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The Sunday EssayJuly 3, 2022

The Sunday Essay: For Keri Hulme

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For Becky Manawatu, and maybe for Keri Hulme too, the sea is a church. 

The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.

Original illustrations by Pounamu Wharekawa.


We were in Rakiura in December when I learned Keri Hulme had died. I took a can of Haagen Strong beer from the fridge at our accommodation at Horseshoe Bay where the kākā swooped to, and ate fruit from our hands. Took the beer to the wharf where my tāne, Tim, was shucking the pāua he and my son got that day from Ringaringa Beach. Poured some beer onto a rock for Keri Hulme. Does death draw us to the water? I think so. Or at least I’m pulled there, to the salt-white church, to acknowledge loss, a passing, and other things too.

In the beginning, it was darkness, and more fear, and a howling wind across the sea.

After learning Keri has died I go to my books and see if the bone people is with me now, I always travel with a book I’ve read – a pou – a new book, as well as a collection of short stories or poetry. The bone people is not in my bag, stink one. We go to the pub, my brother, my sister-in-law and Tim. We order big glass bottles of beer. We search the walls filled with photos of fishermen and women, people who lived their lives here, for my grandfather. Listen to the men at the leaner, and look out the window at the cod boats on the still water. I search my memory for Keri’s bar scenes in the bone people. I replace my old image, with this image, of this pub. Imagine them here, those troubled people, those hurt and healing people, those bone people: Simon, Kerewin and Joe, and all their sentences which start with “If only…”

They have, too. Barstools ranged round them in a semicircle, the man and his boy in the middle. Joe grinning like a hyena, and Simon showing off.

Ah, here they all are, for a moment. And yes, of course, take a big glug on the big brown bottle of beer, and look out to Halfmoon Bay, the sea will always be a church, and maybe it was Keri’s too.

A day or two later I pack a sandwich and a nectarine and make the hour walk through Rakiura National Park to Māori Beach. Walk all the way to near the place where bright blue freshwater spills into the moana. I want to find a shell to put in the locket my tāua gave me for my 21st birthday. Māori Beach was my pōua’s favourite beach and Ringaringa, hers, Dad told me. Pōua is a perfect ghost to me, and I want to find a perfect shell small enough to fit in my locket, but there are none. Just fragments. This frustrates me, I want something whole to put in my locket, something perfect, complete, undamaged. Transcendent thoughts for dead ancestors, dead children, dead aunties and uncles, my pōua, and even for Keri Hulme. But this obsessive search for a perfect shell, a sign that Pōua loved me so much he could calcify and wink up from the enormous expanse of grey sand grains, then sit symbolically in a locket for me forever thwarts the experience. Eyes cast to the sand, searching and searching, my attention and aim singular, all energy drawn to the brain, I have forgotten my feet, hardly feel the ache in my calf muscles from the walk, barely taste the nectarine. Needed too much, from everything, every dusty photograph, and each dried seahorse corpse, but especially ghosts.

If only was the tapu phrase. 

If only I had

If only I hadn’t

It’s Matariki weekend now, half a year has passed since Keri died, and our trip to Rakiura where Dad showed us the home he grew up, overlooking Halfmoon Bay. The island where we ate fried cod livers for breakfast around a big table with our Rakiura whānau, and my tāne and son coming in from the water, with grins on their faces, pāua in their catch bags and a kina each, light, in their hands. Tim dripping with water, face flushed with sea-joy, telling us my favourite diving story ever: “I saw a seahorse behind the kelp babe, and I waved to son. I pulled back the kelp, and it was still there, and we could see the shape of tiny seahorses in the dad’s pouch.”

My hair is almost dry, after going into the sea, on this bright, cold winter’s day. For the past three days the sea has been the calmest I’ve ever seen it on this coastline. From here in the distance, you can see the rainforested mountains, the Papahaua which tower over State Highway 67. I keep waking too late to go and look for the rising Matariki, to be honest lately I almost miss seeing morning all together. I wake when the fire is already lit and the pot of plunger coffee is already brewed, and then, when everyone has gone to school and work, I take my dog to the beach. Bro’s life is sleeping punctuated with sprinting down the beach. He’s with me now. We are here for Keri. Before I went into the water I lit this small fire, and kneeled beside it to read from Te Kaihau/The Windeater. Flipped through the pages and chose a story at random: Unnamed Islands in the Unknown Sea. 

I used to love reading about islands as a child. Being shipwrecked on one would be heaven.

