Feel a bit ripped off by Ardern — hope I’m wrong
When I was pregnant with my first child I was living (it up) in Australia. The baby’s father and I moved back to New Zealand in the very last stages of the pregnancy and set up house in suburban Taranaki.
He worked as a timber machinist, which he was qualified for as a trade, earning back then $15 an hour.
I stayed at home with the baby but not for long. We were under so much financial pressure before Christmas, when the baby was only six months old, that I was bought to tears by a phone bill.
How pathetic.
I went and got a job. The breastfeeding baby was thrown into paid daycare for two days a week and, thankfully, her grandmother took the baby for the remaining three working days, which really was the only reason it made any sense for me to get a job and for her loving generosity, I will remain eternally grateful.
By the time the second baby came along, No.1 was off to school.
Meanwhile, I had improved jobs from a shop assistant (children’s wear) to an administration assistant (oil and gas exploration).
I resigned when the baby was due.
My partner changed jobs because of the low pay. Totally inexperienced, he took on a farm worker’s job, which came with a free house, albeit in the cold Taranaki nether region of Stratford.
When he resigned from the planing mill job, management tried to retain him at the last minute with an offer of $15.50 an hour, which needless to say he declined.
I worked from home as a freelance writer for 10 cents a word and was interviewing clients for a story when I went into labour with No.2.
After Stevie was born, I continued writing and took the baby with me to interviews, which was a bit eye-boggling when she had to be fed, but we all got over it.
Then we became selfemployed as sharemilkers and the kids had to fend for themselves a lot of the time because it was easier to park them in front of a Barney video than drag them down to the cowshed or calf-feeding in the persistent rain. This would be considered illegal today.
The kids (who are now 20 and 26) still know the Barney video off by heart, word for word, to this day.
When the relationship faltered, the girls were 10 and 5. I ended up managing a 130-cow farm on my own and my elder daughter became a surrogate mother to her sibling.
They were left to get on with it a lot of the time. I worked my way up the sharemilking ranks – variable order and 50/50 – racing around like a mad thing trying to keep up with the kids’ schooling, swimming, ballet, gymnastics, and it was all governed by the overriding demands of milking twice a day.
Looking back, it all seems a bit neglectful by today’s standards, but at the time I felt I had to provide an income and do what I had to do – right or wrong.
Now we have a female Prime Minister who might have celebrated her political windfall with a night of unprotected sex and turned up to the country’s top job knowing she was pregnant.
While a piece of me admires her modernity – and I love a baby as much as the next middle-aged woman – but a big piece of me is feeling galled at the maternity leave early on in the piece and the childcare perks all paid for by the taxpayer.
I also feel we are getting half a Prime Minister – ripped off! I hope she proves me wrong.
‘‘. . .a big piece of me is feeling galled at the maternity leave early on in the piece and the childcare perks all paid for by the taxpayer’’.
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