When Ruth and I first started living together, we'd wake up to find an extra body in the bed: a wee four-year-old boy who couldn't bear to sleep alone. He'd sneak in between us, or snuggle up with his mum, and we'd lie like that until morning, all squashed together. It made for an interesting first few years to our relationship, but we loved him.
Blending two families together is never easy, and Tighe wasn't slow in saying how he felt about his new siblings. But they learned to live together, and they grew to love each other over the years.
I always called Tighe my stepson. I'm sorry, but I can't keep calling him that. Stepson sounds like an obligation, and Tighe was so much more than that to me. No disrespect to Tim, but I feel that Tighe was my son too. Tighe was so fortunate to grow up with two sets of parents who both loved him so very much.
Tighe would always do things in his own time. We'd be leaving, perhaps to go to the Waikato, to see a movie or to drive down to Wellington, and we'd all be in the car. All of us except for Tighe. He'd be off on some important mission, like snail-watching or killing monsters, or choosing which necklace to wear. It drove me crazy, but we weren't all that late really.
Tighe would never do something just because that's the way other people do it. He'd come to dinner, and stand rather than sit. He'd go to school — most days — but he almost never went to form class because he couldn't see the point. He'd jump up in the middle of a meal and rush off to update something in a game or grab something he'd forgotten.
To get to Tighe's bedroom, you had to go through an outside courtyard, and he'd often leave the living-room door wide open, or the outside lights on, in his rush to get in or out. These things just didn't matter to him. I don't know how many times I had to tell him to take his beanie off at the dinner table.
Tighe was incredible. I'd be taking a nap, and I'd hear him walking through the courtyard, talking intensely to himself or singing one of his many made-up songs. Once he brought home a shopping trolley, and when we said he couldn't keep it in the courtyard he simply moved it into his bedroom and used it for extra storage. One year for his birthday he asked for a crowbar.
On a trip to Fiji, Tighe brought a crescent spanner in his carry-on luggage, just because he wanted it. We went to Vanuatu on a family holiday, and on the way back Ruth said to the children, "are you sure you haven't got any fruit in your bag?". They didn't, but when we went through customs the biosecurity officer pulled Tighe's bag aside. "I'm afraid you can't bring these into the country", he said with a smile as he showed us a jar with a large spider in it. Tighe had wanted a new pet.
Tighe loved animals. One day he came home from school and said "Mother, my friend has some ducks, and if we don't take them they'll be eaten." And so we upended the whole backyard to make a coop for two white ducks, who Tighe named Hatu and Patu. They're part of our family now. We have three cats, two ducks, and three cockatiels, but they weren't enough for Tighe. He wanted a goat, and a squirrel, and a turkey. He asked if we could import a racoon from America. A few weeks ago, he wanted to adopt a kitten. For years, he begged us to get a goat, but we just couldn't see how to fit one into our suburban property.
At dinner time, our family tradition was to ask everyone what the best part of their day was. Most of the children would say "I dunno" or just mumble a few words, but once Tighe got going you couldn't shut him up. He'd talk for ten minutes straight about how he'd climbed up on the school roof, or got detention because he laughed at a friend's joke, or the type of gun that one his characters in a video game had earned, or the plot of a movie he'd just watched. Of course, getting him to eat anything was much, much harder. I've never met anyone who took so long to get through a tiny half-plate of food. We'd almost be finished by the time he took his first bite.
As Tighe grew up, he began talking in a language that none of us could understand. People were dogged on, things were gee-gee, and he'd say the most random things that popped into his mind. He'd ask questions like, "would you rather be bitten to death by a rattlesnake or eaten by a polar bear?" or "do you think you'd win a fight to the death with an orangutan?" He would shadow-box, and ask "What do you think would happen if I — boosh!", and he'd pretend to punch the window.
He'd walk into the room and say, "Mother, I need some money", and at one stage he even started calling her "Money" rather than mama or mum.I remember when Tighe's friends came around to pick him up, and he wasn't quite ready. They were pounding on the bathroom door, embarrassed grins on their faces, while Tighe was in the shower singing happily at the top of his lungs.
As the other children began to move out, Tighe quietly took over their space. Quinn's bedroom became Tighe's Lego workshop, Anneke's room became a storage space, and the courtyard turned into his wardrobe. That made it hard when we had visitors, but we just went with it.
For Tighe, it was obvious that he'd be a millionaire by the time he was thirty. He wanted to set up an empire of rubbish trucks, and he planned to live in one. He had dreams, but they weren't just idle fantasies. He worked hard to get what he wanted. He started at Domino's and Uncle Bills, but they were dead-end jobs and he soon moved on. Then he started shearing alpacas, which was incredibly hard physical work, and we learned a lot about animal behaviour listening to his stories at dinner time. He began working for a landscape gardener, again hard labour, but he put his heart into it because it gave him what he wanted. He saved up, and bought a motorbike, and packets of Lego kept arriving by courier.
It was Tighe's dream to get a motorbike, and of course he got one. He swapped out the muffler, and we could hear him coming home all the way from the bottom of Otonga Road two kilometres away. My heart still stops whenever I hear the distant rumble of a motorbike, even though I know it will never be Tighe again.
Oh, Tighe. You lived every moment at a thousand percent. I
I'm sorry that we never let you have a goat. I'm sorry you didn't get to live in a rubbish truck.
I will always love you, my son.
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