Single-working parent Tamsyn Matchett knows a thing or two about being dissed.
“I’ve been wildly disrespected as a single parent. Just being a young mum in general. There’s really a total lack of respect ... being half brown is always going to be an issue. People are gonna go, “Huh! Brown Girl!”
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Born in Tāmaki Makaurau, Tamsyn is half Tongan, half Palangi. Tamsyn is a go-getter and co-hosts Dirt-bag Radio on bFM. She's an aspiring opera singer with a Bachelor in Music from Otago University.
Tamsyn is also a solo-mum, or as another solo-mother prefers to put it; 'a single-working-parent’ to her almost eight-year-old daughter Ruby.
But cut-off from the Tongan side of her family at a young age, Tamsyn is also a woman on a quest.
More than 200,000 families in this country are headed by a single parent. This six-part RNZ podcast series, Flying Solo aims to find out what that means for New Zealand.
Tamsyn's journey as a solo-parent has been challenging: “I was 24; very unplanned and I barely knew Ruby’s dad. I was at the University of Otago. I was living off my $150 [per-week] student allowance. At the time I thought – I can do this.
"I don’t want to diminish myself but looking back, I was super immature [in] how I managed my relationship with Ruby’s dad. I had unrealistic expectations of being a parent.”
The couple split up, but Tamsyn admits, "That was definitely not [Ruby's dad's] fault. He has always been a central part of Ruby's life."
Tamsyn’s own mother was also a young, struggling solo-parent, so Tamsyn was adopted by her grandparents as a baby. Tamsyn grew up not knowing her Tongan father.
When she had Ruby she moved back home with Ruby’s great-grandparent’s and found the support she needed.
The family's 1960s three-bedroom home on Auckland's North Shore houses Tamsyn, Ruby and matriarch and great-grandmother Glenda who takes piano lessons in the small studio downstairs (she's in her 70s) and great-granddad Popa Kenneth. Lovingly nicknamed 'Mr Marshmallow', his very sweet demeanour and his dementia are part of daily life. Ruby's dad, who lives nearby, shares her care.
“She has two extremely, exceptionally loving homes,” Tamsyn says. And Ruby’s dad is a devoted father.
Tamsyn has no regrets about breaking up with Ruby's father, “How can you prefer to be in one unhappy household, as opposed to going between two happy and loving and secure households?"
She says her and Ruby's father are doing the same thing now, that they were doing when they were together: 'putting [Ruby] at the heart of our decision making'.
Tamsyn has worked with New Zealand Opera as an assistant director and performer and is now the senior advisor to the counsellor support team at Auckland Council.
She has plenty of culture in her life, but as a child, she had no connection with her Tongan birth-father. She wanted more for Ruby.
Pasifika is a term unique to Aotearoa, coined by government agencies to describe migrants from the Pacific and their descendants. But when Tamsyn became a solo-mum she says her sense of identity was turned up-side-down.
She started looking into what being Pasifika meant, as much for Ruby as for herself. One thing she already knew though – from being "a brown girl", is that Pasifika solo-mums get it worse than others.
“Yes. Like expecting high levels of drug use during pregnancy, or cigarette smoking. Making huge assumptions that I don’t have an education, or that I didn’t have a job, or that I didn’t have a house – or that I needed to be supervised!”
Tamsyn found her birth-father via Facebook only a couple of years ago and now she and Ruby celebrate their huge extended Tongan and Pasifika family and heritage.
She laughs as she tells me “that’s my life really - either being slightly too brown or slightly too white!”
As a mother, Tamsyn makes sure Ruby celebrates both her cultures.
“I tell her all the time – you’re a little Pasifika Princess! I will continue to support her to hold strong to those foundations.”
Creator/Producer: Lynda Chanwai-Earle
Senior Producer: Alison Ballance
Executive Producer: Tim Watkin
Flying Solo Episode Three was engineered by William Saunders, Phil Benge and Steve Burridge.
