Because I was six when my grandfather died and we have super dysfunctional dynamics, I don’t really know what happened in my family.

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Original illustration by Ant Sang.

There are two photos of me, taken the same day, from that summer when I was six. I am wearing a red sundress with a print of oversized white daisies and soft ruffles on the shoulders. I’m wearing blue sandals, although it’s hard to tell the colour in the photo, which has that orangey-pink tinge of photos from the late 70s and early 80s. But I remember those blue sandals and how much I loved them.

In one photo I’m alone: the wind has caught my hair and blown it in front of my face. I’ve turned my head slightly away from the wind, while the hem of my dress has been kicked up slightly by the same breeze. My hair hasn’t yet achieved its full curliness, and instead only has a gentle wave through it. I’m leaning against a gigantic tree trunk, one of two tōtara logs waiting to be carved in this massive shed. I’m only in this photo to give some scale to the trunk’s size.

In the other photo I’m standing in the front, with my mother – grandmother and grandfather behind me. My grandfather has his arm draped over my grandmother’s shoulders. There’s a chicken wire fence behind us, and behind the chicken wire is the massive shed with its structural posts painted with kōwhaiwhai and the faces of tīpuna. Behind us and the chicken wire, you can see part of both logs.

This corrugated iron shed – open on two sides – and these tōtara logs are next to my grandparents’ house on Tiraumea Road. It’s the weekend, and the weather is nice so we’d walked over to once again wonder at the size of these logs. I know that the logs are here to be carved into a waka. I don’t understand that the waka is important, that eventually it’ll be sailed from Tahiti back to Aotearoa. I don’t understand how that journey is an important story about finding home. We don’t know it yet, but my grandfather has cancer. We don’t know it yet, but my grandfather will be dead before the end of that summer.

After my grandfather dies, my grandmother will sell the house on Tiraumea Road to the hapū, so that they can expand beyond the land with the shed and two tōtara logs on it. She’ll sell it for less than the market value, and in return the hapū members will carry all of her belongings to her new, smaller house a few streets away, where she’ll continue to raise the two of my cousins she and my grandfather had been guardians of for the last few years. She’ll be in that house for a decade – a tiny two-bedroom house that means one of my cousins will have to sleep in the skinny sunporch – but still, the house on Tiraumea Road is the one I remember better.

I don’t think I ever realised when I was little how poor my grandparents were. Raising nine children in a three-bedroom house would’ve been… a lot. In both physical space and emotional constraint. The house was a villa, but that makes it sounds much posher than it really was, although to young me, with the wooden front porch and the ceilings that were as high as the clouds, it felt like all sorts of fancy.

There was a lot of getting by on what my grandmother grew and cheap meat, which I’d always put down to them being from olden times when people did that, but it seems hardly anyone I know my age had grandparents who were getting by on so little. Or who were raising some of their grandchildren. On weekends we’d have lunch in the kitchen at the marbled formica table, with the wood-burning range taking up half of one long wall. After lunch, if I was helping with the dishes, we would end up with our sides bumping and pressing into each other at the tiny kitchen bench.

Connected to the front porch by a concrete path was the garden gate with the letterbox next to it, but only visitors – not family visiting, but other people visitors – were allowed to come and go through the garden gate. I only remember seeing someone come through the garden gate once, when one of my cousins – the younger sister of the cousins my grandparents were raising – visited with her adoptive parents. They were rich, and this cousin arrived in a white fur coat. With the garden gate open, it felt like seeing the world differently. If you came in through the garden gate you’d see my grandmother’s garden, dense with trees and shrubs and small moments of colour. The grass always seemed to be green and the perfect length.

The footbridge that led to my grandfather’s workshop was two planks wrapped in chicken wire. I was always sure that if I crossed it too slowly, a troll would grab me and eat me. In the summers we – and only that last summer did that we include me, I was too little before that – in the summers, my grandfather and my mother and the youngest of my uncles and my two cousins who lived with my grandparents and maybe one or two other adults, would climb down into the creek bed that ran between my grandfather’s workshop and the house, clearing out weeds and long grass, so that in winter the water would be able to flow as easily as possible if my grandfather had to open the floodgate to let water through. That one summer when I was lowered into the creek as well, I remember the green smell of plants being ripped out and how far above me the ground seemed.

When I checked on google maps, to see if the street really is called Tiraumea Road, I figured I had the right street because where I thought my grandparents’ home was is now a kōhanga reo. I don’t know if the potatoes that my grandmother grew in the gritty dirt to the left of their driveway kept growing until the driveway and dirt next to it were dug up to make a space for parents to drop off and pick up their kids. I remembered how in summer we would spend weekend afternoons to the left of the driveway, mounding dirt up around the potato shoots, until my cousins and I got bored and would chase each other down to the creek and over the footbridge.

Because I was six when my grandfather died, because I was a grandchild and we have super dysfunctional family dynamics so my family barely talk to each other – let alone talk about what the hell is up with our family – because of all that, I don’t really know what happened in my family. From one of my aunts, I know that my grandfather decided that the best way to manage a large family was to not allow any of his children to get along and be friends – divide and conquer and all that – but I don’t know how he enforced that, if he was physical with them or used threats and fear. I know that one of my grandmother’s key phrases was You made your own bed, now lie in it and that she refused to help any of her children if they were in trouble, and wouldn’t let them help each other, but I don’t know if that’s something she brought into their marriage or something she took on to keep on my grandfather’s good side.

It took me a lot of years to get my head around how much I loved my grandparents in that house on Tiraumea Road and how much it felt like home, with how much my grandparents managed to raise their kids to be such messes who don’t know how to interact with one another, how that created lingering hurts and grudges, how that meant that when my grandmother died my mother refused to tell any of her siblings the details of where or when the funeral would be, because she didn’t want them to there, because that way she would win and would be the best daughter. How all those hurts and fucked up ways of dealing with things flowed through into how at least some of us grandchildren were raised.

The first psychologist I saw as an adult, one session she got me to role play being my mother. We were less than five minutes into the role play when I realised that I could never be good enough for my mother to love because she’d never been good enough for my grandfather. My grandfather considered girls to be a bit of a waste – of time, of money, of education – and the only thing they were good for was growing up and getting married and having babies. He had six daughters.

During late summers at Tiraumea Road, while I sat in the cool of the house or the porch, eating and playing, my mother would walk across the footbridge with my grandfather and head to the massive pile of cut-up logs near the back of his workshop, and together they’d cut them down to firewood size with a chainsaw and an axe. When she’d come back to the house, my mother’s face and arms would be covered in a dirty sheen and she’d be smiling in a way that I don’t remember ever seeing at any other time. For those couple of hours, when it was just her and my grandfather, outside, sweating, chopping wood, she had a chance of showing him that she wasn’t a waste. Maybe if she could chop enough wood, then maybe he would love her.

There was another photo taken that summer day when I was six, which I don’t have. My grandfather took it, with his camera that he kept safe in a brown leather case, the brown leather case held across his body with a strap. I posed in front of one of the tōtara logs, a small Vitruvian girl, star-fished across the width of the trunk’s rings. I remember posing for the photo, but I don’t remember ever seeing it. I don’t know if that film was ever developed.