Whenever somebody said, “Ya mum,” I’d always smile to myself. “Which one are you talking about? I have many incredible mothers.”
“Ya mum.” It’s the most common joke in Australia, especially in the western suburbs of Sydney, where I was raised. “Ya mum” is derivative of the African-American jest, “Yo’ momma”.
The final incident that ended their union was simple. Brian kept turning up the television while my grandmother tried to hold church services with the extended family she was finally able to bring over from Tonga. In front of her five sisters, Nana yelled at Brian that she didn’t need him any more. Brian turned up the cricket to full volume and shouted back, “Charity cases!” Soon after, Brian went back to England. He left an empty bank account and a no return address.
By the early ’90s, Sydney was fast filling with the children of islanders from across the South Pacific. It was a rarity in those days to be hafekasi and even rarer still that two hafekasis would marry each other. But that’s exactly what my father did when he met Mafile’o Theresa Helen Tuitavake at Mounties RSL. She was standing in front of a painted mural of a jungle, looking like a swan. Dad went up to her immediately, bouncing on his Nike TNs and asking for her number.
Widowed and overwhelmed with toddlers, my father moved us to Miller, right next door to his mother’s and sisters’ housing commission home on Guernsey Road. By the summer of 2001, my father had proposed to a Tongan-born woman named Ramona Johansson . Ramona had a son from a previous marriage, my stepbrother William Young, who was also hafeaski. Ramona had grown up in Aotearoa, so she always had a slight posh inflection in her voice whenever she said words like “fish and chups” and “chocka”. Apparently, Ramona had known my mummy Le’o from way back in the day.
As the years went by, I began to doubt I’d ever had a real mother. “I belong to no woman,” I’d told my grandmother.Shaking her afro and pulling me into a hug, Nana said in a thunderous clash of broken English: “No. Me mum. Winnie Lahi mum. Margaret mum. Lavender mum. Jane mum. Ramona mum. No forget.”
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