Charmaine in Sydney

Pat at her 90th birthday party, with children (on left) Deborah, Adrienne, Charmaine, (on right) Barbara, Chris Ann, Jess , (in front) a picture of Patience (with clown friend) not long before her death last year.

My birth mother, Pat Tapper, turned 90 on 27 December 2014. I went to Sydney between Christmas and New Year to celebrate with my extended family there. Pat is in good physical health, but has memory loss. Mostly, she knows when she is surrounded by loving family members, and always holds her arms out for any baby with great enthusiasm.

I’m profoundly fortunate in my two families- Grace and Laurence who adopted me when I was three weeks old, and Pat and Brian and my full siblings who welcomed me and Grace into my birth family in 1986. My brother and five sisters (our dear Patience died in March 2014), and their partners and children, plus innumerable cousins, aunts and uncles, are a very loving lot – a cocoon of kinship.

I come home from family gatherings exhausted, and also overwhelmed with gratitude for their good humour and warmth. Forty-four years as an only child didn’t quite prepare me for being immersed in a whanau of forty and a hapu of four hundred… but I’m learning, slowly.