My Life, My Fight Read online

The next time Mohi came by the house, I begged him to let me go to the farm with him. Dad just shrugged, so the next school holidays Matewai picked me up and I spent two of the best weeks of my life working on the farm with Mohi.

  It was August and calving season. Our first proper outing on the farm didn’t start well. We’d been out all day, with Mohi birthing the calves and his little kids and me wrangling them. The weather was terrible, and we were in a paddock near a dangerous cliff, but we were almost done for the day so were feeling good. The fence closest to the cliff had a gate, which was open, but because he was on the other side of the paddock and exhausted, Mohi told me to stand in the opening. “Just stay there and don’t let the calf run by you,” he instructed. I guess he figured since I was so big I could literally stand still and do the job. So along came the bull calf and the first thing it did was run straight at me. If you make a lot of noise and wave your arms, farm animals will almost always run away. But I didn’t know that because I was a kid who’d never been to a farm before, so instead I did a little squeal and jumped out of the way. I still haven’t lived it down.

  Despite that crappy start to life on the farm, I fell in love with it over the next fortnight. Knowing that I was working and being useful made me want to get better and better at it. I think my dad had that same fight, and that’s why he was such a force at the timber yard he worked in right up until he had to retire hurt.

  I wasn’t the only stray brother Mohi had picked up. He had three younger brothers on his mum’s side, and since we were around the same age, Mohi figured we could hang out together and learn the meaning of putting in a hard day’s work. The farm had a routine and I love routines. Every morning before sunrise Mohi would wake us and ask who wanted to work today. At the start it was compulsory, but after the first week we could just hang out at the house playing table tennis or go looking for swimming holes if we wanted to. I loved learning about the farm business, though, so I always said yes to the work.

  Farming isn’t easy but it’s the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done. As well as helping with calving, we built fences, sorted the feed, and cleared land. I had assumed that farming was good for someone like me who didn’t really like learning in a classroom but who had natural strength. I soon learned more about math and science then I ever had in school. When Mohi told me to calculate how much feed was needed for 450 cows, I had to make sure it was exactly right. Being 10 percent wrong either side meant wasting Mohi’s money or underfeeding the cows. When we were putting up fences and wiring them to be electrified, Mohi explained why each hole had to be dug a certain depth and why the wires had to be taut but not so tight that they would snap. We worked out the perfect angles so that the fence wouldn’t collapse in a storm, and we learned how to wire the finished fences with electricity.

  I soon found out that I learn best when concepts are explained to me using real-life applications. I would have been bored senseless learning about angles in class, but out in a paddock with Mohi explaining why a foundation post has to be at a 90-degree angle, it made sense pretty quick. I always had a lot of questions, which I’m sure got very annoying very fast. But I always like to know the reason behind doing something. That continues today and is why I ask coaches and trainers for the reason behind every play, drill, or workout.

  Perhaps the best part about working on the farm with Mohi was that at the end of the day we could look out and see everything we’d accomplished. It’s rare to spend a day working on a farm and not have any visible progress to show for your efforts.

  One of the best things was that every night Matewai would put on a mean feed. We always had enough food at home with Dad, but dinner tastes a little sweeter when you’ve been out in the cold working hard all day. What I realized only recently, after doing my own food shopping, was that having four boys staying for two weeks must have at least tripled their food bill. We had free milk and free meat from the farm, but Matewai has since told me they would spend an extra $1,000 on food for those two weeks that we stayed. That in itself should’ve been enough reason to never let us stay again, but it didn’t put them off. After that first holiday, I couldn’t wait to go back. For the next three years, every school holiday and most long weekends I’d get picked up by Matewai and spend time on the farm.

  In those three years I kept growing at a fairly rapid pace. By the time I was 12, I was well over 6 feet tall and I had size 16 feet. Do you know how hard it is to find size 16 gumboots? It’s damn near impossible. So in the summer, when it wasn’t icy, I’d farm barefoot. I must have looked ridiculous. This lanky kid walking through mud and cow shit all day in his bare feet. Matewai would be constantly growling at me for bringing shit into the house either on my feet or clothes. I would just walk in and flop myself down on the couch until Matewai would come charging over and shoo me towards the shower. That time spent out with Mohi and Matewai did me a lot of good. I’d be exhausted at the end of every day, which, for a kid who was usually bouncing off the walls, was a rare feat.