We are here on this West Coast beach for Keri, but also to feel shipwrecked, just the romantic parts though, the parts you like to think would make up the lion’s share of what it means to be shipwrecked. The lack of distraction and overwhelm of choice, the abundance of time and sky and source of, and appetite for, kaimoana. It’s hard to keep pretending I am shipwrecked though. A couple passes with a small shrieking dog. Two men are cutting wood, or one is while the other eats a pie with one hand and scrolls through his phone with the other. A family arrives armed with rods – though they hover near the beachgrass, and don’t make it to the water.

Still in my swimming shorts and bra, because maybe go back in? Put my book down, and sprint across the sand and take another dive into a cold curl of water. My ribcage contracts and I gasp and leap up. Run back to the fire and my book and my towel. Another man drives up smiling out the window, and then says, “I thought you were someone else”, and he’s right, we are someone else, we’ve been in the sea, have no data, this book and towel are our only possessions, we’re shipwrecked, so piss off.

Porotītīwai, you whispered, porotītīwai and I never thought to ask you what that means.

Don’t say piss off though, and he parks between my small scaly fire and the water, not blocking the view but blighting it. I become angry, like a leopard seal, and the line from my sunning place and hunting place has been cut. I want to go tell him now, cause far out. It’s low tide and there are heaps of places for him to watch the sea from his shiny four-wheel drive truck with a kayak or whatever it is strapped to its top. Would I park between a person with a fire and the water? I will go say something, I decide, almost, but then he starts his engine and drives away. Open Keri’s book again, and land on a story called Planetesimal.

It’s a story about a man who meets a woman at a party, and she shows him she has a universe opening in the cup of her elbow. First, she refuses his roach because she thinks she is going mad, and weed would make it worse, and he says that if you can think it, you’re not going mad. She winces and tells him she can think what she likes, and then shows him the cosmos, the blinking starry void in the cup of her elbow. He had thought her plain, a wallflower. She invites him to touch the void, near the bone, and something like what’s happened to her, happens to him too.

My hair is wet again, but gonna dry it here, with the sun and the wind and the light heat coming off my near flameless fire. Put on some more driftwood. Read Planetesimal again. I must look up the word when I get home, I think. The thought of going home makes me sad because then I can’t be here anymore. Maybe I am a very boring person, so easily soothed by being outdoors, especially when we can read this book, and listen to the water, and remind ourselves everything is OK if the way between us and the ocean is clear.

We are here for Keri, because among other things Matariki is a time to mihi to the dead, remembering those who had passed between the new rising and the last.

My hair is dry now, and smoky, it has that soft crispness only saltwater can create. Bro licks my hand. I close Te Kaihau, and go to stand. The only two karakia I know off my heart is one mō te kai and one mō te ata, as well as some of The Lord is My Shepherd. None of these suit the moment of course. Still, I stop myself from just walking away without some form of ceremony. I am here to acknowledge Keri for Matariki despite there being no stars out now and probs I will sleep through seeing them again tonight. On Instagram the maramataka tells me this is not a time to be lazy, but 12 hours moe is just barely cutting it at the moment. The sky is a powdery blue and the sun is low but distant. We mihi to those stars made invisible by light of day, and to Keri and another friend on their haerenga. As I leave I see the two men who were collecting wood sitting close beside each other on a large log, talking. I like seeing friendship. Yeah, nah, that’s the goal, eh, who wants to be shipwrecked.

At home I have wifi, and I look up the meaning of planetesimal; the explanation on Universe Today makes the most sense. 

Universe Today explains that a planetesimal is an object formed from dust, rock, and well, other stuff. The word is rooted in the concept of infinitesimal – or objects too small to see or measure. Planetesimals refers to small celestial bodies which are created when a planet is born. 

In Keri’s story the woman with an opening to a universe in the cup of her elbow never arrives home that night after the party, and she is presumed to have walked into the sea, “rendered herself bodiless”.

Later he says, “I have wondered. If you sat among heartless strangers with a universe within your reach, would you always stay, a wallflower at the party?”

We still have Keri Hulme’s words to read here, and this Matariki I read more of them. Her short prose feel like karakia within themselves, hymns, or rosary beads made of pounamu and bone and feather and starlight on a string of vivid human life for me to sit with and welcome in te tau hou.

I go to sit next to my dog, who’s sprawled over the couch. His snoring is freshly heavy, like sand being tugged down the shore. The home fire is glowing bright. I make a cup of cauliflower Maggi Soup in a Cup. It is so quiet in the house, and like my place on the beach, from fire to sea, I like my line of sight between my sitting spot and my bookshelf to be clear. It is my hunting ground. I pick up Te Kaihau again, and I flip to a page. I begin One Whale, Singing. I read a line twice:

Something small jumped from the water, away to the left. A flash of phosphorescence after the sound, and then all was quiet and starlit again.

