Kim | Māngere Bridge
“I want to change about myself? Nothing. I love myself.
I grew up in Auckland but had spent a lot of time in the South Island, in Nelson. So we’ve come back, my partner and I. He’s from Christchurch and we’ve come back to Auckland 10 years ago, and we live in beautiful Māngere Bridge. We have three children; a 26 year old daughter, we have a seven year old boy and a five year old boy, and my life is currently looking after these boys. Sorry, I’m watching one of them biking around, making sure he doesn’t go near the road. So I’m a fulltime mum.
For me, I’m an older mum, I had my last child at 45, and having my children and being in the position where I don’t have to work, so every day is a play day for me with my boys. I’m just very, very lucky that I haven’t got the financial pressures of a lot of these mums out there having to go to work, being pressured into go into work financially, and they don’t want to leave their children, and put their children into day care, but yet they have no choice. Because you know, living in Auckland where the money is, they’re here to provide for their families, and so I feel that I’m really lucky that I don’t have to worry about that, and I can just take the pressure off. It takes the pressure off me as a busy mum, being able to look after my beautiful family, be a happy mummy. If the mummy’s happy, the whole family’s happy.
I found with having two boys, and once again being that older mum, what helps for me is getting the boys out every day, and that’s the type of play that they enjoy. So we’re always out at parks, local beaches, skate parks. There’s so much free stuff to do and explore in Auckland, and that just works really well for our family. The mountain, Māngere Bridge, you’ve got Mt Eden, you’ve got Māngere Mountain, and we use those things in our local community a lot.
That is important to me, because I just really hope that they find something in a career that they are passionate about and not just going to work in a job where they’re not happy. That’s something that is my job, growing my two young boys into beautiful young men who are confident and happy within themselves, and are not going to settle for anything less with their careers and I just want to guide them through that. With having an older child who’s 26, we’ve been through that journey. So, we sort of know what we’re up against, and maybe we didn’t get things quite right, but you know, she’s happy, and we’ve given our children lots of love, and hopefully that will get them across the line, to be good men.
For us, something that we’ve decided this year, within our family to go back to the South Island, and leave the wonderful Auckland. We’re going back to the South Island because my partner of 20 years, he is from five generations of farming outside of Christchurch, so for one reason it’s to give our boys. We want to take them back, they go to the South Island every school holidays, visit the family, spend time on the farm which they love, but we actually want to give them those farming roots, family values, and a different life style, change of pace. I feel it’s our time to leave Auckland. We’ve been here 10 years, and Auckland is a wonderful city, and you know, I can’t bag it any way, but it is our time to leave. So that’s our journey.”
