The Price We Pay

Last year when Xavier turned 21, I had all these notes for this big speech, accompanied by a powerpoint presentation (LOL) that I was going to give at the party, but a week before that, some shit went down and all of my resources had to be redirected elsewhere, so here’s some of those words I wanted to share, coloured in new paint by everything that’s happened in the past year.

For the record.

And if you’ve done it right you’ll have all these stories to tell.

And what you do is
you take those stories
each one as you go
and you let them tattoo your soul.

Like the tablets on Sinai inscribed for Moses by the finger of God himself
These stories are a map that lead back to you.

And like the tablets on Sinai inscribed for Moses by the finger of God himself
One day they will lead you out of the desert and set you free.

My son turned 21 last year, and I had been waiting 21 years for that moment
And when it came it ate me alive, and there’s a scar on my wrist now that tells me about love.

I got the scar after my husband burst through the fence wild and full of rage,
But that’s not the part that matters here.

I’m going to tell a story
And maybe you’ll understand, just a little
Why that day and that night and that place
And these people are the part that matters.

And maybe one day, my son will read through this map and he’ll start to understand (even just a little) why raising him was such a battle for me, and how I was always tussling with wanting to love him like the baby I brought home at 19 years old OR keeping him safe.

One or the other, I didn’t know I could do both.

Because I didn’t know how love worked
And I had no fucking idea what I was doing.

But this was my best shot, I promise.

I’m just gonna tell a story.

My Mum is the youngest of 13 children.

My Nana gave birth to her at 44 years old, so by the time she came along she already had nieces and nephews older than her, and when she was 8 years old they all came from Niue on the ship named TOFUA and they made a new home in Grey Lynn.

In her late teens my Mum started working in restaurants, eventually ending up in the kitchen. 

She’s a phenomenal chef and caretaker and lover of hospitality.

My Mum taught me style, and she took me out to eat at fancy restaurants all the time, and how to take care of my skin, and to never leave the house looking like a mess, because in our family we’re always clean and well presented.

She taught me other things too, like how to get shit done, because what’s the alternative?

So I always had nice things
I was always clean and well groomed
I was a smart and really sweet kid
My childhood was rich in culture.

That’s all true.

AND it’s also true that the adults who were responsible for my overall well being just weren’t equipped with the knowledge and skill sets to keep me safe.

In my first 10 years of life I saw lots of really bad things.

I was sexually abused on the regular and forced to keep secrets that weren’t mine, and I was burdened by the fallacy that somehow all these things were my fault.

And I had nowhere else to go.

My Mum was a single Mum, all my other cousins had 2 families, different cousins and aunties and uncles, different Nana’s, which was such a strange concept to me.

They would tell me stories about them,
These people and places and spaces that they would go that I couldn’t touch.

There was no where else for me but home.

7 Wilton Street, Grey Lynn.

The dairy at the top of the street before it became Gypsy.

Mrs Alice and her daughters Adele & Kim, across the road at number 6.

The basketball courts at the top of Baildon.

Grey Lynn park and the Richmond Rovers.

Touch tournaments in the summer.

The sound of elephants in the morning from the Zoo.

The last post on ANZAC Day dawn, trumpeting through the trees from the RSA on Francis St.

Walking home with the groceries from Foodtown.
(walking everywhere)

And $1 chips from Goodwill.

The 027 bus
Aladdin's Bath house.

And sitting on the steps on Sundays to wave to my Samoan friends who went to the AOG church on my street.

This was the only place made for me.

And everyone else would come and go,
But I would always be there.

Waiting for them to come back.

Parts of me are still waiting.
(I think they will go soon)

In my head the streets of Grey Lynn are the Kingdom.

And we were the nobility.

My Grandfather was the King, and I was the Princess of course.
My Nana called me Cinderella.

Now, I’ve lived long enough inside myself to know; that all of these memories, and the way I tell them, and how they smell and what they sound like, are an amalgamation of fact, truth, legend and myth.

That after all is said and done,
I was a kid surviving
Like many kids do.

And these are the storylines that kept me alive
In a world that threw me to the wolves.

By 18 I was living in an apartment in the city, dealing drugs, staying in 5-star hotels, riding in fancy cars, and eventually being raped by gang members in a sleazy motel room at the Lincoln Green in Henderson.

