So I’m a Kiwi Chick, eh?

See how I spelled eh? That’s the correct spelling. Aye is what Scots and sailors say, or politicians opposing the nays. Please do not make this mistake again, because one day I might be forced to write a VERY angry letter to the NZ Herald about it.

Now we have that out of the way, let’s get on with my New Zealandness. Yes, I’m that bride on the Suffragette Steps in Auckland, as blogged about by Ashley E. Remer of the Girl Museum: Kiwi Chicks inspire New Zealand

Suffragette Steps, Khartoum Place, Auckland - 19th January 2008 (Photographer: Gerald Shacklock)

In my own small, academic way, I have become one of many symbols for Aotearoa/New Zealand girlhood. I volunteered, and so there are even more pictures of me, my sister, my mother, my aunt, and several other ancestral girls in the Kiwi Chicks exhibition.

As it happens, I’m not too happy about the exhibition being called Kiwi Chicks. Not my decision to make, but as I wrote to Ashley when I first got involved in her project: “As a young(ish) NZ woman, the whole Kiwi Chicks thing gets annoying. I know it works well with kiwis being birds, but hey, we’re girls, not birds. We always tend to default to easy vernacular as a nation, but the ready use of chick means NZ has become a society where to call yourself a woman is perceived as being a bit up yourself. Particularly for teenage girls.”

But I’m prepared to bet that people don’t really think of me when they think of a New Zealand girl. Certainly not when they think of a “Kiwi Chick.” Whatever that is, but surely she’s more sporty or something? Climbs mountains? Maybe she’s really into listening to dub music at back-garden BBQs? Hell, I don’t know.   

National identity is about personal association and can have very little to do with how long you or your family have lived in a place, but I’m unequivocally a Pakeha New Zealander. My settler-society lineage is almost embarrassingly impeccable. I may not be a Colenso, Kemp or Williams (now there’s a burdensome ancestry), but my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and several of my great-great-grandparents were all born in New Zealand. I have family ties from Kamo in Northland right down to Gore in Southland. I was born in Lower Hutt, have lived in Kawerau, began my primary education in Whakatane, even speaking Maori in the playground, and then moved to Howick, where my conversational Te Reo was unsurprisingly of little use.

But my money’s on most people reading me in my teenage incarnation as a Mt Eden EGGS girl (That’s Epsom Girls’ Grammar School for those uninitiated with Auckland Central school slang). As if that urbane existence is somehow a less authentic expression of New Zealand life. Yes, yes, I know it means I’m a JAFA with a soulless and wraith-like national identity.  

Aside from being a proud Aucklander, I hold no other passport and am eligible for no ancestral right of abode in any other country than New Zealand.

Yet, a lot of people just presume I hold British citizenship, unwittingly implying that a red-headed, freckly, pretty well-spoken, choir-singing, book-reading girl couldn’t possibly be from round these parts.

My opera-singer sister gets it even worse.

My private school educated lawyer brother seldom receives such challenges to his national identity. Because he’s a bloke, and plays cricket, and was once pretty good at rugby, so that’s alright then.

Dorothea Turner wrote in 1972 that “The sense of belonging to and of possessing their country, which New Zealanders have been very slow to attain, came first to the less educated. The more a family made books a part of life, the more its mind was divided between the local reality and the equally powerful reality of literature, particularly that of England.” She was reflecting on how the author Jane Mander famously despaired in the 1930s about the suburbanisation of New Zealand, and how art had been reduced to “cake-making” for women and “chest development” for men. When faced with being “pressed into the very domestic, homogenous mould of the frontier,” Turner argues that unconventional New Zealand women had little choice but to accept the “quasiexcommunication” of literature and radicalism.[i]

Most of us are not radicals, but we bookish girls have always been viewed by our neighbours with some suspicion; and my family certainly took to books. My paternal grandmother went to Auckland University in the early 1940s and got a BA in History and Geology; my maternal grandmother left school at 14 to work in a factory, but she was arguably better read than her PhD-attaining granddaughter.

