1 day ago
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Seventy-two hours after our daughter, Neve, was born, Clarke and I held a press conference to introduce her to the world. We planned the whole thing before I gave birth, and I’d been sure it would be fine. Kate Middleton did it, I’d thought. I can make it work.
Now that I’d just given birth, it did not feel fine.
I had spent most of the waking hours since Neve arrived just staring at her, the way new parents do. For so long, I had waited and worried, and now she was here. I was relieved and elated.
My body, though, was another matter. Even the easiest birth knocks a body in two, and Neve’s wasn’t entirely straightforward. Close to delivery, her heart rate had dropped precipitously, and she’d emerged with the cord wrapped around her neck. Her first night, she’d been up for 12 hours straight, which meant I had, too. By now I felt almost delirious from lack of sleep.
I’d also barely got out of my pyjamas since she’d been born. My hair was unwashed, and the best hope was to pull it back in a bun. My postpartum stomach was, shall we say, not minimal. And walking any distance at all made me feel as if my insides were falling out.
I remembered how Kate Middleton looked on the day she introduced a newborn Prince George to the assembled throng, to the media, to the world. How composed and put together she looked in a powder-blue polka-dot dress. She’d made it look easy. How, exactly, I wondered, as I hobbled down the hallway toward the hospital atrium for my own press conference, had Kate done this?
I held Neve in my arms. She was wrapped in a blanket knitted by Clarke’s mother, wearing a little green knit cap that my seasoned midwife, Libby, had given us. Clarke stood next to me, beaming in a woollen cardigan with a southwestern pattern.
I didn’t tell the reporters everything, of course. I didn’t tell them that the hospital room I’d been staying in had a little vestibule at the entrance for protection officers, because it had been designed to hold incarcerated people from the nearby Mount Eden prison who might need hospital treatment. I didn’t tell them that Clarke had snuck past the media while I was in labour to get me a lemonade Popsicle, or that the first meal I’d had after the birth – Marmite on toast with a cup of Milo – was probably the best meal of my life. I didn’t tell them what Clarke had told me: that the first time I held Neve, I looked like a crazy person, and that I in turn asked him how exactly he would have looked after that labour? Instead, as I looked at the cameras and microphones in front of me, I simply said that it was a joy to introduce our child to the country.
The first question we were asked was easy, about the origin of Neve’s name: Neve Te Aroha Ardern Gayford. Her middle name, Te Aroha, of course, was the mountain beneath which both of my parents were born, the one that in Māori means simply “the love”. If anything was going to make me cry during the press conference, it was this part. My voice wavered as I explained that her name captured what we felt from the moment we announced her existence to the world: love. Love from strangers, friends, family, iwi, Māori. A whole country. Just love.
After that, I wanted to go inside, to bundle Neve into her car seat and leave the hospital for home. But there were more questions. I rocked back and forth on my feet, hoping to keep everything where it belonged – organs, emotions, body fluids – as I took a second question. This one came from a TV journalist.
“Prime minister,” he began. “What have you learned about the state of the public health system?”
It seemed I was a mum for all of four minutes. Now I was back to prime minister.
I’d known exactly what kind of mother I wanted to be. I didn’t want to obsess about breastfeeding, about feeding schedules, about exactly how many minutes of sleep the baby had. I definitely didn’t aspire to feel overwhelmed, weary, or snappish with Clarke’s efforts to help. No, I planned to spend my maternity leave soaking up every minute with beautiful Neve.
But even with Clarke having taken time out from filming his TV show, and even with my mum bustling about our home in Auckland, cooking and cleaning and filling me to bursting with lactation cookies and tea, I still ticked off all the things I wasn’t going to do like they were agenda items.
For one thing, I expected breastfeeding to be a lot more straightforward than it was. I knew that wasn’t the case for lots of new mums, and I had heard a few horror stories including from my sister. But that didn’t change my assumption that eventually my body would just do what it was meant to. But within a few days, Neve began losing weight. So, to boost my supply, I hooked myself up to a pump. I pumped almost nonstop, obsessively.
Does any mother ever look back and say, “I wish I’d spent more time on a breast pump?” Maybe not, but I still felt as if I were failing my first test. And eventually, it became clear: I would have to supplement feeding Neve with formula, and it also looked as though it would have to stay that way.
Then there was the issue of sleep. Neve slept well during the day while I tried to work – because even with my deputy, Winston Peters, temporarily at the helm, even though I left everything as organised as it could possibly have been, there were still papers I needed to review, political issues I had to be involved with, plans I needed to weigh in on. So, I joined conference calls with Neve across my lap, trying to straddle two different universes.
By night, Neve was unsettled – a “party baby”, as Clarke would call her. At first, this turned the days into a hazy blur. But after a few weeks, the sleeplessness became something else entirely. Being woken up so often felt so physically painful that I began to dread the night.
There was also the simple reality of physical recovery. From the moment I learned I was pregnant and was given the label geriatric mother, I expected more twists and turns. But it also meant I marvelled just a bit more, too. My 37-year-old body had managed to create this entire human being, and to sustain the two of us for nine months. It had eventually brought her airside, wide-eyed and perfectly formed. But that didn’t mean my body was happy to just bounce back in the aftermath as I needed it to. For weeks after, I still struggled to stand fully upright. I wondered whether this was just how I would be from now on.