  I’m still not entirely sure why Mohi and Matewai took it upon themselves to take me in for those few years. I don’t think Dad asked them to, but he definitely appreciated it. When I was 10 years old, Dad was 70. He’d taught Sid a lot of things that dads teach their sons. How to fix things and use power tools and look after his younger siblings. But by the time I was old enough to learn, Dad was tired. He couldn’t come outside and play with me or teach me how to use a chainsaw or anything like that. So that’s where Mohi stepped in.

  He was certainly strict, and there was no swearing or slacking off. I did more dishes for Mohi and Matewai than I ever did at home. It took a little while to get used to it, but once I knew what the boundaries were, I stayed within them.

  Whether he realized it or not, Mohi was like my second dad. He was only 24 the first time he let me stay, younger than I am now. I was his helper around the farm and soaked up everything he said. He taught me how to ride a farm bike and then banned me from ever riding one after I bent the handlebars. And he made me want to do a good job for him so much that I ended up hurting myself because of it.

  We were putting up a fence on one of my later visits and Mohi had me hold up a wooden board that he needed to nail in. We’d done it a dozen times before and I knew the most important thing was to hold it perfectly still, which meant pushing it hard against the post. I grabbed the board and pressed my knee against it for extra stability as he started hammering. I could feel the impact shock going through my leg every time he made contact with the nail.

  What I wasn’t expecting was for the shock to get worse. It actually started properly hurting. “Hey Mohi,” I said between hits. “It’s starting to hurt.” He just shook his head and kept hammering. The pain only got worse with each hit. “Mohi, it really hurts.”

  “Shut up, I’m almost done,” he growled, and gave the nail one last hammer before he stood up. I pulled my leg away from the board and we both saw that Mohi had hammered the nail straight through the post and into my thigh. Mohi tried to act like it was some sort of rite of passage, but I didn’t buy it. Luckily, I hadn’t started crying. Rightly or wrongly, being able to take a punch was regarded highly in my family. It’s a skill that’s harder to master when you’re the youngest, but I think it’s fair to say that it has served me well since.

  I might have been only 12 years old at that point, but I was planning out my whole life. I’d get a paid job on a farm as soon as I could, then save up to buy my own land. Mohi worked as a manager on someone else’s farm, so we would always talk about what I had to do in order to run my own farm and not have to work for someone else. By starting work young, I could help my dad out with some of the bills and pay him back for all he’d done. Maybe I’d go on a business course to polish up on that side of things before getting my farm set up. I knew exactly what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

  And then Dad got sick.

  2.

  DAD GETS SICK

  No one knows for sure how many
kids my dad had. If you ask anyone in the media they’ll say he had 18, or maybe even 20, but they won’t know where that number came from. If you ask my sister Viv, she’ll say it’s 16. I always thought there were 14 of us. Whatever the number, there will only ever be one Sid Adams.

  Dad joined the merchant navy straight out of school in Bristol, England, and a few years later, when the boat he was working on docked in the Bay of Plenty, he jumped ship. He ended up in Rotorua and never left. Almost as soon as he arrived in New Zealand he shacked up with a local woman and had two daughters. The relationship clearly wasn’t a great one because those two daughters chose to have nothing to do with him for the rest of his life. Unfazed, he hung around, driving logging trucks for a forestry company and apparently meeting plenty of women.

  In 2005, when I was 12 years old, Viv and Valerie organized an Adams family reunion. It was going to be the first complete Adams reunion ever. It would also be the last. Maybe they waited until they were sure Dad wasn’t going to have any more kids before trying to round us all up. Or maybe they wanted to make sure none of us were accidentally dating our cousin, seeing as quite a few of us kids hadn’t properly met. The reunion was held at our house and almost everyone showed up: 13 kids, with some getting to know each other properly for the first time.