Don’t know why, but this flash of life and colour makes me think of a line in a friend’s manuscript I not long finished reading, which got me crying which was actually embarrassing because I was in a public place, but fortunately one where I did not see anyone I knew. It’s too soon for me to quote direct from her mahi, I think, but it was about living, just wanting to live – not needing to be loved. I consider the sentence probably not entirely separate from her meaning in her manuscript. Needing to be loved is a sickness I understand, and in not needing it, it can come in unexpected waves anyway. And like I said, yeah I was a big ol tangiweto when I read this simple sentence, because of all that had happened to my friend before it, and all that we brave after, and so on.

I make my intentions for te tau hou patting my dog, holding Keri’s book, the salt still on me from my winter swim. My intentions are not achievement-based or goal-oriented, they are happiness-based and connection-oriented. They are about language, and love and friendship, and they do not care how my body changes between this Matariki and the next, or what time it gets out of bed, or if it accomplishes anything. Yes, my intentions are about language, yet they refuse to be manufactured into a list of words. Maybe they are planetesimal in essence.

I close Keri’s book and look at the home fire. Say something to her, again, but it’s just for her. He kaituhi!

Say something for all she’s done for us, and continues to. The book, with Planetesimal, and planetesimal inside it, remains alive with meaning. And so do we e hoa mā, so are we, whether we stay by the bookshelf or go to the sea, the beads are there, these tiny planets, to pull through our fingers, while we search for the porotītīwai, the phosphorescence lighting up our hunting grounds, where we spear the gold and green and red and purple flashes, we spear and snare and treasure and possess, we make our bodies heavy with our catch, these silver fish, these reasons to be brave, these reasons to return to the page, the church, te hā.

Keep going!
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The Sunday EssayJune 26, 2022

The Sunday Essay: My breasts and me

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I always hated my large, droopy, weirdly uneven boobs. Could surgery finally ease the hurt and shame I’ve been carrying for decades?

The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.

Original illustrations by Jem Yoshioka.


The only two female plastic surgeons I could find in Wellington are booked until 2023, so I’ve settled on a male surgeon. The private hospital is in the suburbs and I wait in the reception area for a few minutes before being whisked through to the consultation room by a smiling assistant.

Dr Paul (not his real name) is genial and soft-spoken with a firm handshake and an agreeable bedside manner. Instead of a practised medical spiel, he asks me to recount how I’ve ended up in his office wanting to know about breast reduction surgery. I have participated in a lot of therapy sessions in my time and this feels close enough to one that I can relax and give him my origin story.

Breasts didn’t really factor into my life until I went through puberty. I’m sure there were giggled conversations about boobs with my friends if we saw them on TV, but I was used to them, growing up in a house full of females. My mother was very relaxed about her nakedness when we were kids so breasts were just a continuation of heads, shoulders, knees and toes.

Then came high school. While co-ed schools have endless benefits, going through puberty alongside a bunch of 14-year-old boys makes one feel acutely visible – like being under a sweaty microscope forged out of testosterone and tasteless jokes about wanking, pubes and tits.

I also had the added complication of a six-month transformation from a teenager whose body was basically straight up and down to a teenager with boobs that could fill an E cup.

What to do with these two new pieces of body furniture? Putting them in a bra was only the start of my troubles.

There were the changing rooms before and after PE class to navigate: did I look the same as the other girls? Did any of them notice that I wasn’t naked?

And what to wear now that I had something(s) to hide? I went for large t-shirts or basically anything that turned them into shapeless objects under cloth, rather than lumpy double scoops of ice cream under a Glassons bodysuit which a lot of my girlfriends wore.

I had a paralysing fear that a member of the opposite sex was going to spot them and put a notice in the school paper, outing me and my floppy boobs. A rumour went around the school that a boy in fifth form had a pair of x-ray vision glasses that could see through clothes. The terror kept me home for nearly a week.

You see, I didn’t love my new acquisitions. They had grown faster than any action plan my mother and I might have put in place to carry their weight, and once they had reached their full size they were just …. not what I was expecting.

By this stage, I’d done some research into what breasts should look like: Baywatch and Beverly Hills 90210 were ideal case studies for globes that bounced in bikini cups no bigger than a Dorito. I had also peeked at my mates’ chests at sleepovers and their bodies by and large seemed to be adhering to this new regime of boobs that were fully containable in A or B cup bras.

But mine? I had angry red stretch marks covering most of each breast that gradually faded to distinctive purplish lines with a sateen finish. Oh, and, the nipples were in the wrong place. There is no other way of putting it, they weren’t two little buds sitting up top, they were shameful nubbins that drooped towards my belly button, like pebbles sliding off a balloon.

