Devoy, 59, famously retired from a stellar squash career in 1992. At the World Open Finals in Vancouver she told her husband, John Oakley, “Win, lose or draw today, I’m going to retire.” Devoy did go on to win but “unbeknownst to me, I was pregnant at the time, so fate had decided [motherhood] was my next thing”.
She went on to have four sons in five years.
While it was “really challenging”, she says her first two boys, Julian and Alex, were “a breeze... it was relatively easy in terms of your expectations of what motherhood’s going to be like”.
Then her third and fourth sons, Josh and Jamie, came along and she decided she’d had two little devils after her first “angels”.
Devoy recalls while the early years saw her boys really bond with their mum, now in their mid to late 20s, their father is their go-to.
“... they love spending time with their father. They still hang out at squash more with their dad. And they have this enormous respect for him. They had the same for me, but we just don’t have the same banter. I’m sort of like the spare wheel now. My sons can take weeks to get back to me. And that sort of crushes you.”
But coming in as the seventh child in a family of six boys herself, Devoy has long been surrounded - and aware of the unique challenges.
“I think it’s really hard for mums to bring up good men. And if you don’t have a female other than their mother in the environment, they don’t have a sister, we’ve got lots of uncles and aunties, but the only female opinion [my sons] have is mine, in our family environment.”
Devoy says she’s had “lots of really good but difficult discussions about what a good man is”.
“And in this day and age, I think they feel that at times the whole world is against every young man because they feel that they’ll never be believed. And I have to sort of remind them that unfortunately, they’re paying now for the mistakes of many misogynistic men or sexual abusers or whatever that have gone before them.”
Another challenge Devoy has had to navigate has been allowing her sons to pursue their own paths. While the squash champ rose to the top in her chosen sporting pursuit, she and her husband were acutely aware of not pushing their sons in directions they might not want to go in.
“We let them be their own people,” she reflects.
“I’m pretty sure we didn’t push them into anything. Perhaps we should have pushed them a bit harder at some stages, but they’ll always be who they are born to be. [It’s important] not to make them into something that you want them to be, which, I also found a bit of a challenge.
“One of our sons was a very good squash player and he sat me down one day and said, ‘Mum, when you get it in your head that I don’t want to be a world champion, then probably we’ll both be okay.’”
She says coming to terms with what your child wants for themselves, as opposed to what you as the parent might want “is a really hard thing to swallow at times”.
In perhaps her most unusual parenting experience to date, Devoy found herself pitted against her son, Josh, 26, on Treasure Island: Fans v Faves, which started this week on TVNZ+.
“It was difficult,” says Devoy, whose straight-talking leadership and ability to laugh at herself saw her become a favourite on last year’s Celebrity Treasure Island.
“It had its good and bad moments. I think it’s like you never like them to lose. You’re still a parent. You’re still a mother. No matter what age they are, it still pulls the heartstrings, the failure or the success.”
- To find out more about Dame Susan Devoy’s tips for raising good men, listen to this week’s episode of One Day You’ll Thank Me below. And to catch up on Treasure Island Fans v Faves head to TVNZ+
