In eight years, Jackie never missed a single visit with her tamariki.
Her daughter and son were taken into Oranga Tamariki care in 2018. Jackie did the parenting courses. She did the counselling. She turned up to every visit, an hour at a time, for years. And still, she says, Oranga Tamariki told her she wasn’t getting her children back.
This is what she says she told them: “I’ve been fighting through and through, jumping through all your guys’ hoops, doing everything you’ve told me, and you just keep pushing the bar further and further away for me to get my kids back.”
Jackie’s connection to Porirua Whānau Centre started long before any of that, when her older girl began at the Whānau Centre’s day care at age one. She’s 10 now. One of her teachers back then was Jess.
At the time, Jackie was going through family violence with her children’s father, and she wasn’t telling anyone.
“I wasn’t really the type to really tell people what I was going through. I just thought I was hiding it and just keeping it to myself,” she says. “The lovely people from the Whānau Centre kind of saw something wasn’t right, and they stepped in to help.”
Jess sat her down and told her she could say what was really going on. Jackie did.
She had a lawyer then who was telling her she had to do everything Oranga Tamariki said. Jess and two other kaimahi at the centre told her that wasn’t how it worked.
“They kind of were like, no, she should be actually working for you, not you having to listen to what OT’s telling you to do,” Jackie says. “Because I had no idea what I was doing. I was pretty much bowing down, letting them walk all over me.”
They helped her find a new lawyer. That lawyer stuck with her, as Jackie puts it, “from that same day right through till my kids got discharged from OT”.
The years in between cost her more than she can easily put into words.
“It’s like you’re grieving for somebody that’s alive, and you can’t be with them,” she says. “Every day I just felt like I was just a walking corpse with a beating heart.”
Her son had been taken at seven weeks old. Oranga Tamariki told her to use the visits to build a bond with him, which was its own kind of cruelty.
“Well, how can I do that when I only get to see them for an hour?”
She says there was a stretch of about three months when all contact with her children stopped, and nobody could tell her why beyond not having a case manager.
Through all of it, Jess kept answering the phone.
“I used to have Jess on speed dial, pretty much, and I’d ring her and she’d be like, girl, I’m coming over. I’m gonna chill with you until you feel better.”
“I definitely wouldn’t have made it through without her.”
The turning point came at a family group conference, when Jackie finally sat down face to face with her children’s foster parents. She says they had been told she didn’t want her children.
“I finally sat down with the foster parents and I told them, I was like, I want my kids back. That’s why I come to every visitation. I’ve never missed a visitation,” she says. “And that’s when they were like, oh well, we were made to believe you didn’t want your kids back.”
Her tamariki are home. The Oranga Tamariki orders were discharged in August.
Coming home took its own work. Her daughter, who had developed attachment issues, would cry at school thinking her mum wasn’t coming back for her, so Jackie sat in the classroom with her until she settled. Her son had spent his whole life with other people.
“Today we have a good bond now.”
Most of Jackie’s eight years came before Hapori existed.
Hapori is a pilot partnership between Oranga Tamariki and community organisations like the Whānau Centre. It is there to strengthen support for whānau involved with the care and protection system.
Jessica Tehuia, the Jess that Jackie had on speed dial, says the pilot was a natural next step from what the Whānau Centre had already been doing for years.
“Behind every case file is a whānau with their own story, their own strengths, and a deep connection between parents and their tamariki,” she says.
“Our role is to build trust, help whānau find their way through complex systems, stand up for their rights and keep their voices at the centre of decisions about their lives.”
She is clear about who did the work.
“Jackie did the hard work herself. Our role was to stand beside her and remind her that she did not have to face it alone.”
Jackie hasn’t had a drink in nearly four years. “My kids deserve better. They shouldn’t have to see their mum be a drunk,” she says. “There’s nothing to be sad about anymore. I have my babies back. I can breathe. I can feel alive again with my babies.”
Christmas has never been the big one in her house. New Year’s is, the way her mum taught her: everyone made it to another one together, so there’s a big feed.
“I’ve always told my kids Christmas is about being with the ones you love. It’s not always about gifts. The most precious gift in life is like just being with each other.”
“It’s okay to ask for help. You don’t have to do it alone,” she says. “There are people out there who are willing to help and support you, even when the ones that you think love you ain’t there.”
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