Dignity

My son visited me at work on Wednesday, arriving as I microwaved leftovers for lunch. I went to wrap my arms around him, like I always have and I always will - because the moment a kid no longer needs such a thing is the moment he comes to cherish it. I did a doubletake at the sight of my boy as I reached out. 

Last I saw my son was the day he and his partner moved out of their flat, three weeks ago. I said, I'll help you clean, imagining a little vacuuming and a wipe-down of windowsills. The state of the place - it was the first time I'd seen it - turned my stomach. I spent a couple of hours with bleach and a bucket and a mop, scrubbing at mould I couldn't budge from the bedroom walls and ceiling. My disgust for the landlord, my contempt for him, were visceral. 

The kid who visited on Wednesday had an elastic support band around each knee, and he was walking with a cane. He is twenty-two years old. There'd been niggles, yes, for a while - but somehow, in the space of three weeks, they had turned into a pain that meant he could no longer walk easily, or even stand for long.

He’d gone to the GP, and the GP explained there were a few possibilities. Osteoarthritis, maybe, where the body simply wears down over time. But mould has been linked to joint pain - and even possibly to rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease. With rheumatoid arthritis, the body turns on itself, attacks itself.

To be clear, there are several scenarios - and rheumatoid arthritis is the least likely. But it makes no difference to what has to happen next. My boy needs to see a rheumatologist as fast as he can, to rule out the more serious possibilities related to the mould. The public waiting list is too long: he needs to go private. Right now, he can't find work in the sinking Wellington job market. I will pay for the rheumatologist, for the tests, for whatever is needed.

This is not some tale of a mother’s love. Yes, I’ll pay. Mums will generally do what we can when our kids need us, and I’m not special. The only difference between us mothers is that some can find money and some can’t - they simply can't. Your options are reduced when it’s hard just to make rent. I’m luckier than many, and I know it.

No: this is a story of a mum’s anger, at a property market that first does harm - then expects the harmed, their families, the taxpayer to bear the costs of the insult and the injury alike. Somehow we’ve normalised this. And, yes, of course I’ll pay. But just because my kid’s wellbeing is priceless to me doesn’t mean I can’t begrudge the landlord every last damn cent.

Visceral. It's a word we prefix to things like 'disgust' and 'contempt', but it actually means the deepest parts of the body. A body is supposed to be a whole made up of parts that work together - like a society. That’s what makes an autoimmune disease so hard to understand, so lacking in logic: the body turning on itself. When that happens, to a body or a society, one part of it against another, it's the whole that gets sick.

This government was elected on a platform that included ‘giving landlords dignity'. I don't know what that means anymore, that word 'dignity' - except it seems to come at a cost, and a whole lot of people are priced out of the market.