Charlotte | Waiheke Island
“Well, when you said that you were going to be talking about regret, the biggest regret of my life immediately came to mind.
When I had my children I had very idealistic ideas that I was going to develop my career and also be super-mum, and it didn’t work out like that. In the end, I stepped away from the career side and focussed on looking after my two children, and my biggest regret is not that I did that. I think that was for me, the right decision to make, but I regret I didn’t enjoy it more, that I think I was feeling guilty, because, you know, other friends seemed to be able to manage both career and parenting better than I appeared to be doing. I felt a bit angry that I hadn’t had more support, so that I could do both, and somewhere in the middle of all that, you know, I lost just the sheer day-to-day satisfaction of looking after my children the best I could, and now I look back, giving them a pretty good childhood, really yeah.
Everyone says, make the most of it because the time’s over so soon, and it’s a truism, but you know that, that is true. I think the difficult thing with parenting is that from day-to-day, you don’t always see a lot of progress or a lot of achievement. It’s when you stand back and look at it after your children have grown up. So, it’s trying to enjoy it. It’s like putting tiles in a mosaic; each little tile builds up the picture, and it’s like enjoying each tile as you put it in place, rather than expecting to enjoy the whole picture immediately.
I’m just so proud of my two daughters. My eldest daughter, Eleanor has chosen to live on Waiheke Island with her husband, and she has been involved in a number of jobs around social justice. At the moment she’s working for an organisation that is seeking to make sexual exploitation of young people for money more visible in New Zealand, and my other daughter, Briony who lives in Whangarei is a clinical health psychologist, and she’s doing amazing work up there. No grandchildren as yet, but both my daughters want to have children, and I’m looking forward to enjoying my grandchildren this time around.
I was born in Kaitaia, up North, and I came to Auckland to go to university, and I’ve lived in Auckland and for the last 13-14 years on Waiheke Island ever since. I did a master’s degree in history at Auckland University, and since then I’ve been involved in any number of activist campaigns I suppose, including setting up out-of-school care as a sector in New Zealand, and since, I came to Waiheke very involved in the environment, and in zero waste, and growing food locally.”