New Zealanders are far more willing now than in 1938 and 1972 to accept the arts and literature as part of our national make-up, but there are still conditions to that acceptance. We celebrate no.8 wire ingenuity, but are uncertain about dedicated study and reflection. We see the physical, the outdoors, the vernacular as our defining identity, and the performing and academic life as something New Zealanders do when overseas. Provided of course we make the news and reflect well on the nation. For New Zealand women there is the added expectation that we will eventually return to have children, because New Zealand is “such a great place to raise a family.” To reject that model, to not have children or to raise them elsewhere, leaves you open to a LOT of questioning from friends, family, and complete strangers. There is the hint that your behaviour is traitorous, or worse, unwomanly.

We’re sometimes too vain to admit it, but there’s still this image of an ideal New Zealand girl barefoot on the beach in a perpetual summer, effortlessly whipping up a pavlova or plate of fairy cakes. Of course, she now calls them cupcakes and has to post an instagram picture of them to Facebook. You know it’s true!

There is no single expression of New Zealandness nor girlhood, and for one moment in my life, I was (and still am) that New Zealand girl who took the time on her wedding day to have a photo on the Suffragette Steps. To briefly acknowledged on a day full of various images and ideals that my life as a married woman would follow a legacy of educated, socially-minded, politically-conscious women. New Zealand women whose DNA makes up some of my own signed that petition for enfranchisement back in 1893, and in the process helped make my Aotearoa/New Zealand and allowed me to be the “Kiwi Chick” <cough> I am today. 

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[i] These quotes come from Dorothea Turner, Jane Mander (New York: Twayne, 1972) 93, 126; and Jane Mander, “New Zealand Novels: The Struggle Against Environment,” The Press 15 December 1934: 19 [NZMS 535 APL].

Parenting Study Groups

I had a pretty difficult first year with my son. He didn’t sleep at night. My two-year-old daughter had turned from utterly delightful baby into tearaway toddler and wouldn’t sleep during the day. It made for an awful year of sleep deprivation and all that.

And I flippantly say “all that” because we got over it. It’s been and gone, and life is easier and more fun for us with slightly older children.

The advice that sticks with me now from that time is not the discussions I had in Young Master S’s coffee group, nor even my Miss B’s coffee group full of second time mums like myself.  Amid the general social directive that you have to cherish the baby years above all else because they go so quickly, the really helpful advice for me came from the light-hearted and almost resigned response of people with older children:

Having a baby and a toddler is awful, but they grow up.

Oh, I wouldn’t live those years again if you paid me.

You know, it just gets better and better with every year.

One day you’ll wake up and you’ll realise that it’s got so much easier and you didn’t even notice.

Stuff like that.

What that year of insanity taught me was that coffee groups are not for me, but not for the reasons everyone thinks. It was never the women in the group whom I clashed with, it the shared experience of having a baby. 

I managed to fall into three separate coffee groups. The first was my friend’s antenatal/neo-natal group in Edinburgh. I was pregnant, unsure of where I was going to have the baby or which country we would live in, so I did aqua-aerobics and then had coffee with a wonderful group of likeminded women.

Still, I’d always feel depressed when I got home, but never told anyone.

My second was another friend’s Plunket coffee group in Mt. Eden, Auckland. Yet another group of likeminded women, two of whom are my very good friends with children who are my children’s very good friends. Still love seeing everyone - could never quite deal with my reaction to coffee group.

The third was a group of wonderful likeminded women I met at yoga during my second pregnancy. Again, great women, but coffee group coupled with severe sleep deprivation quite literally tipped me over the edge. And yes, when I lost it, I lost it at coffee group. Classy. (Guess what? No one really wants to see you lose it. Ever. For that I apologise unreservedly.)

Obviously it was me. I don’t suit coffee group, which is fine. Plenty of people don’t. The need for information and advice brought out the bossy know-it-all in me, but without the altruistic joy of teaching literature or the frivolousness of pub quiz. Coffee groups really are earnest places and you just can’t jest with a group of tired, anxious first-time mothers, no matter how likeminded you all are. This was made apparent when I went to pick my husband up from work one day and his colleagues were all deciding which of them would be Piggy in a Lord of the Flies situation. As I exclaimed in desperation at the time, “this conversation would NEVER happen at coffee group. God, I miss boys.”

