Going South ... continued

I had a long-term Maori boyfriend, Buddy, whom I had met about a year before I started training, and at first I saw him as often as I could. He wasn't what my mother thought. Buddy was better educated, kinder, and far more loving than I was, but it was just so difficult. His mother and his stern sisters were as opposed to our relationship as my mother. I had no real reason for thinking it, but I sensed that they thought me a piece of pakeha rubbish. As my life became more and more involved with nursing, I began seeing Buddy less and less. Finally I broke up with him, made easier by the fact that he saw it coming and got very bitter toward the end.

One morning on the ward I threw up. My period was late (nothing unusual there), my breasts were sore (nothing unusual there, either). But to me, it was clear I was pregnant. Immediately I went off the rails. It was over, I had nothing to lose. Life became a series of parties. Where earlier I had crept back into the nurses' home over a roof and in my window, I began not to bother going back at all, crashing at parties and going back next day in time for duty.

Eventually the Home Sister caught on and contacted my mother, and I was sent home. Buddy showed up at the door one day. He knew I'd been running around, but he came just the same. I sent him away.

Within a week or two, I was shipped off to be a mother's helper to a doctor and his family in Wanganui for the duration of my pregnancy. Nobody was likely to see me there. The two kids were bratty and spoiled, but the worst of it was Mrs. J., a patronizing woman with bulging eyes and nicotine-stained fingers. She had been a nurse in Wellington before marrying the doctor. The whole family referred to me, in my presence, as 'the babysitter.' Each day brought new snubs and humiliations. I was just one of a long series of stupid, worthless girls who worked for nothing, and who were nothing.

One night at the dinner table, I stood to collect the plates, not noticing that the doctor had a piece of bread uneaten on his plate. 'You could at least wait till we finish eating,' snapped his wife, cigarette already in her hand.

© 2000 Trout &
Kerry Wilke