By the time I was 18, the murky podginess of my teenage years melted away, leaving in its place a slimmer figure that I greedily ran my hands over as often as I could. My breasts had also shrunk down to a B cup (hurrah) but this hadn’t fixed the drooping issue. It made me hideously self-conscious. Whenever I undressed in front of a new sexual partner it felt like false advertising; my breasts did not resemble the ones found on young women in fashion mags or even on my friends.

It was the 1990s, and society had a slavish addiction to late-stage capitalism and body surveillance, so alongside the tokenistic shrieks of “girl power” from the Spice Girls, media was awash with images of supermodels who wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000, and nothing but perfect breasts as far as the eye could see. At least this was how I perceived it.

I also couldn’t see at the time (and not for many, many years) that the greatest gift I could have given to myself was pride in and acceptance of my body, which was box-fresh and pretty fabulous really.

Dr Paul carefully makes notes as I talk. Every now and then he tilts his head slightly giving a faint yet encouraging smile, exactly what you want out of a health professional who is about to closely examine the part of your body that you hide in a bra shaped like a battleship.

“Right,” he says, standing up and smoothing his chinos out. “Why don’t you come and stand in front of this mirror here and take your top layers off, and your bra.”

He has a little section of his room set up as a photography studio.

“Do I get to come back once this is done and do the after shots with make-up and some fairy lights?”

“Oh absolutely, we love to have before and afters for our website. Without your face obviously.”

I strip off down to my skin and face the mirror.

I have been learning to live with my G-cups for three years now after being a size C for most of my 20s and 30s, yet I have spent very little time looking at them. I’m not averse to stripping off for impromptu dance parties with my daughter, yet standing in front of the mirror in this soulless square room feels nothing like dancing to Shakira around the living room in my knickers.

Thankfully, Dr Paul’s gaze is hygienically objective and I am saved from any further self-analysis as he skips the small talk.

“Your right shoulder naturally sits a little lower which makes sense, as your right breast is significantly larger, did you know that? It’s very common.”

His manner is weirdly anaemic, reminding me of that actor who plays Marty McFly’s teenage dad in Back to the Future. Sort of pleasant with waxy undertones.

“Yes, so, both your breasts are heavy with very dense breast tissue and must be causing you increasing amounts of discomfort.”

He lifts both boobs in turn. “You’ve got several acrochordons underneath both breasts caused by friction.”

“Excuse me?” Did he just tell me I have spiders living under my boobies?

“Skin tags.”

He points a latex finger at the gargantuan skin tag sitting between my breasts that won’t come off despite my best efforts to strangle its blood supply.

“You’ll find that all of the skin tags including this larger one here just won’t be a problem once friction has been removed.”

I picture these little pink papules fleeing from my body once their moist friction-y home has been sliced away.

“At an initial estimate, I’d say we’ll remove at least half of your left breast and maybe two-thirds of your larger right breast, so that’s around 600-700gms respectively.”

My brain immediately converts it into baking and I can visualise four blocks of Mainland salted butter stacked on the bench, prompting me to emit a surprised “Jeepers!”

He gives a soft dry laugh. “Yes, it’s rather a lot. This procedure is the surgical team’s favourite as the women who have it wake up with an immediate result from something that can be, or is, extremely debilitating.”

“And we would make the incision here,” he continues, running his finger along the underside of my breast, “up to the nipples then around the nipple.” He accompanies this with a roundy-roundy motion of his finger on my right nipple. “Then we’d remove the tissue and also perform a lift, which will help with the emptiness up here.”

He gestures at the tops of my breasts and he’s right, there is an emptiness to behold, a pale expanse of flat chest where bumps should sit.

“Huh that’s funny,” I say in an unfunny voice, “I’ve always wondered how to explain my boob deficit to people and that’s pretty perfect.”

“It’s a real benefit of this procedure,” he says. “We can reduce the size of your breasts and also perform a mastopexy so your nipples will sit about … here.” The location he is pointing to seems miraculous. I can’t believe this isn’t something I’ve considered till this exact moment.

“Are you saying that you’re going to give me a breast lift?”

I would later read on Dr Paul’s website that in a mastopexy, “the areola is centralised over the area of breast prominence where it would typically be in youthful women with smaller breasts”, which feels savagely honest and painfully reductive in equal measure.

It’s a lot to take in. And finally: “Now Emma, what cup size would you ideally see yourself as?” I want to scream SMALL, I WANT TINY GODDAMN TITS into his face. Instead I smile benignly. “I think a D cup would be sensible.”