While it’s happening I stare at the pale lime green walls around me, and I wonder why this didn’t hurt as much as it should, not physically, but to my heart and on the codes stamped into my cells, they stopped writing ~ and I marvelled at our innate capacity for survival, and all the different ways we do it.

Apparently they call this dissociation. Now I remember the pale lime green walls and the wonder, and I don’t remember the men in the room.

I had a boyfriend who was also just a stupid kid like me
But he had the same unrest in his bones that I did
So he felt familiar.

And then I was pregnant, and it was time to go home again.

The walls and the ceilings
And the draft through the windows
The crooked floor under my feet
The daisies on the grass
The feijoa tree
The banana leaves
And the red letterbox

These are the bones of Number 7.

The bones that kept the same secrets as me.

On the 29th of September 2002, Xavier was born. I called him Xavier Jack after my Poppy, and I gave him his father’s name, Joshua. 

Xavier Jack Joshua was born at 27.5 weeks, and I watched him sleep every day in the hospital until he was allowed to come home, back to the bones that carried the same secrets as me.

And then 11 months later, 2 days before my 20th birthday, I said goodbye to my Nana for the last time, and the day she left was the day the bones started to crumble.

And the sky fell down.

1 year later, a week before my own 21st birthday I was in the hospital giving birth to a 20-week-old still-born baby that had stopped growing inside me.

I was by myself while some friends were watching Xavier, and my friend’s Mum picked me up from the hospital, drove me back to their house and we smoked a joint and I went to bed. 

A week later I was still bleeding when I went out to the clubs like a lunatic, getting stupidly drunk and just trying to get on with life.

That pattern went on for a while, sometimes it still does, even 20 years on.

During that time, most weeks I was lucky to have $20 left in my pocket, standing in the aisles at Woolworths on Richmond Road, choosing between buying formula or nappies.

Very early into motherhood I promised this kid that that no matter what happened, when he woke up in the morning it would be me who was there, and when he went to sleep at night it would be me who was there. 

Keeping him safe was the only thing that mattered.

And the most dangerous thing in the world to me was the well-intentioned words and beliefs of the other adults around us.  

Adults who had never kept me safe, trying to imprint onto my son.  So I taught him to always look for me, to hear my voice, to know me first.  

I remember there was an ad on TV at the time of a Grandpa out walking with his grandson, and his grandson would ask him all these questions and the Grandpa had all the answers, and the kid asked him “how many apples on that tree Grandpa?” and the Grandpa looked at the tree and back at the kid and he said some random number and the kid was like “Wooowwww”.

And that became the foundation of how I parented my son, from a fucking T.V ad of all things.

Because in my head for him to be safe he had to listen for me - always.

Until Xavier was around 8 years old he thought I was a spy, I would tell him that so he would never worry when things weren’t going to plan.

When we didn’t have a home to live in, or when I had black eyes, or when I was crying from the unrest, I would see him look for me, and I would wink at him, and whisper, “don’t worry, it’s all part of the plan”.

Xavier Jack Joshua, is a good person.

He is my earth. The soil that forced me to pull things out from their roots and plant new seeds.

I wanted him to have a better chance than me. To have more choices and a soft place to fall.

But all of that was directly proportional to the willingness of the parent to go toe to toe with the unrest, and to walk through the fire.

So as the years went on and the unrest got louder and the fire lapped at my feet, I fucked up a lot at being his Mum; and there are so many things I had to ask his forgiveness for and likely many more to come.

Most of the time I just didn’t know what else to do, but staying honest and being real with him was the only tool I had because bad things can only happen in dark places.

Raising my son continues to be my greatest teacher, it has stripped me down to my bones where the secrets are, and it brought me home.

So just like me, it’s true that Xavier had a childhood that was beautiful and unconventional, and bold and adventurous.

AND it’s also true that the adults who were responsible for his overall well being just weren’t equipped with the knowledge and skill sets to keep him safe [from all the things inside of them they couldn’t name.']

And that never, ever should have happened, but it did, that’s the nature of being alive.

Life is like making wishes to a genie, he grants your wishes, but never tells you the price you’re about to pay.

And you have no choice in the matter really, in this lifetime of infinite possibilities you must choose, and each choice comes at a cost.

As parents we pay that price on behalf of our children, and whether they would pay the same price is irrelevant, as cruel as that sounds, that’s how it is, that’s why we have the job, and they don’t, even though in the end, we both have to live with the cost.

