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ParentsSeptember 4, 2017

Sex work is how I support my family

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How would you earn your living if you and your child had a severe disability? One mother shares how she has found a job that makes her life just a little easier.

I’m young, Māori and a sex worker, and my life is harder than you can imagine, but not for the reasons you’re thinking. Some mornings I lay in bed crying. I know that my day will be painful, and so will every other day for as far as I can see into the future.

I’ve lived with chronic pain in my body since I was a child, and my daughter’s severe disability means that I will continue to care for her full time for the remainder of my life. It’s not only hard physical work, it’s hard emotional work, and some days I can’t bear it.

Like many people, I want to work hard now so I can retire comfortably when I’m old. I imagine relaxing in a rustic little cottage by the ocean, nestled into a colourful garden brimming with vegetables and wildflowers. I think about sitting in the sun with friends and making strings of beads and shells to hang in the trees. I think about teenagers giggling and saying that I’m so behind the times. It’s not everyone’s aim in life, but I can’t wait to be behind the times.

In reality though, I live in a capitalist economy where everything is privately owned, and if you don’t own anything then you’re stuck working for the people who do. My body isn’t capable of working a 40 hour week, nor allowing me to become qualified at something that pays well. I’m disabled from working, and I’m part of a society that doesn’t take care of people like me, people like my daughter.

Both my daughter and I will gradually become more and more disabled, but she much sooner than me.

She already needs one-to-one care at all times, and she’s still just a small child. People with her level of needs are not well-accommodated, even in care facilities.

I can’t bear the thought of reducing her life. I need to plan for her future – and I imagine she will outlive me, so I need to plan for that as well.

But how can I plan for her future when I can barely pay the rent?

What will happen to her if I don’t own a house by the time I’m completely unable to work?

These are the questions I contemplate as I cry silently in my bed. I know that my life will always be hard both physically and emotionally, but sex work has given me hope for a future.

Being a sex worker means I can work when I am able and have days off when I’m not. I can fit my work around my disability, I choose when and how I work, and there is no pressure from my workplace. I never have to do more hours than I want to, so I can spend lots of time caring for my daughter.

The hardest thing about my job is being organised to place advertisements, take phone calls, and have somewhere convenient to work from. I pay tax on the money I make, and I save as much as I can so that my dream of a country cottage can come true one day.

Some people make the argument that any woman who needs money is not free to truly choose sex work, but is forced into prostitution by circumstance. They say sex work is not empowering, it is exploitation. They say my clients should be arrested, and they want to stop me from being able to work.

They say I’m in a predicament with no other choices, but I say sex work is getting me out of a lifelong predicament, and I’m glad I have the option to do it legally.

After struggling for years in a desperate situation of poverty and pain, being failed by social welfare and lacking safety nets, I finally found sex work. It’s a job I can do, it enables me to work and save, and it’s making my life a lot better. Sex work buys me mental health and happiness, because it buys my daughter a future, and every day that me and my clients aren’t being arrested is a day that my life gets a little easier.

Is it empowering? I’ll leave it to you to decide.

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ParentsSeptember 1, 2017

Happy Father’s Day to my deadbeat dad

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Father’s Day isn’t a happy day for a lot of families. A new dad reflects on the lessons he learned from his own dad – one who wasn’t the father he deserved.

Dear Dad,

Happy Father’s day I guess. I wish this note were written under better circumstances, but the reality is that you’ve been dead for four years and you were kind of a shithead.

I don’t have that many memories of us spending time together at home, but do have a few of your favourite dive bar. I remember my younger brother and I tagging along while you warmed a bar stool and slid tiny packets of Eta Ripples our way. One time I had a really good chat with a nice young woman bartender – she had the same name as my mother (and probably still does).

The last time I saw you in the flesh was in January 1991. The divorce wasn’t quite finalised but your marriage to my mother was definitely over and the custody arrangements were in full effect. Even at eight years old I intuited that I might not ever see you again.

And I didn’t, even though I spent good chunks of my childhood and young adulthood living in the same city – sometimes within a few suburban blocks of each other.

For many years I didn’t care to expend any physical or mental energy on you. I figured if you couldn’t get your shit together enough to reach out, why the hell should I? You were the fucking adult in this situation.

My brother, a passionate dude four years my junior, made more of an effort to seek you out in the last decade or so of your life. I stayed in my room that day in 2001 when you came to visit him because I didn’t want to face you. You honked the horn from the driveway and drove him to the same pub you took us to as kids.

Years later my little bro threw you a bone and commissioned you to help him with some home renovation work. His family (including your first set of grandchildren) invited you to a barbeque – an offer you declined because it was “roast night down at the pub”.

You died at 58, looking like a corpse even before your last breath and leaving a $1,200 Japanese import as your sole asset. I was living overseas at the time, toyed with the idea of coming back, but ultimately didn’t.  I took the three days of “bereavement” leave, pottered around the house and caught up on Breaking Bad.

Selfishly I let my brother bear the brunt of the post-death arrangements. He visited WINZ to negotiate funeral costs, cleaned out the hovel you had rented in your final months and had to endure the pub-organised memorial service, listening to platitudes from your drinking buddies about what a “great guy you were” and how you’d “do anything for anybody”. Your obituary dripped with similar sentiments. It made me feel nauseous.

As you stumbled off this mortal coil I was preparing to become a first-time father. I read books, attended hospital visits and talked to other dads about what to expect.

I also made a silent promise to my wife’s baby bump. I swore that whatever happened, my children would have a dad in their lives who cares for them and who loves them. I swore that even in my darkest times, when I’m struggling the hardest, that I would not abandon them.

Parenting is tough, man – I get it. I find it really, really arduous sometimes. I’ve often relied on the wisdom and experience of others to help me learn the custard-stapling-difficult processes of kid-wrangling. And in a messed-up kind of way, it was you who taught me the most.

I’m not talking about your finely honed responsibility-shirking skills (which I absorbed and am consciously trying to train myself out of) or your predilection for alcohol abuse (I hardly ever drink, but have addictive tendencies in other ways).

The biggest lesson you taught me is how NOT to be a father. Thanks to you my children will never feel that their dad has abandoned them. They will have someone to teach them how to ride a bike or change a car tyre. They will have a dad who packs lunches and reads stories and isn’t secretly wishing he were in a dingy room with Lion Red coasters and sticky floors.

So thanks for inadvertently teaching me how to be a dad. I know this wasn’t your intention, but well, I feel like you didn’t have much in the way of intentions that didn’t involve a Swappa Crate anyway.

I wish I had more to thank you for. Happy Father’s Day.

P.S: Your pub was sold to property developers a few months ago and is gonna be bulldozed. Sorry.

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This content is entirely funded by Flick, New Zealand’s fairest power deal. In the past year, their customers saved $398 on average, which pays for a cheeky bottle of wine in the trolley almost every shop. Please support us by switching to them right now!

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