  Even though some of the brothers, like Mohi and Rob, only found out they were Dad’s kids later on in life, as soon as they were introduced to us it was like they’d been there the whole time. Looking around, it wasn’t hard to tell we all came from the same guy. You couldn’t turn anywhere without bumping into a giant Adams forehead. I think Mohi might be the only one who escaped the famous Adams brow.

  It was cool seeing Val again. She’d been competing all around the world in shot put and had just come third at the world champs. She was definitely the star of the family, but because she had grown up and lived in Auckland, I didn’t feel that connected to her. She was more of a distant sister who we sometimes would see on TV. Yet Val’s upbringing wasn’t all that different from ours and it seemed like the two of us actually had a lot in common. She’s the tallest girl of the family at 6′4″, and although at that age I didn’t look tall standing next to her, I was on my way to becoming the tallest boy. At that reunion, though, Ralph and Warren, both nearly 7 feet tall, were the big brothers in every way.

  I looked at Val and all she was achieving on her own and couldn’t help but be impressed. Even though at that point I wasn’t taking anything seriously, and definitely not basketball, she showed me that the Adams family definitely had the talent and the genes; we just had to put in a bit of hard work and we’d go far. Ralph and Warren also had the genes and talent. Quite a few people over the years have said they could have been in the NBA if that had been an option for New Zealanders in the 1980s.

  Viv has always been the photographer of the family and even now her house is packed with photo albums and framed photos of us all. She went around that day and got all of Dad’s “lots” in photos with him. First it was the older lot with Viv. Then Rob on his own and Mohi on his own, followed by Val’s team. Then finally Sid, Lisa, Gabby, and me. The photos aren’t fancy at all, just taken on Viv’s cheap digital camera, but they’re the only proper family photos we have with Dad. Then it was decided we had to all appear in a photo together.

  Having 14 people in a photo is a bit of a mission if they’re a normal size. But Adams kids aren’t a normal size. Viv thought it would be cool to have us all in height order so we all argued for a bit over who was shorter than who, then formed a line. Dad was right in the middle. He would’ve been closer to the tall end if he could still stand up straight, but it worked out perfectly for the photo. Because I was only 12, I was still the shortest, or at least pretty close to the shortest next to Viv, so I was right down at one end. We got one of the partners to take the photo and we should have known then it was a mistake, because she was a foot shorter than most of us, so the angles were all wrong from the beginning. After a lot of pushing and shoving we all stood still for the one second it took to take a single photo and that was it. No one bothered to check if the photo was all right; we just wanted to stop having to pose like idiots.

  When the photo was processed, we all saw that I’d been cut off along with our sister Marg. Not even a little bit cut off or half cut off, just completely removed. We still laugh about it when we get together, but it kinda sucks that it is the only photo that exists of all of us with Dad. And I’m not even in it.

  Not long after that reunion, Dad found out he was dying. Of course, he didn’t tell me at first.

  I knew Dad was going to the doctor because he had fairly regular checkups for his legs and his asthma. When he got home I asked if there was anything wrong. He told me the doctor had found “some white stuff in my stomach.” I thought they must have just seen the ice cream we’d eaten earlier swirling around in his tummy. I told him that and he nodded, which to me meant he was fine.

  That night, Viv came by the house as she always did, and she and Dad sat in the lounge talking. When Dad had gone to bed, Viv called me, Sid, Gabby, and Lisa out to the living room. “Dad’s sick,” she said. “He’s really sick. He’s got cancer.” I knew what cancer was and I knew it wasn’t just ice cream swirling around in his tummy. Viv explained how the doctors didn’t think there was much they could do and Dad, being Dad, didn’t want to go through all the chemotherapy and radiation, so he was just going to wait it out.

  I started to think of it as just another health problem that Dad would have to live with. He’d had asthma and his gammy legs for as long as I could remember, and now he’d have cancer. It would just be another part of the daily routine. But when I saw how upset Lisa and Gabby were, I started to realize that it was serious. Viv didn’t know how long he had left, but we all thought it would be, at worst, just a few years.