In 21 years Xavier Jack Joshua has traveled the world.

He’s seen things and had experiences that most people will never get to have in a whole lifetime.

He’s alive, doesn’t have a criminal record, he’s well traveled and well read, he’s an expert at his craft, he’s kind, and he knows how to think.

The price was high, but I’d pay it again, even though I’m sure he’d disagree, one day I hope he can see that I chose the best of the choices in front of me.

He was a funny, character of a kid, who loved to sing and do silly things, he played Junior footy at Goodna Rugby League Club from 6 until he was 14.

And then I made him choose between footy or Boxing, he chose Boxing.

He lived through addiction and anger.

He didn’t ever live in a home without a hole in the wall.

When he was 5 years old he bought a dog with his birthday money, his name was Diggy, and I didn’t grow up with dogs, but I did grow up with death - and I wanted him to know the loss and grief of death, the feeling of your breath being snatched from you.

The understanding of permanency vs that which is fleeting, so a dog I thought, whose life was much shorter than ours, could teach him this lesson.

And then one day we had to surrender Diggy to the pound because the dog wasn’t safe in our home anymore.

And not long after that, Xavier watched his Dad attempt to take his own life.

And that whole lesson on loss and grief came to visit on him in ways I never saw coming.

And so I kept him in spaces where he could see healthy men.

But I still taught him about his father, and his limitations, and his hurt, and his fear, and all the ways that he’s survived.

Until I was too tired to keep singing that song alone.

Xavier made me swim in deep water, figuratively and literally.

I wouldn’t get in water if I couldn’t touch the bottom.

And then one day we went swimming with dolphins and sharks in Te Moananui A Kiwa, the Pacific Ocean and jumped off cliffs into the clearest water in the world on Niue.

He made me demand seats at tables that weren’t built for me.

He showed me what I was capable of.

Last year when we presented our son with his 21st key, in the moment that I had waited 21 years to see, I didn’t have these words, they weren’t in me.

But there’s power in our human rites of passage, because one year on I can see that the moment I waited 21 years for, in the home with the bones that carry the same secrets as me, on that day, the unrest came to sit in the palm of my hand, it’s final resting place, and the end of this story, that took a whole year to tell.

Life is fucking wild.

A process of unraveling and revealing, and for kids like me, and his Dad, and now him, the firstborn children, well, I’m fairly sure that even in alternate realities on different timelines, a million light years away or a million within, there was no other way to get this close to the bone.

And for my son this will one day be a part of his Peace.

That we got all the way down to the bones.
Where the secrets are kept and the stories are told.
Now we are one cut deeper than he will ever have to go.

In that moment I had waited 21 years for, I sat with my son among the people who we will one day bury, and who will bury us, and they are the greatest investment and legacy I could ever give to my children.

So about that scar on my wrist now, it represents the price I paid to know love in the way that I know it now, and when I look at it I know I am loved, and I see all of the faces of the people who mean so much to me, my Mum, my brother, my friends, my people that came for us, and for them there are some prices I’ll never pay again.

I promise.

To Xavier,

Your 21st key is baby blue because no matter how much you grow (and I want you to grow) I want you to grow fiercely and never stop - but there will always be a place in you that is my baby boy.

And there’s the Auckland city skyline
Because these are the streets that carved the path for you.

And the area codes 09 and 77, that’s the distance between your 2 worlds.

The Winnings boxing gloves are symbolic of the other parent that raised you ~ the boxing ring.

The best of everything I gave you, I found between those ropes.

Because of you I tried my very best.

It carries every single one of your names.
Xavier Jack Joshua Mata’afa-Ikinofo.

But most importantly is the Vaka that reflects off your name by the mirror that represents the oceans and seas that are now yours to navigate.

And the scripture, Jeremiah 29:11 - For I know the plans I have for you says the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

We live in a home now that will never have a hole in the wall, where the city skyscrapers watch over us, and the water flows nearby.

In this home I’m learning to be your Mum again, and I’m learning about you in ways I didn’t know how to before, and it’s really hard, but I won’t turn away.

Please take this key, and use it to unlock EVERY door you find.

I said it before, but I’ll say it again, you may not agree with the price we paid, but the second you start to walk through the doors that were opened for you, you will.

Oue, Tulou!

Mum.