To find work that interests, challenges and meets material needs with a bit left over for fun. To make mistakes and learn from them. To just be human.
To love someone as an adult and to be loved in return. To have children and grandchildren or not if that’s one’s wish.
To have good health and decent access to modern healthcare. To have decent friendships and to know to keep those at a distance who would hurt us or ours.
To learn about our world via travel and to reflect on how lucky we are here.
To just have a home we can call ours and pay the bills. To have a car if there is simply no reliable, regular public transport like most places in our country. For parents to have the choice of both not having to work to just survive if raising children, leaving a parent supported to care for those children. That’s a hard one nowadays. Why?
To be able to retire from all paid work in due course with dignity and the means to survive well and enjoy that retirement. To enjoy a long retirement surrounded by those who love you and you love until your time is run.
It does not mean putting one’s work or one’s personal activities ahead of one’s family. It does not mean blind ambition dominating life. It does not mean being unkind because we can. Bullying others. Hating others for their differences. It does not mean getting ahead of one’s own abilities or what is the right thing to do.
It means just being ordinary even if that ordinariness gives one great power and responsibility. Keeping one’s feet on the ground. Remembering where you came from.
That is my version of ordinariness in our country. Sadly, for many people, it is an outdated and impossible version in 2020s New Zealand.
All of the above fell out of my upbringing in this country. The very simple upbringing of a very ordinary child from a very ordinary family.
All of the above was, or became, available to most New Zealand families at that time. In the time of traditional two-parent families, it was common for only dad to have to work. Mum often did not, staying home for the children. That was often a choice.
Often, though, mums did choose to work as time went by. Part-time roles to help balance the budget. There was just more choice then. Not now. In two-adult families often both people have to work, end of story, just to pay the mortgage, rent and bills. Just to get by. Not flourish.
Women are now fully part of the workforce. That has been driven by social progress, but it has also, sadly, been driven by simple need.
Would it not be nice if parents could have a choice again? One parent being able to choose to stay home subsidised by the state, a family benefit payment? Simple. I certainly do not advocate that the parent staying home be mum. Most dads can do a good job.
I often sit in the car and wait for my granddaughters outside their kindergarten and school, Granny going inside to organise the lassies. I see young parents coming and going. So many dads. Maybe shift workers, maybe stay-at-home dads. Dads are nowadays more in the life of their children than ever before. It’s wonderful.
I also see so many like Jenny and I, retired folk, coming to get their grandchildren. We smile at each other, recognising another boomer doing a labour of love, obviously caring for the children until at least one parent can get home from work.
In some ways it’s wonderful, that intergenerational caring thing. But in others, it is also not so good. Grandparents have raised children, and most do certainly want grandchildren in their lives, but maybe not as a duty anymore. A mum or dad should be able to wander down to the kindergarten or school and get their children.
Older kids should be able to walk home from school, having the security of knowing mum or dad is there.
Some items on my list of ordinary things are not happening anymore. Literacy and numeracy are now issues when they never were. Homes are often either someone else’s or motels. Even cars. Healthcare is a lottery. Come on New Zealand.