I was 42 when my partner and I had a baby, after a number of years spent trying. I started eating almost constantly as soon as we had our first pregnancy scan at about four weeks.

I knew that eating pure shit for nine months wasn’t very clever, but the fact remained that all I really wanted to eat was brioche and supermarket frozen mince pies and eggs with sides of sweaty bacon. As a result, I gained nearly 40kg during my pregnancy and even that’s a guess as I refused to be weighed for the last few months.

This was around the time I had a minor revelation: we DO NOT have to be weighed by health professionals. It is our choice whether or not to step on those scales and saying no can make you feel a lot better about your experience at the doctor’s surgery.

Once I birthed my daughter my weight fell a little but not by much, and my new G-cup breasts that had developed over the pregnancy months just never went away (they actually got way bigger during the breastfeeding phase). At first, I rallied furiously against this new shape. My steadfast refusal to inhabit a much bigger body led me to drastic diets that I had previously shunned as bad news for someone with my history of disordered eating.

Then I came to realise that my unhappiness with my body wasn’t going to just affect me any more. And I didn’t want my daughter to go through years of self-loathing and an unacceptance of her body like I did. I didn’t want her to hear me say unkind words to myself about my own body. I didn’t want her to hear me talk about diets or food restriction. And I never wanted her to feel unworthy of attention or love because of her size – no matter what that might be.

So, I unbuckled myself from the shackles of the diet industry. It was no quick fix. Just a relearning of how I regard the body I’m in and the acceptance that comes with that. And a refusal to ever put myself through a weight loss programme again. The data doesn’t lie – they don’t work for the vast majority of us.

However, the fact remained that I now had a very large pair of breasts that made it incredibly hard for me to exercise and move around comfortably. It was painful to wear huge bras every day and I ended up with deep grooves in my shoulders that never went away. I also started developing a small hump at the base of my neck caused by postural changes to accommodate the large mass I was carrying on my chest.

Then about six months ago I sat next to a woman at a dinner party and we got chatting about bodies and baby-bearing. She told me she’d had breast reduction surgery in her mid-40s and it had changed her life. Her small frame with H-cup breasts had made it impossible for her to live comfortably, despite the work she’d put into battling her eating disorder from which she was now in recovery.

In all my adult years I’d never, even for a second, considered surgery. It felt too much like a cosmetic luxury utilised by the wealthy quick-fix brigade. I had never conceptualised the physical limitations of what I was carrying around nor considered a world where this could be rectified with such a drastic step.

I googled the procedure and what I read told a tale strikingly similar to my own. “Breasts may be a source of social embarrassment and unwanted attention… many women will dress to hide the size of their breasts, and suffer from chronic rash or skin irritation under the breasts, neck and shoulder pain.” It was all so familiar.

Now, in his office, Dr Paul presses his palms together. “I’m going to take some pictures for your file, if you’re OK for me to do that?”

I have never taken a photo of my breasts, not for a sext, not for a laugh, not for a drunken moment best left forgotten, not for anything.

Yet here I stand with my wonky shoulders pushed back and my undefined areolas and my pedunculated skin tag on display, hearing the thud in my chest as Dr Paul adjusts his lights and then asks me to turn to the right then left and then centre, and on and on for a thousand years until the only thing I can see is my very large pale breasts and I’m scared if he doesn’t finish soon I’ll never think of anything else again.

Then suddenly we’re done. I sling my bra around my waist and do it up at the front before ungracefully dragging it into position with the clasp at the back. I’ve never figured out how to do it the normal way.

Later that night I continue with my research, and an article about teenagers and body image catches my eye. I think about my teenage self and the shame I wore on my chest. Shame that wasn’t mine to carry. Shame that stopped me from undertaking the most basic acts of self-care, like learning how to put a bra on with ease. Shame that has evolved into a deeply entrenched dislike for a part of my body that society tells me I should be showing off at every available opportunity. A shame that has followed me around in ill-fitting bras all of my life.

I want to pour a honeyed salve onto these old wounds and ease the hurt that my younger self went through. I want to start again and learn to love my 46-year-old body. I want to stand proudly in that soulless room for my “after” photos, and bear witness to the woman I have grown into, and all of the women who came before me.

I make the decision. I’ll find a way to cover the cost of going private. I book the surgery for August.

Author’s note: Breast reduction surgery is currently not publicly funded in this country unless you can prove to ACC that you are in enough physical pain due to the size of your breasts and that your weight sits under a certain BMI. I am in an extremely privileged position to be able to afford it privately and I want to acknowledge that, as I know that for thousands of New Zealand women, this is just not an option


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