  After our little meeting we ran to Dad and hugged him. By that point we were all crying, which he didn’t like. “Stop the bloody crying,” he said, the first of many times he would say that. “I’m the one who should be crying, not you guys.” It was typical Dad, telling his kids off for crying over something even if it was the news that he was dying. Viv told us later that when he told her he was sick he laughed as if it was the world’s funniest joke. That was just Dad; he always had a bit of a dark sense of humor.

  Everything moved so quickly after that and no one, even now, can remember exactly how long he was sick. At one point, Viv took him to the hospital for a procedure which they stuffed up. I guess it was a colonoscopy because they burst something up there. They sent him home anyway because he didn’t complain about the pain.

  But a few days later he was in agony, so he called Viv and asked her to leave work to drive him to the hospital. When she asked him why he didn’t just call the ambulance, he said he didn’t want to pay the fee for getting an ambulance pickup. If you ever hear me being a tight arse and complaining about paying for parking, that’s where I get it from.

  Once Dad was back in hospital, he stayed there. Viv came by every morning and night to make sure we were going to school and had something to eat for dinner. She also called Mum in Tonga and told her to come back because Dad was sick. She did come back, but it didn’t feel right. She got a job working at night and we barely saw her, which suited us kids just fine since that’s what we were used to. It felt weird to have my own mum living in the same house as me and feeling like a stranger. During that time, Viv felt like more of a mother simply because she’d been helping out for so long and wasn’t about to stop just because Mum was back on the scene.

  Life continued on as normal, or as normal as it could be. Sid was 17 by then, working and doing his own thing. He became the full-time driver and also a fill-in dad for us while Dad was in hospital. He’d drive us all to basketball trainings and to school if it was raining, then help get dinner sorted when he got home from work. It all seemed natural and normal at the time, but Sid had to grow up real fast once Dad got sick.

  All the s
iblings from around the country came to visit Dad while he was sick. Val came down from Auckland every weekend that she could, and Warren and Ralph flew in to see Dad, but then had to go back to work.

  Eventually, we got word from the nurses at the hospital that Dad could come home. He couldn’t even walk at that point and he had lost a lot of weight, but they thought he would be more comfortable at home. We all agreed, and it was arranged for a hospital bed to be delivered so we could set it up in the lounge for him. We all knew it would be his final move, but we were so happy at the thought of him being back in the lounge where we had been used to seeing him our whole lives. If you’re from a big family, or an island family (usually those two go together), you’ll know what it’s like to “visit” a sick relative in the hospital. It’s not really about sitting down and talking to them, most of the time you’re just hanging out with your cousins and mucking around near the sick person. That’s exactly what we were doing when Dad got worse.

  I still don’t know what exactly happened, but suddenly he wasn’t allowed to come home. Viv sent one of her daughters to go get Gabby from basketball practice and then called Ralph and Warren, who had both just flown home, and told them to hurry back because Dad was on his way out. It was a Monday.

  By Tuesday everyone except Val was back in Rotorua. She had been at an athletics meet and was in Sydney on her way home when Viv told her the news. Everyone was freaking out and wondering what had gone wrong with Dad. One minute he was supposed to be going home with us and the next he was barely able to talk or move. As kids we thought the nurses or doctors must have done something wrong for him to get worse. It took a few hours before we stopped blaming the hospital staff and started thinking maybe Dad had just had enough. Perhaps he had given up or just decided it was his time to go.

  Within 24 hours every one of the Adams kids was back except Val, but Dad was deteriorating quickly. He couldn’t move or talk or even make noises. His hands, those enormous hands, lay motionless at his sides. When I put my hand in his and squeezed, he didn’t squeeze back. There was a rumor around town that Dad had once broken a guy’s hand by squeezing it too hard in a handshake. I started wishing he would break my hand in his grip because at least that meant he could still move. But instead his hands just lay there, huge and calloused from a long life of labor.