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NZ Herald
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Mother's Day expectations and the real gift mums deserve
But for the rest of us? The panic is real. Buying something for someone who gave birth to you, or raised you like they did, and is still sorting out parts of your life deep into your 40s (including pretending to be surprised when you call her from the supermarket asking what goes in a lasagne) … is a high-stakes mission. You're buying a gift for someone who has literally wiped your bum. How do you say 'thanks for that?' With a scented candle? Now we're grown-ups, the bar's been raised. These days, Mother's Day comes with Instagram expectations and gift guides that started stalking you online in February. And now it's May! So, before you reach for that last-minute massage voucher, or quote her saying 'You said you didn't want anything,' let's be clear: that's a trap. A beautiful, well-intentioned, emotionally complex trap. Right up there with 'I'm fine!' So instead of panicking, take a moment. Not to ask what she wants, but to imagine what life would be like if the roles were reversed. What if your mum treated you the way you've treated her? Advertisement Advertise with NZME. She shows up at your house at 2am after a big night out, dumps her washing in the hallway and slams the bedroom door. Then texts in the morning asking for Panadol and toast. Quietly. Without that annoying click noise the toaster makes. Or she sneaks in while you're at work, hosts a loud midweek gathering with her mates, spills red wine on your new rug, and rearranges your furniture to hide the stain. (Surely no one would be that ridiculous … right?) Then casually asks to borrow $50 on the way out. Maybe she hands you a 'Hug Voucher' – redeemable on weekends, but only if she's in the mood – and includes Air New Zealand-style terms and conditions. Still tempted to grab panic chocolates or that generic card with a woman doing yoga on a beach who looks nothing like your actual mother? Think again. The truth is, being a mum – biological or chosen – isn't about gifts. It's about showing up, staying up, cleaning up, cheering up, and still loving you even when you're at your most unlovable (and possibly smelliest – even with the Lynx Africa). Whether your mum is your birth mum, stepmum, foster mum, dad-mum, nan, aunty or neighbour who raised you like one of their own, she deserves more than a panic gift and a wilted bunch of flowers picked from someone else's garden on the way over. She deserves a proper thank you. Thanks for the time she pretended your teenage poetry was profound. For not mentioning the dent you put in her car in 1998. For still having that clay pencil holder you made that looks suspiciously like an anatomical part you didn't intend. Ooops. So, Mum: for all that (and more), thanks.
The Guardian
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Writer Saba Sams: ‘I wanted it to be sexy and really messy'
Saba Sams was in bed breastfeeding her two-month-old baby Sonny when she received an email saying that the publisher Bloomsbury wanted to offer her a book deal on the basis of some of her short stories. She was just 22 at the time. 'I didn't even think it was a book,' she says when we meet. 'I was just learning how to write.' Send Nudes, her first collection, about being a young woman in a messed-up world, was published in 2022. She won the BBC national short story award and the Edge Hill short story prize. The following year, she made the once-in-a-decade Granta Best of Young British Novelists list. 'Then I was like: 'Oh, this is actually happening. This feels like a big deal,'' she says. It is one of the first warm spring days and we are sitting outside a cafe in Broadway Market in east London. Sams, now 28, has another new baby (three months old). He is being looked after by her grandmother, along with her toddler, at her flat in nearby Bethnal Green, while her eldest, who is just about to turn six, is at school. She also – somehow – has her first novel, Gunk, out next month. Squinting against the sunshine, she seems remarkably unfazed by it all. And, as a writer of youthful malaise, very cheerful. Although she does admit that it is a 'relief' to have the tricky follow-up to a hit debut in the bag. 'You write the first book and you're like: 'Well, that will probably never happen again,'' she says. 'I feel like a real writer now.' Sams writes in the disarming voice of a bored teenager with a gift for one-liners and sudden moments of poetry, and it is not hard to see why her work has caused such a stir. The 10 short stories in Send Nudes show characters on the heady precipice between girlhood and becoming young women. 'It was the summer between year nine and 10, when all the boys smelt of Lynx Africa and Subway,' one narrator tells us. Pool-side rivalries flare on a first blended-family holiday; a young woman bakes sourdough in the days after an abortion; a girl attempts to recreate a Tenerife beach in a London high-rise flat to console her mother during the pandemic – these stories are sad, true and very now. The girls' world is one of Tinder and Snapchat, but also age-old problems of unwanted pregnancies and abuse. They navigate toxic relationships with their friends, boyfriends, parents and their own bodies in stories that are sticky with booze, sex and blood. Gunk returns to the same territory. The title is the name of the grotty student club in the novel, which is set in Sams's home city of Brighton, and also refers to the slime on a baby's head after it's born. It opens with a baby just '24 hours and 17 minutes' old and loops back to end with what Sams calls her 'big fat birth scene'. In between, the novel charts the friendship between Jules, the divorced manager of Gunk, and nim, a shaven-headed 18-year-old who comes to work in the club. In a twist on the standard love triangle, Jules's ex-husband Leon is the father of nim's baby, and the novel rests on the ambiguous relationship between the two women. In Sams's fictional worlds, the edges between female friendship and desire are as smudged as lipstick after a long night partying. Jules and nim are everything to each other, she explains. 