Holiday Mayhem

How do you holiday when you’re a solo Mum of five?  With great bloody difficulty!  The logistics alone in terms of juggling 20 days of Annual Leave and 84+ school holiday days - mind boggling.  We are about to head off for another ‘holiday’.  That means we travel to the other end of the country where the kids get to spend time with whanau they love and adore and I get to work from conveniently located offices nearby.  Solo parenting is all about making the most of what you have!  The fact that we travel cross country gives the kids a sense of going away.  And they can ‘holiday’ while I work.  Working in a different part of the country helps me to see my job from a different perspective, and meet people in our organisation I might otherwise never meet.  It helps that they’re a great group of people too.  Win-win?  So far.

I try to make sure of course that I do spend actual time with the kids doing proper holiday stuff.  There is the obligatory shopping trip with the daughters, while the boys carry the bags.  You would think!  ALL five of my kids LOVE shopping.  And they all have million dollar shopping lists that are grossly mismatched to their mother’s something thousand dollar salary.  Shopping with sons vs. shopping with daughters?  I swear there’s a whole ‘nother outblog waiting to be explored there!  And we have developed a movie day/night.  Day for the young ones with their young cousins.  And night for the older kids.  And one other big outing.  All about mixing it up!

I get a bit stressed taking the kids to ‘holiday attractions’.  Everything is about ‘whanau/family’ in the holidays.  Family meal deals, family concession passes, family specials.  You can feel pretty self-conscious of your reality when you see families all around you.  It is hard.  And sad.  I know I feel the loss more than the kids and I try to wo-man up and be brave so my kids see strength.  And I mostly get away with it.  But there are signals, shifts, nuances and my kids know my sadness.  They have learnt from my reactions, their reality and experience and smile politely at the nice hospitable people who speak as if ‘Dad’ is a part of the equation. 

And speaking of Dad.  I have accepted that I cannot say how holidays should look for him and the kids.  I spent a fair few sets of holidays planning and booking time for the kids to be with the Dad.  Pick them up here, on this day, at this time.  Do this, do that, none of this, none of that. Threats.  Emotional blackmail.  Not my finest moments.  Caused me nothing but stress.  In retrospect, I realise how much of that was me trying to maintain control.  Now I let him know the holiday dates and if there is an offer from him to spend time with the kids, I pack their bags, take them to the pick up point and wave them goodbye.  And if there is no offer, no worries.  I live and learn.  That goes for his whanau too.  I put the offer out there and if they want to see the kids, that gets worked into holidays too.  I cant be evil and keep my kids from them.  Only in my alternate world lol. 

Holidays should be all about whanau.  And there is one special whanau that no matter what, no matter how late the planning, how last minute the phonecall will always put us up every holiday.  The pot is always on when we get there, the beds are always made, and it always feel like home.  I hope everybody has a whanau like that.  What would we do without the Widdicombe Whanau - whanau4life.

Here come the disclaimers!

I do plan to have this blog be about my whanau4life.  And I hope by now you get a sense that whanau in our world is bigger than just my kids and I.  There are so many things that interweave in our immediate lives, and things that happen on the periphery that affect us all the time.  If I really intend to be a shameless capitalist and make gazillions off this blog then I have to post about as many of these connections as possible.

The hub of this blog is my kids and I, you'll meet them soon.  We are the centre of the network.    And yes, if you’ve noticed my blog-speak, I have been googling ‘how to blog’ and apparently I can have more than one blog and it should stem from the hub.  Kind of like the spokes of a wheel on a bike (that is directly ripped off of someone elses blog, I may have to pay for that!).  There will be a blog at the end of each spoke, an outblog.  Thus forming my own network of blogs.  Perhaps one of these outblogs can narrate the journey I’ve taken.  Who knows.

Now for the disclaimers.  This blog wont be a man-hate-fest aimed at the ex.  That will be reserved for one of my R-18 outblogs!  You will most definitely have to subscribe to that one because it will be worth the money haha.  It wont be a soul–searching hunt for the real me either.  Though I believe that is bloggable, the truth is every post will reveal something about the real me.  And my language.  I can gangsta it up if I have to,  but in my (second year) seventh form history class, my teacher taught me to embrace my knowledge of the language and not be ashamed to use my big words.  What can I say, I read so much as a kid that I’m just an out-and-out nerd.  So take me, take my language.

The last disclaimer?  The rawness.  I cant or wont change the way I write.  It has to be real.  Its who I am.  I did worry about the level of pain that my kids could read about, but they know I hide nothing from them.  They have seen me at my lowest and cried too.  But they wont let me stay there.  Nothing gets me out of a sook session faster than their need for me to get over myself and cook/clean/pay/play/drive...live.  They're quite simply the best kids - I cant wait to introduce them to you!

