Bob Jones
A number of readers have asked me how I picked the exact date Jacinda would announce her resignation on this Blog, 18 months before it occurred.
This year since her resignation announcement, numerous opinions have been published on diverse blogs, specifically that it was to dodge an election defeat. That would make sense if she had made the decision this year but I believe, as I wrote on this Blog, she made it at least 2 years earlier. Here’s why.
Over my long life I’ve known heaps of women. Many whom I’ve virtually just waved to across the street have then become pregnant.
Not being a cell-phonist I’m a keen observer of humanity and all women share some common behavioural traits.
One for example, (which women share with cats), is no-one ever saw their mother go to the toilet.
But my salient point is with first mothers on whose behaviour I’m a world-class authority, having experienced many first-hand.
If their first-born is a son, without exception, they all believe they’ve given birth to the Second Coming. If a girl, they still behave largely the same and generally act as if they’ve done something hitherto unprecedented.
I can easily understand that. To hold a newborn tiny human-being you’ve grown in your belly, must be an over-whelming emotional experience.
This behaviour applies only to first-borns. With future children women become more matter-of-fact about it all.
As PM Jacinda would have been torn up inside from a sense of neglecting her little daughter, given her work demands and pressures on her every waking hour. Guilt would have been constantly on her mind.
So I easily envisaged her, perhaps hoping to achieve a second child, agreeing with her husband to have one more year in office, then pull stumps around New Year’s eve in 18 months, to allow a successor time to blood him or herself, while she got back to a normal life and Grahame Thorne attention to Neve. As she was riding high in the polls when I made this prediction, she doubtless would have assumed it would be a cake-walk for her successor.
On that first child behaviour note, I recall a dozen or so years back when my New Zealand Manager told me his wife was pregnant with what would be their first child.
“Well,” I said, “when it comes to affection or even noticing you exist, you will do well to rate say under 12, that is an imaginary nine others plus the baby taking priority”.
Greg scoffed at that. I still remember his response that “Janie (his wife) is not like that,” adding “she’s a highly intelligent woman”. (She’s a Cambridge university graduate). The two of them were always visibly close, so his belief while understandable, was ignorant as we’re talking about emotion, not intelligence.
Six months after his son was born, I remembered this exchange and asked him whether I’d been right.
He looked like a stunned mullet. “I might scrape in under 20th place,” he muttered.
I gave him the solution, namely have another child and sanity would be restored. He followed that advice which worked and to ensure no return to the previous horror, has applied it annually ever since, which is a bit overkill and costing him heaps with full-time live-in nannies.
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