Dr Siouxsie Wiles with daughter Eve and husband Professor Steven Galbraith. Photo / Doug Sherring
It's Mother's Day, so At Home asked five famous New Zealand women - artists, writers, and creatives - to reflect on a piece of wisdom their own mother gave them about the meaning of "home".
As an actress, a big part of my life is flying
to wherever my job takes me. I find myself in new and unfamiliar places like Prague, New York and London, where it's easy to get lost and hard to find a space to call my own. Usually I'm able to call my mum before any loneliness comes creeping in but when I'm in need of more than a pixelated smile or virtual hug, often her advice is "have the courage to reach out and make a connection". And she's right!
Usually the people I gravitate to are the makeup and wardrobe departments — I always feel the most grounded and myself when they're making me laugh or bringing me back down to earth (which generally means singing Disney songs at the top of our lungs until we're told to pipe down). For me, home is where my whānau is, and by the end of a couple months of filming I end up with a whole new family. who become my home away from home.
I don't always follow my mum's advice, but the one thing I can't negate is that she's an expert in love and has, along with my dad, gifted me with more wisdom than I care to admit.
My mother doesn't understand the question.
"What do you mean "where is home"? I am at home."
And she is. In the Remuera house she's lived in for more than four decades.
"But Mum, you said you regretted coming here with Dad".
"Of course. My family is in Hong Kong. My friends are in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has great public transport."
Hong Kong's public transport is pretty great.
"So is home Hong Kong for you?"
"I don't have a house there."
"Mum, I mean symbolically. Where is home for you?"
"Ugh. I don't know what you are asking! With my husband and children, of course!"
For a while now, I've struggled to reconcile Mum's regrets about settling in New Zealand with my own feelings about Aotearoa. Fact is, with all its caveats, I'm happy to be a New Zealander. If my mother had been less of a traditionalist and refused to follow my father across the world here, who would I be? It reminds me of another thing my mum's said to me, several times:
"In my next life, if I get to choose, I want to be a man."
"Why? What's wrong with being a woman?"
"Being a woman is too hard."
This hurts my heart. I'm proud to be a woman. Are there things my mother didn't get to do in this life, because she was a woman? I wish my mother was less burdened by tradition. But if she hadn't been, this version of me wouldn't exist. If I think about this for too long, my head hurts.
My mum doesn't have time for all of this earnest existential identity stuff.
"I still don't know what you are talking about. Just write that I think home is when parents and children stay together, and love each other, and look after each other, Okay?"
For my mother, home is family. Home is regret. Home is love, and isolation. Mum, if you're reading this, home is a gift you gave me so I wouldn't have to feel the pain you might've felt when you moved away from home. Happy Mother's Day, and thank you, with all of who I am.
I've always struggled with the word home. It has so many meanings. According to the dictionary, home is simultaneously the place where you physically live, the social unit formed by the people you live with, and your place of origin. But it is also a place that provides residence and care for people with special needs, and a base of operations or headquarters. Meanwhile to be at home is to be relaxed, comfortable, at ease. It is to be in harmony with your surroundings or on familiar ground. And to be home free is to be out of danger or in a comfortable position.
I think one of the reasons I struggle with home is that it is a word that is supposed to make us feel safe and secure. But the sad reality is that for so many people it doesn't.
I have been very privileged. My mum and dad were always able to provide a safe and secure place for me to physically live. My social units have always been loving and supportive.
But my relationship with my place of origin is more complicated. When I was four my family emigrated from Yorkshire in the UK to South Africa. My only memory of Yorkshire from that time is of watching a large drunk man fall out of a pub in the snow and stagger off leaving one of his shoes behind. I was frightened. But my mum was holding my hand. She made me feel at home until we got home.
When I was a teenager we moved back to Yorkshire. It was a very difficult time and so my feelings for Yorkshire now are much more complicated. It isn't home, despite it being my place of origin.
Within a few years I'd moved to Edinburgh to go to university. After that I lived in Oxford for a few years, and then in London. I loved living in London. I definitely felt at home there.
But life intervened and nearly 11 years ago I emigrated to Aotearoa New Zealand with my new social unit – my partner and my daughter. Because they are the ones whose hands I hold.
It took a few years, but this is now home. It's the place I feel safe and secure. Where I feel relaxed and comfortable and at ease. Perhaps more so during this global pandemic. And even though she lives thousands of kilometres away, back in Yorkshire, I still feel like my mum is holding my hand.
We danced with our mum. She was a gymnast when she was younger, could still do the splits and walkovers as an adult and would perform on demand when we pleaded for her to, so we could be amazed, yet again.
