Tīhema Baker (Photo: Ebony Lamb)
Tīhema Baker’s new novel, One Day a Taniwha, draws on the struggles he faced as a new dad. Here, he explains what happened the day he came close to taking an irreversible step.
When the taniwha came for me, my son was about four months old. It was in the depths of night in late 2022, while I tried to rock him to sleep.
In those four months, my son had never slept for longer than two, maybe two and a half, hours at a time. Which meant my wife and I hadn’t slept any longer than that either.
On this night, after yet another screaming wake-up, my wife said to me, on the verge of tears: “I just need to sleep. I can’t go anymore. I don’t have anything left.”
I mustered what energy I could and said I’d take him to the lounge, try and settle him there in his waha kura. Put as much distance between them as possible, to give her a decent chance at sleep.
So there we were. In the dark, my son on my shoulder, screaming for a sleep I couldn’t give him, while I rocked and sang as I had done every night since he was born.
That was when this anger rose up in me. Rage like nothing I’d ever felt. Raw, blinding, white-hot rage.
I didn’t want to feel him on me any more. I was sick of hearing him. I just wanted him gone. I wanted him to be somewhere else. Anywhere but near me.
Before I knew it, I was holding him out at arms’ length. Every muscle in my body was activated. Adrenaline pumping through me.
It wasn’t even words that came out of my mouth. It was just a noise. Something primal.
Then I saw myself, reflected in his face. He was terrified of me. And rightly so.
I’m not a particularly big or strong man, but in that moment, in a way I never really had before, I became acutely aware of my own body. My physicality. Just how much damage it was capable of.
Thankfully, I heard the voice of our midwife in my ear. On one particular visit, in the early days, she’d asked my wife how she was coping with the lack of sleep, the stress, the frustration.
To my surprise, she then asked me the same thing. I gave the typical, blokey sort-of response: “Yeah, nah, I’m all good.”
All she said was: “If you ever find yourself in that place, just put baby down and walk away. Make sure he’s safe, and walk away.”
As I held my son out in front of me, my whole nervous system overloading, those words were ringing in my head. “Put baby down and walk away.”
So I did. Put him in his waha kura, still screaming, and went back to wake up my wife. Who then had to deal with the fallout of my breakdown. I lay there, in the dark, listening to her desperately trying to settle our son, and all the anger gave way to guilt and shame. It felt like the walls were closing in, and I wanted them to.
That experience was the start of a journey. A journey that took me to therapy, and to a place of deep reflection, learning, and healing.
It just so happened that, while on this journey, I was working in mental health policy for Te Aka Whai Ora (the since-disestablished Māori Health Authority). I led a project investigating kaupapa Māori approaches to acute mental illness. This experience opened my eyes to the scale of mental illness in Māori, particularly in our tāne.
What I had been through was only the tip of an iceberg that runs far deeper in our people. But it also taught me to understand mental illness in a more Māori way. Which is to say, that it’s often more than what’s in the mind.
These experiences led me to write this book. Writing has always helped me to process things. I needed to channel what I’d been through into something constructive. But I also hoped that others would see themselves or their whānau in it.
One Day a Taniwha is a book about fatherhood. It touches on things that fathers of my generation are grappling with. Like the fact that many of us grew up being hit. Being told, in various ways, not to cry. To harden up. Be a man.
We grew up with a culture of competition drilled into us. Be stronger than the other guy. Be smarter, work harder, look better, make more money. Most of the time, it was our own fathers telling us this.
And now that we’re fathers ourselves, we’re finding that the game has completely changed. Now, we have to be gentle and nurturing. Present and involved. Emotionally secure.
For many of us, we have to be what our own fathers never were, or never taught us to be. Because they were never taught to be that way either.
But more than that, this book is about Māori fatherhood. Which means it’s a book about harm.
In that moment with my son, I was standing on the edge of a line that must not be crossed. But so many other Māori men have crossed it. We hear it in the news often enough. Māori fathers beating their babies to death. Their wives and partners too.
Having stood at the edge of that line that those fathers crossed, I understand why. It doesn’t mean I excuse or defend those men. Never.
But the policy analyst in me knows that you can’t solve a problem until you understand it. If we want to prevent the abuse that our wāhine and our tamariki experience at the hands of our tāne, then we have to be prepared to understand why there is so much violence committed by Māori men.
What led me to the edge of that place is complex, but it boils down to that simple saying: Hurt people hurt people. It’s not a way of excusing violence or absolving anyone of responsibility. It’s about recognising that actions have consequences. Cause and effect.
For me, some of the factors that led me to that moment with my son were about what was happening in that instant. Sleep deprivation, obviously.
But also feelings that I hadn’t processed yet, because — as I learned through talk therapy over the next couple of years — no one really taught me how to process them.
Feelings of fear that I wasn’t and would never be a good father. Rejection by my son who wouldn’t settle for me, or by my wife who, naturally, didn’t have the time for me that she used to.
Then there were the things from my childhood. Don’t get me wrong: I was privileged in many ways. Not financially, but I had a stable home and loving parents.
I have a wonderful relationship with my father, notwithstanding some of the traditional masculine patterns of behaviour that are entrenched in both of us.
Despite that privilege, I still experienced things that struck deep and took root. Things that were lost and never properly grieved.
And that’s the thing about whakapapa. You’re not just you. You’re the sum of everything that came before. So the more you start to peel back the layers of yourself, the further back in time you go.
When you think about the reo beaten out of your grandfather, or the house confiscated from your great-grandfather, or the Supreme Court ruling by a Pākehā judge that your tūpuna and his people are nothing more than primitive barbarians, you start to wonder how those men felt.
How they processed the harm that was done to them. And then how they passed it on to their sons. Cause and effect.
One Day a Taniwha is about all of this. The harm that Māori fathers experience, inherit, and inflict on others.
But it’s also about love, and the mana of fatherhood.
If you go back far enough in our whakapapa, you reach a place where Māori fathers were renowned for their childcare. We were gentle and nurturing. Present and involved. Emotionally secure.
I’ve come a long way from that night the taniwha came for me. My second child, a daughter, arrived in February 2025, and I have never felt more capable and prouder of being a father. There are still times I struggle with anger and guilt, but this is part of the journey that I know I will always be on.
I like to think we are coming full circle. We talk a lot about restoring our tino rangatiratanga. Reclaiming our reo, our land, our culture. I want to see us reclaim the mana of fatherhood too. My hope is that this book goes some way to achieving that.
One Day a Taniwha by Tīhema Baker is published by Moa Press. This is an edited version of the speech Tīhema gave at the launch event earlier this week. Read an extract from the novel here.
Tīhema Baker (Raukawa te Au ki te Tonga, Ātiawa ki Whakarongotai, Ngāti Toa Rangatira) is a writer from Ōtaki. His writing often explores the complex interactions between and within te ao Māori and te ao Pākehā, based on personal and professional experience. He is the author of satirical novel Turncoat*, which was longlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2024, a young adult novel series, and various short stories and essays.*
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