Lisa – Auckland
“I shared a meal with someone; recently it would be with one of my really good friends who’s Austrian. We met here in Auckland 13 years ago, and she’s famous for her chicken schnitzel. So once a month, since I’m a fan of a chicken schnitzel, I go over to her house and we have a meal together, and catch up on good times.
We used to live together in Westmere, in Auckland as flatmates, and she’s my hairdresser, hence the purple hair and shaved haircut on the side. We talk about all types of things. As woman to woman, we talk about relationships. We both have partners. She’s been going out with her partner for quite awhile, and same, and I’ve got a kid. So I talk about the sort of troubles in my relationship that I have, or challenges I might say, with having a little one. We talk about old times when we used to live together.
The reason why I chose pink hair and to have it shaved was that I just didn’t want to be a typical soccer mum, with boring hair. Even though I’m a mum, I still have a bit of a vibrant side to me, and I just wanted to express that. If I’m going to go short, I might as well have fun with it, and if I’m going to dye it, I might as well have fun with it. So yeah, that’s basically why I did it.
I think the biggest challenge for me, being a mum is just losing a little bit of freedom of doing whatever you want to do; just picking up and going. You’re just constantly thinking about them. It’s just, I suppose, your personal time gets limited. I was a big traveller before I had him. My partner was a big traveller, so it’s just a little bit different now, and I feel that biggest challenge at the moment is just being a stay-at-home mum, and I’m kind of feeling a bit itchy and scratchy. So I’m going to be back to work in May, because that’s just my personality and I feel that he needs to be stimulated more with kids his own age in day-care. So that was my biggest challenge, but I’m trying to sort that out now.”