She told us she had been scared, however, of the parallel bars and that had held her back. She was sharing some vulnerability, so we knew that it's all right to feel scared sometimes.
Mum kept on dancing though, and dancing with her is one of my happiest childhood memories. Dancing with Mum, wherever we were, was being home, being happy.
Mum was a Jazzercise instructor (there's a term you don't hear often these days) and a choreographer with the first Canterbury rugby cheer team. So we all danced around Lancaster Park, at parades for the Ranfurly shield matches as the little girls among the women in the team. Mum choreographed the dances, ran the team, and wore a headband that shouted "1980s".
For a single Mum to do that, with two little girls in tow, was a juggle, and I remember that getting ready for those matches created a bustle similar to the working and schooling from home mini-storm that many of us are going through now.
Mum would have said herself, she wasn't a great cook, and didn't really enjoy it. But her Mum, our Nana Joyce, was very much a homemaker and when I think of her, I see freshly cooked pikelets under a teacloth, on the chopping board that you could pull out from the bench. I see her tin full of buttons, in her sewing room that was full of creations, material scraps and scissors with blades that made a satisfying "shomp, shomp" sound. Nana was a whiz at everything to do with homemaking, gardening, craft and community projects, and I have a similar mother figure in my mother-in-law now, who is also gifted in all of these things.
I remember Nana's soft skin on her elbow, and I remember vividly the day she died, when I was 8. But when I think of our mum, I don't so much think of items but of actions, of how she made me feel.
I see her stroking my forehead as I went to sleep, singing and dancing with us, and sitting up with me while I wrote my head-girl speech for intermediate school, very late, the night before the last assembly.
Mum was our āhuru mōwai, our safe haven, and home was wherever she was.
Stacey Morrison, Mike Puru and Anika Moa - weekdays from 4pm on The Hits.
At home you're always welcome.
If there was one rule at our house it was that our door was always open. No matter who I brought home, who came to stay, who turned up to say hello, you were welcomed in.
This was how I grew up at my grandmother's in North America. There were always people coming and going, shared meals where everyone got fed, new folks I'd never met visiting for a coffee or a nip of something stronger at the kitchen table; there was always "enough space for everyone".
When we immigrated to New Zealand, we took that sentiment along with a couple of trunks on the boat ride to Lyttelton. As new immigrants, we were pretty isolated but soon our home was the place where folks congregated for sing-alongs, where multi-family get-togethers and parties would occur and where I learned that it felt good to be connected and part of a community.
My parents separated when I was 9 and things got pretty horrid for a few years, but despite everything, our family ethic of open doors still rang true. Somehow my mom and dad knew, that irrespective of the place we lived, how well we were or were not coping, we needed that connection and that a welcoming home would see us through the hard times.
It feels very much the migrant way - to embrace your new community with open arms and welcome them into your home. This too was the migrant life my grandmother led.
Now, on reflection, I see her home as a safe place for the destitute, a warm embrace for the lost, a real hub and heart of the community. And I love that my home - for my children - has always been a place where we all feel welcome. Where musicians have graced the couches and living room floors, where teens turn up for meals or comfort and find a place to rest, where my son and daughter learn the value of compassion and community.
A welcome home feels like an intergenerational gift that serves to support all of us and I am truly grateful to all my mothers for teaching me the value of open arms.
Reb Fountain's self-titled album was out digitally on Friday, special edition vinyl, standard vinyl & CD out June 26 through Flying Nun.
One year we forgot to take down the Christmas cards until the next year's cards started turning up in the mailbox.
Mum and Dad's bed was our trampoline.
There was always a box of crayons on the coffee table.
Always a project on the dining room table - one winter it became a papier-mache battlefield.
The fridge door was held closed by a bungy rope.
We rotated two black and white TVs and for a while it was a TV stack where one had the sound and the other the vision.
The back deck was for dress-up competitions.
Every cushion was embroidered, every shelf was laden with books, rocks and treasures.
Dogs came inside, boots came inside, that's why the carpet was camo-coloured.
We all understood that housework was the lowest priority in life, to be done as fast and as little as possible.
There was too much else to do - gardens to create, clothes to sew, books to read, stories to write, cakes to bake, games to play, life to live.
I grew up in a rambling, cock-eyed castle surrounded by a magical garden.
Our friends loved visiting our magical kingdom, where adventures happened and creativity bloomed.
My mother taught me that "home" has nothing to do with matching furniture, cleaning products or a Marie Kondo'd pantry.
It is all about creating that magical kingdom where anything is possible, you can be anything you want, supported, encouraged, nurtured and loved.
‘Mum had lived and died with this secret,’ says writer Mary Garden.