Miriama Smith talks to Capsule about her advice on raising sons, the magic of parenting an 11-year-old and the delight of playing a helicopter parent in the new rom com, Rule of Mum.
For actor Miriama Smith, one of the biggest goals in parenting her 11-year-old son Rauaroha is keeping him thinking like an 11-year-old for as long as possible. This isn’t an easy task – in a world where 11-year-olds are privy to all the information in the world, how do you keep a kid, a kid?
“I cringe thinking about how scary it is for them to cope with everything they’re bombarded with,” she says. “When we were 11, the only thing we had to think about was coming home before the street lights came on! We were testing the waters a lot more. We learned how to break the rules and how to make the rules a lot more.”
Keeping young at heart is a quality that Miriama sees in the grown men she most admires, and it’s what she wants for Rau. “The most beautiful men I’ve met have kept that sense of wonder, even when they’re older,” she says. “They haven’t forgotten to have an imagination, to be playful, to dance like no-one is watching, to sing. They’ve kept that sense of joy, of beauty in life. They’re not so serious – ‘eat steak, play rugby, drink beer’. They’ve kept that vividness.”
A few years ago, Miriama shifted from city living to Waipū beach, in Northland, to give Rau the closest experience to an old-fashioned childhood. “Being able to roam the streets, me not knowing where he is for five or six hours and not worrying,” Miriama says. “In the big cities, everything is organised – everything is a half an hour drive away, so everything is managed. That’s why I chose to move to a small village with that community sense; I wanted my son to know what it’s like to feel free, and trust everybody, and to be able to make his own informed decisions around his own boundaries.”
Travelling with children gets an (understandably) hard rap, but Miriama says that this age is a delight to travel with. “He’s so willing to go and say hi to people, to go and meet people, because it’s just me and him travelling – and he’s an only child – so it’s either hang with mum, or go and meet kids at the beach,” she laughs. “Every time we’ve gone travelling, within a day he’s gone and met a family and they’ve asked if they can take him out on a mission. And then they end up being my friends! I just love it; it’s a joy.”
The pair have been around the Pacific Islands, and have also headed abroad to bigger, more bustling places like Thailand. Miriama says the shadow of a childhood spent under Covid-19 restrictions is a long one – she could feel Rau become more cautious, more careful during the pandemic. “I wanted to take him to countries like Thailand, places that don’t have such rules in place, where it’s more chaotic,” she says.
“I want to take him to places where rules are still made to be broken or bent; as a little country, we got a little bit ‘don’t do that,’ and ‘that person is a bad person,’ and that’s not our natural inclination [as New Zealanders]; we’re normally very trusting. When we travel, I want him to experience a bit more chaos – and that chaos still works.”
Miriama was 36 when she had Rau, and as she points out, being an older mother a decade ago was a very different world to what it’s like these days – she was openly referred to as being ‘a geriatric pregnancy’, truly one of the worst terms around. Because she didn’t know if Rau would be an only child, she really treasured all of the aspects of early motherhood and now the pair are “best mates, as well as mother and son.”
There are definitely cross-over themes here with Miriama’s new project, Rule of Mum, one part of the Motherhood Anthology that has just landed on TVNZ+ for Mother’s Day. Billed as ‘Five entertaining stories across a range of genres unified by the theme of ‘motherhood’, inspired by the Māori, Pasifika, Pan-Asian & LGBTQIA+ communities of Aotearoa,’ it’s a collection of stories and viewpoints that features some of our biggest local stars.
In her episode, Miriama plays Nuku, the devoted and yet overbearing mother of an only son, Tāne, played by Jayden Daniels. Nuku is a hilarious example of well-intentioned maternal chaos – the episode starts with her posing as an Uber driver to drop her son off on a date – as she seeks to micromanage, lovingly, all the aspects of Tāne’s life.
Written and directed by actor Scotty Cotter, Miriama says the environment on set was one of pure fun. “It was very free on set, everyone was allowed to play and he was determined that it should just be very simple – this lovely little rom-com that was quite joyful and fun, it didn’t need to be anything more than that.”
Truly the most delightful half hour of television I’ve seen all year, Rule of Mum is a laugh-out-loud look at co-dependency between a mother and a son. And while Miriama is every inch as devoted as Nuku, she’s all about creating a much more hands-off, independence-building parenting environment.
“I always want to be a safe space for him,” she says. “It’s an every-changing evolution of sometimes playing the parent, and sometimes playing someone who’s in the background just holding space for them to make their own way, and walk their own path.”
“The more independent he can be, the more I feel like I’ve done my job. I do really want him to be able to stand on his own two feet, as a man, and know who he is, and know where he’s come from. I always want him to know that I’m the home he can come back to.”
Motherhood Anthology on TVNZ 2 on Saturday 11 May from 7.30pm and on TVNZ+