'They're a boss and an employee, a kind of mother and daughter interchangeably, they've slept with the same man and they are parents of the same child.' Like the unequal best friends in her short story Snakebite, their relationship is charged with attraction. 'I wanted it to be sexy,' she says. 'I wanted to keep it really messy and to see if there weren't so many rules around love, maybe we could love each other better.' Sams is interested in the tangled and untidy: 'I couldn't write something neat because it wouldn't feel true to me.' Her own life became messy when she got pregnant just after graduating from the University of Manchester with a degree in English and creative writing. 'I was a woman of a certain class and education; I was expected to dream of something other than wasting my life on a baby,' she wrote in an essay in Granta magazine shortly after Send Nudes was published. She realised she desperately wanted to keep the baby. Her boyfriend Jacob wasn't initially keen (he's now a very happy father of three boys). 'It didn't occur to me that I would feel completely alone afterwards,' she says today. She felt alienated from her friends and the older mums she met in west London, where she was living at the time. Writing the stories was a form of escape, but also 'a kind of grieving process for girlhood,' she says. 'I really felt like I had left young womanhood behind.' Gunk was written when Sonny was a toddler and she was pregnant with her second baby. She knew she had to write about young motherhood, and that inevitably meant writing about alternative families. In a time of a cost of living crisis and crazy childcare fees, she feels 'like everyone's rethinking how the family looks. Everyone is like: 'Where's the village? We need the village.' It's just not working.' It is not just domestic set-ups that have changed. 'You no longer need a man and woman to have a baby,' she says. In Gunk she wanted to think about all the different ways to be a mother, 'how we mother each other, and how we all still need mothering'. Growing up in Brighton, her world 'was run by mothers'. Her childhood was one of parties and music festivals, which left the bookish young Saba (her name comes from her Syrian heritage) longing for more rules. Her parents divorced when she was 11; she has a younger sister and a much younger half-brother. Her mother, a breastfeeding consultant, has recently gone back to university to train to be a midwife. Send Nudes is dedicated to her maternal grandmother. Having so few men in her life as a child, she was thrown to find herself the mother of three boys, 'but they are all so different from each other that it becomes impossible to know what 'a boy' even is,' she says. 'The world has changed, gender really does feel looser.' Send Nudes was written as a reaction against the 'simplified feminism' of those bubble-gum-pink go-girl affirmations all over Instagram when Sams was at university. She would look at the slogans and ask: 'OK, but what about this situation? What about this one?' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Dodgy boyfriends, mean girls, lousy parents and body shame – Sams's stories do not make being a young woman today seem much fun. But then the reports of rising depression, anxiety and eating disorders among generation Z, particularly women, show that it really isn't. Add in financial insecurity and the existential threat of the climate catastrophe, and it's no wonder novels by a generation of female writers have come to be dubbed – rather patronisingly – 'sad-girl lit'. Feminist critic Jessa Crispin complained that Send Nudes conformed to this vogue for listless young female characters 'as helpless against the tides of fate as a jellyfish washed up on the beach'. This passivity could be seen as part of a generational helplessness in the face of world events. In fact, many of the stories are also celebrations of female resilience or agency, such as the title one in which the unnamed narrator finds liberation in sending a nude selfie to a stranger. 'Obviously, it's complex and it's shit sometimes,' Sams says of the reality she was trying to capture. 'But ultimately I wanted the stories to be about power and the slipperiness of control.' Far from being merely victims, many of her girls are drunk on their own youth and beauty. 'I think that there is loads of power in being a young woman,' Sams reflects. 'But your power is also your powerlessness. It's constantly eluding you.' Looking gorgeous might feel great, but 'it's just the patriarchy' and can always be weaponised against you. Like writers such as Ottessa Moshfegh (Sams is a big fan), she refuses to be coy about sex and body parts. 'I'm really interested in bodies, particularly women's bodies, periods and all of that,' she says. 'To me that feels overdue.' You can't write about women's bodies without also writing about shame. 'I was a chubby kid, and I felt bad about my body from around the age of six,' she says. 'I don't think it felt, like, rare.' She was determined to write a truthful delivery room scene, breaking waters and all. 'I was filling chapters,' she laughs. 'I was forcing my reader to witness this massive birth scene, because you give birth and no one cares. You're like: 'Listen to this – it's insane!'' And, rather than being an act of feminist subversion, she simply enjoys writing about sex. 'There's only so long you can write before you're like: 'Let's do a sex scene.' It's fun.' She gave a copy of Send Nudes to her grandparents with strict instructions not to read it. 'Obviously they would never have listened,' she jokes. 'But I don't know if they're as scary as just, like, the whole world.' Jacob is a horticulturist at Kew Gardens – 'He's a plant guy, it's cute' – and they have a small but lovely garden in east London. Now her middle son is at nursery, Sams likes to write in the cafe of a local independent cinema, where they don't hassle you to buy much and she can eavesdrop on conversations about films. Generally, she's not bothered by the buggy in the hall. Quite the opposite: 'For me, having kids and writing complement each other,' she explains. 'You experience time differently because toddlers are so slow and so interested in every tiny thing. Writing is the same: it takes ages and there's so much paying attention to things that are brushed over when you're just walking around.' Writing is the best way 'to be in love with being alive', she says, and there's nothing sad about that. Her phone buzzes. Time's up. It's her grandmother. She needs to go home and feed her new baby. Gunk by Saba Sams will be published by Bloomsbury on 8 May. To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
