Well, I never experienced raising girls, so I haven’t got a lot to compare in a good or a bad way, but I guess what I really enjoyed was seeing my three boys be friends and grow up together. Of course they had their little hassles here and there, but there was a lot of comical things that went on. For instance, with them being so close together, one of them turned 18 and the other one wanted to use his car, so he charged him $20 to use it for one night, although he had to have it back the very next day.
Their friends; that’s what really intrigued me. They made very good friendships, and I think it was because of the brothers being so close together, they knew what it was like to rely on each other. Well, again we go back to that children thing; innocence is bliss in a sense, and my responsibility as being a mum was purely to them, and because there was three of them, and they were all in three and a half years, I didn’t have time to think about anything else. I mean, they actually needed me, and that’s where I think I got my gratification, was actually feeling important to them, and them being really important to me. I think it came back from my own mother and what she explained to me. She said, what’s very important is their education, them doing activities like sport, and, she said, even though you’re on your own, try not to ever move them from school. So we actually lived in the same house for 25 years. I had that kind of stability that I thought was going to be really important for them.
Yeah I think that basically it’s when you look around you, there could be somebody who’s just dropped something. It doesn’t take a second just to pick it up and smile, and you know, it just keeps that connection. I mean, I caught a bus the other day and the bus driver was just so pleasant that it really made my day, and I said to this other person, do you know I’d really like to write into the bus company and just say what a lovely experience it was to get on and off that bus and have somebody be so genuinely kind to you.
What it is to be a man is to take responsibility, and that is from the minute you wake up until you go to sleep at night. That’s responsibility on all levels; like that holistic approach, how you respect women, that old school stuff, talk to them nicely. You don’t talk down to them. You create a good rapport with them, and that should just be a theme of your life. That’s a women’s point of view.”
