25 - by David Slack - More Than A Feilding

She was born 25 years ago today in North Shore hospital. Her eyes were closed tightly shut, her mouth was silently moving. The whole theatre was all quiet intensity as they marked her a 2 on the APGAR test.

A one-minute eternity later, she was an 8. The universe was having a little cosmic joke on us: a room with your daughter in it will never be this quiet.

If you’ve only arrived here recently, this is what happened next.

And following that? I haven’t written so much of the detail, because it’s her life to live and share, not mine.

But there’s this:

If you show up at the door of 95bFM they will make you welcome, your own little campus home with like-minded friends, and you may find yourself writing and reading news and ads, and you may find yourself hosting your own hour of the Wire, and getting a whole lot of free journalism training alongside your degree in politics and anthropology.

And you may find this equips you well for the job-hunting, which begins just as the country goes into COVID lockdown. And you’ll eventually find one doing comms for Bike Auckland, and then one doing admin for NewsHub, who will then give you a job as a producer, and because it's a threadbare organisation, you'll be getting to do a bunch of other things as well and getting to understand the whole business of putting on the news. And this will make you well-equipped for a decently paid comms job for IAG, who will say we’re keen to hire you, but we’d need you to commit to at least three years and because you feel it's best to be honest, even though it might not be in your interest to say so, you tell them sorry, but you’re going to be moving to London in six months. And you have your heart set on this because you spent a semester there when you were 19, and you have been dying to get back ever since. And they’ll give you a job anyway, and you’ll learn a whole lot more about the way comms fits together with the business of putting on the news.

And you may find that all of this makes you a suitable candidate for a job in a fancy PR firm in London. And you may flourish there and this will thrill your parents even though they miss you terribly.

Amazing to watch the little bundle turn into all this.

And this little gurgling helpless bundle, the book says, will one day crawl and talk, but really how will that ever happen?

We were talking last night with her flatmates about the modern working world and the expectation of networking. Karren can do it well, but has no enthusiasm for it, I thought I enjoyed it, but with the booze removed I’m barely there any more. But she says she loves it, and you can believe it. She has a lively, engaging way with everyone, knows how to glide through choppy waters. She’s quick and witty and sharp. There are parts of this in me, but she has a bigger, warmer, more empathetic heart.

Her clear-eyed assessment of this modern world is consistently entertaining. We were in a café once watching the trail of Uber Eats drivers come and go and speculating about scenarios. She said, It’s degrading for every party involved.

We were walking towards the theatre this week for a most excellent treat she had arranged for us. Karren pointed out New Zealand House to her there, across the street because she sees that as a possible agreed contact point in a time of global catastrophe. Mary-Margaret was greatly amused that the building did such a good job of making New Zealanders feel at home by being wrapped in scaffolding.

Both of us worry and fret for her, I'm just more in denial about it. An entertaining development of recent years is the sharing of stories, generally from her teenage years, that begin: I may not have told you this but… You thought you knew, but you didn’t. Still, here she is.

25 years since she came into our lives, five years since Mitchell did, our lockdown buddy, her most special person. They met at, where else, bFM. He’s an enthusiast for music, for bikes, for culture, for making every day an adventure. His work is in planning and urban design, he dreams of good and big things. We love the way they support and sustain each other, a relationship built upon yes, and rather than no, but.

She cares. She is warm. She is fun.

We imagine ourselves her caregivers, she’s just as much ours. When she was leaving for London the first time, she said to me as we hugged goodbye, Don't drink too much, Dad. A month later, I had quit.

We got a text message yesterday as we finished a walk on Hampstead Heath, How are my little travellers?

We love her. So much.