20-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Teenagers having sex is news to no one. Thank goodness the government has seen sense on this
God, remember kissing in corridors? It's been so long since I was a teenager that I had honestly forgotten how much snogging used to happen at school, until it was mentioned in the House of Commons this week. (I have never been a fan of the word snogging, yet as a term it's powerfully evocative of late 1990s-early 2000s adolescence, conjuring a heady mix of Impulse body spray and Lynx Africa, the taste of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, and the sound of braces clashing.) Teenage love is in the headlines, because of the news that there will be a 'Romeo and Juliet' exemption to the new crime and policing bill obliging professionals in England, including teachers and healthcare workers, to report suspicions of child sexual abuse. The exemption for teenagers in consensual sexual relationships received cross-party support, recognising that 'not all sexual activity involving under-18s is a cause for alarm or state intervention'. This is all common sense, and similar approaches are already in place in countries such as Australia and France. That teenagers engage in sexual activity should be news to no one – obliging teachers to report every instance as a potential child sexual offence will give them an even higher workload than they face already. Instead, they can use their professional judgment. Safeguards remain in place: if there is any indication of harm or imbalance, the duty to report remains. It confirms what many of us have long known: that often the most present threat to teenage girls are those older guys who just can't seem to get a girlfriend their own age. You know the kind. The groomers. Guys who are 19, 20, older, who hang around the school gates in their Saxos and Corsas. In my home town, one actually went on the run with – or arguably abducted – a just turned 13-year-old girl. Others would invite underage girls to their shitty flats and ply them with alcohol. Alongside these men you had the even older ones in positions of power – at my own school, the biggest threat to teen girls was our actual headteacher (Neil Foden was eventually convicted of multiple offences). It would be utterly absurd to put such criminal abuse and exploitation on a par with teenage fumbling. The use of Romeo and Juliet to describe the clause may at first seem rather grandiose, but isn't that just how love, or at least lust, feels at that age? Intense, powerful, tragic even. That feeling of 'If I can't kiss him right this very second against the science block stairs, then I might as well drink poison'. I suspect its resonance is the reason it's on the syllabus for pupils just about coming up to Juliet's age (13). It also provides a framework for discussing these issues in class ('I know you feel like the main character in your own Shakespearean tragedy right now, but maybe put down the deadly nightshade and listen to some Lana Del Rey instead?') I remember how Amy, who sat next to me in English, could recite most of the play by heart. 'O brawling love! O loving hate!' – I can still hear her voice now. That Romeo is saying these words about Rosaline, before he abruptly switches his affection to Juliet, was lost on us. It was in vain that our English teacher tried to get us to think about how Shakespeare might have been commenting on the fickleness of young love. There's no telling you when you're in the middle of it, is there? Yet there's an argument that we should take teenagers' romantic feelings more seriously, because they can go on to shape us. Today's teens are lucky, in many ways. They are not experiencing their first love, or lust, against a backdrop of alarming teenage pregnancy rates, as we were. They receive better sex education, at an earlier age, have access to more varied methods of contraception, and are generally more clued up about the biology of reproduction. We certainly weren't making TikToks about the luteal phase – we didn't even know what it meant, let alone how it might affect your dating behaviour. One thing hasn't changed, though, and that's how vulnerable teenagers are, and how easily their hearts can be broken. We thought we were so grown up when we were fooling around at 15, going on dates to Pizza Hut, dissecting our relationships on MSN and rolling ridiculous 10-skin joints so we could hotbox caravans. We were just kids, like the teens I see walking to school or on the bus now, so impossibly young and naive, but fizzing with hormones that made you want to jump each other. While jumping each other on a Tuesday morning outside set two maths isn't often going to be a reportable offence, anyone who works with young people knows that their vulnerable hearts need some sort of safeguarding, too. Perhaps, alongside all the work that needs to be done in terms of consent and online misogyny and how to recognise abusive relationships, we all need formal lessons in heartbreak – after all, these years can shape our adult relationships to come and who we are. I wonder about the role they play in later infidelities, too. Most of us are happy to leave those Impulse-scented years behind us, but we all know someone who will always chase that Juicy Fruit high. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author