This blog will be about the things I have learnt, the fears I have faced and conquered, and the joys of being a mum, a solo mum.  Awww, cant get better than that!  It took me ages to accept that label.  Solo mum.  And I know my story isn’t unique, how many of us know a woman currently raising kids on her own?  I am not the first woman to do this, and sadly I wont be the last.  This blog is about acknowledging all the people I have met, and the people I will meet, who have helped shape my new life, my new look  whanau.  My strength is my whanau, whanau is my strength.  Ohh, maybe I can outblog about cheesy oneliners!

When the dust settled.

Chaos.  Five months in Christchurch, a beautiful city I have been told, but for me the City holds horrible and ugly secrets.  Lies.  Mess.  Pain.  Grief.  Chaos.  The end of 14 years, and the end of the whanau that I believed my kids would be a part of well, forever.  Thats what I wanted for them.  Thats what I couldn’t give them.  I was devastated.  We left Christchurch as fast as we could. 

We hit Otaki, where our whanau home is, in the middle of the night and I curled up on the floor and symbolically died.  The very next day without missing a beat my kids all returned to the kura that knew them as whanau and the kohanga that knew its moko, and they were welcomed and reabsorbed like they hadn’t been away for five months.  Not many people in New Zealand would proclaim this but the New Zealand education system saved our lives.  As a Māori Educationalist I may yet live to reflect on that statement many times over.  But at the time, I was grateful for education.  More precisely, Te Kura-a-Iwi o Whakatupuranga Rua Mano (WRM) and Turoa Kohanga Reo (TKR).  In simple terms WRM is a Composite School in NZ for ages 5-18 and TKR is an Early Childhood Centre for under 5’s.  Both WRM and TKR are underpinned by Maori Pedagogies and philosophies of which the notion of whanau is a central tenet.  The principal language of instruction is Te Reo Māori.

I trudged back and forth between Wellington and Otaki, an hour each way, to a job I loved (I may reflect on that later in life too)  and ultimately needed and, surprisingly, to a whanau that I never knew existed.  Wake.  Wellington.  Work.  Otaki.  Sleep.  That routine was to be the saviour of my sanity, for almost a year.  While I was on zombie survival mode, my work whanau looked out for me and the Kura and Kohanga nurtured and raised my kids, because I could not.  I am usually a very engaged parent and care much about the doings at Kura and Kohanga, especially when it relates to my kids.  I like to invest time into both Kura and Kohanga because I believe so strongly in the kaupapa (cause, philosophy) and the system works best when whanau give back in kind.  I was so emotionally messed up that I couldn’t give.    I feel pretty bad about not giving to them.  But there will be a right  time for me to give back to the Kura and the Kohanga.  I only hope it will be in a manner equal to that which we have received.

We found another special whanau to support us during that first tough year.  A strong woman and her beautiful children.  They were always there.  How many tears did she witness - mine, my childrens?  So many.  Each tear carried grief and pain, and healing too as they dried.  How could a woman who had so much of her own pain give so much to my children and I?  Open home, open heart.  She was meant to be in my life, I truely believe that.  And I am so very thankful for her friendship and support.  He wahine purotu, he wahine toa. 

I barely kept it together that year. I know I fed my kids.  Clothed them.  Laughed and cried with them. But I was grieving for the whanau I should have had.  Grieving because I felt like I had failed to provide that for my kids.  I was very numb and dazed.  How was I going to do this?  Why did I have to do this?  Many tormented hours wondering about what whanau meant.   Were we a whanau?  Of course we were.  A rejigged, reformed, redefined whanau.  I symbolically took back my life.

Whanau takes on a whole new meaning and so many different forms when you go through a break up.  When the dust settled, I was the head of a new whanau, and more importantly my kids and I had found a support network of new whanau.  Only they weren’t really new, they were always there.  Whanau at Kura.  Whanau at Kohanga.  Whanau at work. Whanau right next door.  And I haven’t forgotten the strengths of the women in my life who gave so much to me, in subtle ways and more direct ways.  My Wahine Toa Whanau.  My two beautiful sisters, my friend in Otaki, my empathetic 'see right through me' friend at work, my Varsity friends, and so many more.  He mihi.  Wonderful, powerful women who are indeed whanau.  All of these people, our  Whanau4life. 

Introducing...the chaos

In the beginning there was a girl.  And she met a guy.  They had five kids together.  He met another girl.  And left.  Then the chaos began.


Me
Five kids 
Raising five kids
Me Raising five kids
Me raising five kids alone!


Nothing prepares you for that moment, the moment when you fully realise that you have to raise five kids on your own.  And raising kids waits for nobody.  No time for an indulgent emotional recovery.  No paid time off work to cope with change.  Nope.  Nothing.  Just total chaos.


I have five kids for life.  I have a fulltime job, and I am all alone. 


Welcome to our life, whanau4life.