But as the weeks went by, Neve’s nights got a little easier. The formula helped, and so my obsession with feeding eased some. I began to walk a little farther, a touch more upright. And by the time I could do those things, six weeks had passed. It was time to return to Wellington, and to the role of full-time prime minister.
Come September, I was due to speak at the United Nations general assembly. I knew what I wanted to talk about, too: the climate crisis, its impact on our region and the desperate need for nations to work together on solutions, just as leaders of Nauru and atolls like Tokelau were asking us to. Since a trip to New York City is too long for a breastfeeding mum to make alone, Clarke, Neve and I stepped on to a 13-hour Air New Zealand flight and flew through the night, Auckland to Houston, then another three and a half hours to JFK. By the time we got to our hotel, it was one o’clock in the morning in New York and already dinnertime in New Zealand.
By this point, Neve’s nappy had been changed on aeroplane floors. She’d been whisked through airports and strapped in and out of her car seat many times. She was completely spent, her sleep rhythm off, and so she did what any reasonable 12-week-old would under the circumstances: she screamed. And she would not stop.
We sang lullabies into her ear, paced back and forth, rocked her, but she was inconsolable, her face red and twisted, her head thrown back. Her tiny limbs flailed, fighting back against sleep. I felt responsible for her being there, responsible for her being so uncomfortable and unhappy. I glanced at the clock: I was due to speak at an event on sustainable development in the morning, which meant I needed to be up in four hours.
Finally, Clarke sent me to bed. “You need sleep,” he insisted. He was pacing around, rocking Neve up and down in his arms the way he did at home when he tried to settle her. I could tell how tired he was. “We’ll be fine,” he said, his voice quiet. We both knew that I was the one who had to get up and speak in the morning. I kissed them both good night, and I crawled into bed, covering my head with a pillow.
A few hours later, just as the first light was breaking, I found Clarke sitting up in his boxers, wide awake, on the foldout couch of our hotel room. Neve lay against his chest, quiet now, but her eyes open. The television was on, sound down, both mesmerised by what appeared to be a UFC fight.
I stood there in my dress and blazer. “You guys OK?”
Clarke nodded.
“Did you sleep?” I asked.
“Yeah, Neve nodded off eventually.”
“And you?”
“A bit.”
I handed him some milk, kissed them again, and headed out the door.
A few days later I spoke at a Nelson Mandela commemorative event in the general assembly. Clarke and Neve joined in the wings, just in case Neve needed to be fed.
When I finished speaking, we all sat down together in New Zealand’s designated seating on the general assembly floor. That’s when I heard click, click, click. I strained around awkwardly. I couldn’t see where the noise was coming from until our high commissioner pointed up to a row of booths above the floor. “There’s a few media up there,” he said.
Still not really registering that it was us they were interested in, I made stupid faces at Neve while Clarke held her. By the end of the day, these images would travel around the world.
These pictures mark the first time a baby was brought to the floor of the UN general assembly. But when I look at them – at Neve’s double chin, her blue-and-white-striped dress – it’s not the historic occasion I think about.
Instead, I think about all the people just outside the camera frame: the foreign policy adviser who babysat so we could attend an event with the American president. The high commissioner who found bassinets, sterilisers and a playpen. Clarke, who changed the nappies, rocked Neve to sleep and followed me around for feeds.
I worried that this photo could become a banner for “women doing it all” or some kind of proof point that women should never complain about how much they have on their plate, because, look, here’s a woman running a country and being a mother. Sure, women can do it all; they are mothers, workers, caregivers, change makers, advocates, counsellors, cheerleaders, often doing these things with little support. But that doesn’t mean they should.
Women shouldn’t have to choose – the way our mothers so often did – between being good at their profession and being a good mother, or daughter. There should be support networks, a village, whatever you call it, that can help them be all of those things without completely losing themselves in the process. That’s what I was blessed to have, at the UN and elsewhere: the love and support of others. And today that’s exactly what I say when anyone brings up that photo, or when they stop me in the supermarket to ask how I did it.
That trip to the UN was historic, but in some ways it was also bittersweet. On the second day, I noticed that Neve was fussing every time I tried to feed. Clarke saw me struggling, so I tried to explain it away. “It’s probably the different time zones.” But even as I said it, I knew this wasn’t true. I had felt this coming.
I wasn’t giving up on breastfeeding, but Neve was. She’d had enough of feeding when I was available. Of my patchy supply. Of my sometimes-hurried approach to it all. But I hadn’t wanted to concede, because conceding in my mind meant I was somehow failing. It also meant that I would have no excuse anymore to have Neve with me, on the road, or in the office.
If I’d been at home, I would have sat quietly and alone in the corner of a room and had a cry. I’d have mourned this thing I’d never quite mastered, and which as a result made me feel as if I’d failed my first test of motherhood. I was in New York, surrounded by people who wanted nothing more than to help me. But the one thing I needed at that moment, no one could help me with.
I just wanted to feel like a good mum. And right now I didn’t.
In December, just before the Christmas break, I took home my final briefcase of the year. I finished my paperwork, slipped the papers into a manila folder, then slid it back into the bag.
There were new things to worry about: lower-than-expected GDP numbers, a minister who was being scrutinised for his handling of an immigration case, a complaint and report about one of our police appointments. There wasn’t enough time, not enough hours in the day, the universal plight of every mother.
I peeked in at Neve. She was sound asleep. I closed the door to her room, walked to mine, crawled into bed, and pulled the covers up around me. It had been a long year.
“Next year,” I said to Clarke. “Next year will be easier.”