Yet, I still wanted to figure out what new motherhood reminded me of and I kept coming back to a single analogous reason: it’s like School Certificate. (Insert NCEA Level 1 if you’re young; or GCSEs if you’re English; or Standard Grade if you’re Scottish - or whatever national examinations you have in your country around the age of 15, if indeed you have such a thing).

Having a baby suddenly made me feel like I was at school. You’re surrounded by females your own age (yes, I went to a girls’ school), and you’re all doing the same thing. There’s always a group of self-appointed prefect types who like bandying about rules and saying how things should be done, and there’s also a group of very helpful and concerned middle-aged women who constantly offer well-meaning but unnecessary advice.

By extension, coffee groups are like a class of School Cert students certain to pass, but still freakishly obsessing over their exams, and who refuse to listen to the university students they know who say, “you know what, so long as you pass, in a few years no will even care what you get. No one will be in the least interested. Actually, come to think of it, there are some people in my course who never even got School Cert and enrolled as mature students once they turned 20, and I’ve other friends who just got a job and are doing well. It just doesn’t matter.”

I am in no way suggesting that there is a correlation between success in school and success in raising children, but like having children, secondary education is common ground for most people in some capacity. As with doing well in your school exams, social factors generally have more to do with your success at raising children than any adherence to a particular methodology. Put simply, getting into university was always going to happen in my peer group, just as raising healthy happy children is pretty much a given. (And much of the healthy part is outwith our control anyway).

Yet we persist in stressing about it and stressing each other about it.

There is always the need for peer group support, but I wish I’d remembered when my babies were brand new how much I hated the peer group hype and the devastating import placed on progressive stages of High School. I just could never believe it - I knew enough older people to make me utterly cynical of intense preparation and the belief that this was the most important thing ever.

How you raise your children is obviously important, but we’re probably all going to “pass” the “test”. We just might do it in different ways. Also, success is not charted by a final mark.

So maybe we need mixed-level coffee groups or peer-support tutors to give newbies some perspective. Any volunteers? It might also help to enforce co-ed coffee groups - but really, the last thing my husband wanted to do was come along to coffee group. Honestly, he’d rather work a 60 hour week. Or go to pub quiz. Maybe the dads are onto something...

Seriously, we probably just need to remember that our parents and our slightly more experienced friends do know what they’re talking about, and that if you are struggling, help is more likely to come from someone slightly removed from your situation. Indeed, our first time mother friends might be the last people we should be listening to because they may have lost the plot too. 

But whatever happens in those early months, in a few short years, no one will care about how you got your baby to sleep.

The first post

I have started a blog. Another voice in the crowd rambling away about herself and her ideas.

I’ve been meaning to start one, to write things about stuff, for a while. To put all my rants onto paper/screen and to force myself to refine them for public view. I also hope that it will give me a forum to develop in a different context my academic writing, which has slipped by the wayside a little since my eldest was born.

So expect to hear about my frustrations with academic life and life with small children. But also expect to read about the joys of books and ideas and those tiring but brilliant children I have the pleasure to call my own. I’m still working out what their handles will be, but for the meantime I live with Mr Evans, Miss B, and Young Master S. I’ll probably slip as that gets too cumbersome and pretentious.

The other reason for starting this now is that we’re moving to Canada in June. I’m not going to minutely document the move, but it provides a great opportunity to record how my little family copes with a great emigration and all our hopes, fears, and anticipations. As well as the big questions like why doesn’t NZ have a reciprocal drivers licence agreement with Ontario?

This is not a “parenting” blog, but as I’ve only been a very part-time academic for nearly five years, being a mum and housewife is the inevitable focus of my life. Some of this will come with that frustration born of finding myself pregnant at the same time as I finished my PhD and a consequent work/parenting balance decided for me. (Just in case you know someone in a similar situation, it’s always best to congratulate the PhD as lustily and enthusiastically as you would the pregnancy - chances are they put more time and hard work into the thesis!) Some of it will come with my delight in the things I study and research.

Thus, my first proper post will be on the subject of being a mummy, but in the spirit of its thesis, I’ve tried to condense the last five years into a response on why we probably shouldn’t obsess so much about the methodology of parenting. In the words of the great Bill Murray, “It just doesn’t matter!”