Travels with My Parents: The Last Instalment
In which my mum gives me the greatest gift of all: an unexpected Barry White impersonator.
It’s our last week together, and we’re back in Auckland. It’s also Mother’s Day. When my parents booked to come out here, we didn’t realise that it would encompass Mother’s Day. I was thrilled when I worked that out though. As a rule, I don’t get to spend Mother’s Day with my mum, primarily down to the whole ‘living on the other side of the world’ thing, and that’s firmly on me. So, now with the opportunity to spend this precious day together, I think about what I can do to make the day special. I settle on Westhaven Marina.
Westhaven Marina is the largest yacht marina in the southern hemisphere.* I like to go running down there because it’s traffic-free and very flat, and I like to look at the boats there because apparently the world isn’t already full of enough things I’ll never be able to afford. I assumed that my parents - boat owners** - would appreciate the nautical eye-candy, so in our last week in Auckland, I took them down there as a Mother’s Day gift.*** I may not be able to buy my parents beautiful and incredibly expensive things, but I know where I can at least point those things out.
The walk along Westhaven Marina is quite stunning, taking you under the harbour bridge, along the water towards the city, and past hundreds of private boats. The walk leads into the city, so I thought it’d be a good idea to head into Wynyard Quarter, where we could have some lunch before heading back. I didn’t account for the fact that, with boat spotting and my mum’s apparent full-time job for Google Earth, the half hour walk would take us a lot longer. Add to that the fact that we’d been awake since 5am, having flown back up from Christchurch that morning, and you have the basis of what one might call ‘actually a pretty bad idea’. By the time we arrived in Wynyard Quarter, we were all about an hour past hungry, and I was exhausted.
And did I mention, Wynyard Quarter is home to dozens of restaurants. Once we arrived, I braced myself for a solid 30 minutes of looking at all available options, weighing up which would be best, and then taking a seat just as the kitchen closed their lunch service. I just wanted to dive into the first place offering chips and a cold beer. And maybe somewhere to nap.
As I tried to psychically will my parents to settle on Wynyard Pavillion (a tried and tested safe option), I looked around to realise that my mum had disappeared. Glancing down an alleyway, I saw that she was one street over, looking in the window of the fish market. Christ, it’s going to be HOURS before we’re eating if we’re expanding our search to include all adjacent streets. I try to call my mum back and get her refocused on the mission.
‘Can we just have a little look in here?’ she asks, standing in the doorway of what appears to be a fishmonger. It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that my mum has a passion for fresh fish that borders on the religious. I would say she’s had fish and chips 4 meals out of 5 for the past 2 weeks, and any BBQ we’ve done has featured at least 3 different kinds of seafood. If she’s spotted oysters in this window, it’s probably game over.
I hesitate. I’m so hungry, but I also don’t want to be the one to kill my mum’s joyful curiosity (at least not yet - give me another 10 minutes though). I let dad know the change of direction, and we follow mum into the fishmongers.
The unassuming entrance turns out to be the magical wardrobe door into an upmarket, fishy Narnia. Mum’s found us a fancy food court. Stalls selling oysters, lobster, fish and chips and, yes, cold beer, line a courtyard filled with parasol-covered picnic tables. Live music radiates from the corner of the courtyard, where a man with the baritone of Barry White and a woman with the enthusiasm of Jessica Simpson are pumping out crowd-pleasers. I have never seen this place; I have never heard of this place; and if I’d allowed the more kill-joy aspects of my personality to override my mum’s thalassic curiosity, I’d still have no idea it existed.
We get fish. We get drinks. We listen to over-enthusiastic covers. We add another item to the ever-growing list of places that are now infused with memories: another one of ‘our’ places.
The list grows when we discover new places together (Lake Tekapo, Fairlie Bakery, that museum in Arrowtown where you can go panning for gold), but it also grows as my parents join me in spaces that already mean a lot to me. Just by being there, they colour these places and make them different, making them feel closer to my family.
In the four years since my parents were last out, my life has grown and evolved, and sometimes it feels like it has done so in isolation from my family. I have been building relationships, whānau, a career, and I am so proud of all those things. But I can’t always show those things to my UK family in the way I wish I could. I am made of two worlds, and, until my parents came to visit, it felt like they had been separate for a very long time. The two rarely, if ever, meet.
Over the four weeks that they were here, they helped me to weave those two worlds together, pulling threads of family and home through my New Zealand life. We were only visiting my friends, or walking around my city, or eating at my favourite cafes. But now they are our friends, our city, our favourite cafes. When they leave a few days later, they’ve left a slightly different world behind them, and it’s not just because of their ability to find hidden gems behind unlikely shopfronts. By being here, they’ve changed things. They leave me with a world woven with a strong sense of family and home.
*It’s no Porto Montenegro, but it’s trying.
** I’ll let you decide what type of boat my parents own, because I wouldn’t want to disabuse you of the belief they might have an actual yacht.
*** Unfortunately my Mothers’ Day gifts peaked when I was seven years old and gave my mum a live performance of ‘Mama’ by the Spice Girls. I’ve been trying to top that ever since.