Norma – Onehunga
“Well, as a kid I didn’t really spend a lot of time with little children and so when I had my daughter it just opened a new world to me about watching her interact and the way she learns things. Like you’re learning alongside her. They teach you, I guess. She can teach you, I don’t know, how to be with other people. When you watch her with other kids, there’s all these other kids that are different races, and she just gets along with them. It’s really nice.
I was born in the Philippines and then moved here when I was six months old, and I lived all the way up North in a town called Kaitaia, and I lived there for pretty much my whole life until maybe three years ago we moved to Auckland, and now I’ve got a daughter.
How did I prepare? Oh, well I didn’t find out until I was five months pregnant that I was going to have a baby, and so the next five months we were just looking at books, going to the library, taking books out, but you don’t really know until you actually have a baby what it’s like having your own kid, and you can never be really prepared, to be honest. Ever since she started crawling and walking, I was taking her to the Plunket playgroup, and so she really gets along with the other kids.
They’re a little bit older, but rather than being home all the time she can interact with other kids. Coming from Kaitaia, it’s a really small town, there’s not really many different races when you come here, like Chinese, Indian, Islanders and everything, and I’m half Filipino myself, so it’s really nice living in this community where there’s heaps of different types of people.
When I go to playgroup, we all get to know how other mothers raise their kids, or the different kind of things they do and, and I think it’s really good for my daughter to look at how other people live, because I haven’t traveled much. I would love to travel, I can’t because at the moment with a young kid, but I always want to know how other people live their life.
It would be nice if some of the mothers could get together, because I know that everyone’s busy and they’ve got other children to look after too, or they’re probably working as well, but it would be nice if maybe once in a couple of weeks, we got together and had a chat. Maybe one of them could set up something at their house, or have a little get-together and host something or share a bit of their culture maybe.
I guess that English barrier; you know, how some can’t really speak English properly, and so most people don’t really connect with them, because if they can’t speak English then they don’t really understand them and that is kind of a problem, but growing up, English is my Mum’s second language, I understand when she’s trying to speak. Some people get frustrated with others when they can’t speak English properly, or they tend to ignore them, or don’t really want to talk to them, which isn’t very nice. Just got to be patient, I guess.”
