Love language
With her new baby Pakotāiko safely in her arms, teacher, musician and social media star Jordyn Rapana is counting her blessings.
The biggest ones? Being able to welcome her second son – brother to four-year-old Toa-Awanuiārangi – into the world, and being able to do so in his ancestral language, the way she’s long dreamed of doing. Neither was a given. But both have changed her life immeasurably.
Just a year ago, Jordyn, 29, suffered a miscarriage. She’d planned to name her baby Te Ao Marama, The World of Light. It was a loss that cut incredibly deep, and one she had to work through before she could grow this new life inside her.
“I knew that I wanted to be pregnant again, but I wanted to be able to process the stuffout so that this baby didn’t have to grow inside all of that other mamae [pain] that was left behind,” she says.
The way she processed that was through music, namely, her debut single “Te Ao Marama”, a
