Spinning

Saturday 30 December 2006

9:30pm

I’m sitting on the sofa now, which faces a totally different direction after we moved all the furniture around, and I think I would like the view better if it weren’t so amazingly blowy outside. Another southerly has come in (remember, here the southerlies come from Antarctica, so they bring in cold and generally terrible weather) and it’s blustery like mad. On our sunset walk on the beach tonight, Aidan asked, “Mommy, does the wind EVER stop blowing here?” I don’t know.

It has been, perhaps, the most mixed day I’ve had here, the day with more ups and downs than usual. This is probably good, because I’ve been a little worried about my equanimity of late. I’ve noticed that I have been sailing on a totally even keel, not feeling particularly happy nor particularly sad which wouldn’t be particularly noticeable except for the fact that we are in the biggest transition in our lives (in some ways) and have moved thousands of miles from home to a place where we know almost no one. This seems like a recipe for big emotions, but so far, I haven’t much had them. I was waiting.

Today I have bigger emotions than other days. We went into Wellington today to buy lamps for our house (we brought no lamps with us and so there’s no benefit to waiting for the container) and to buy some exercise equipment for me because I’m getting fat and sluggish just at the time allegedly known as summer. Then, to make the outing more than just drudgery for the children, we promised them a trip to the kiddie bungee place right at the waterfront in Wellington. We got there later than we had hoped, but waited in line just the same. I’ll attach pictures of this (I’m attempting to upload a small video clip, too-ah, and it hasn’t worked) and not describe it much here. You’ll see from the pictures that each child is held by a V of bungee. Under their feet are big poofy trampolines. The guy in charge straps the kid in, tightens the resistance so that the kid can just hit the tramp, and gives a firm tug on the kid’s ankles. Kids fly up in the air, come down again, push off against the trampoline, and up back in the air (maybe 30 feet).

Both kids have been begging for this experience, and both kids really liked it. But Aidan was astonishing. On his first jump, he began trying to do back flips, and on his second jump (with one sentence of coaching from the bungee guy), he was doing them. On nearly every jump, he hurled his legs up over his head—sometimes flipping twice—and came back again to push himself back up in the air. He looked for all the world like one of those wooden toy clowns I used to play with as a kid, the kind that flips when you squeeze it. Over and over and over he went, and each time he went over it made me laugh. And all the people sitting in line were laughing and pointing, and Naomi spent a whole lot of her time in the air watching him as he was in the air. I laughed hard and long and wasn’t even sure why I was laughing. There was something incredibly joyful about the way he moved his body—Michael says it’s as if Aidan knew he was totally safe and he could do anything he wanted with his body and so he tried it all. There was also something about seeing another side of someone I know so well. I know that Aidan can do all kinds of things well, but this side, this amazingly physical and graceful side, I haven’t seen from him before. I saw a new gift in him somehow, and it was such a joy.

That was the happy part.

Then, on the lovely drive home, I was spooked again by being on the wrong side of the road (just as a passenger, mind you), and Michael and I decided that I needed to get used to being on the wrong side as a passenger before I attempted actually driving on the wrong side of the road. That seems some weeks--even months—away (although I more often feel confident about my street crossing skills). And then I realized that I live in a tiny village, where I know about eight people (three of those are under 14) and I don’t know how to meet more people until organized activities start up again. In six weeks. And I can’t drive anywhere. And everything I own is on a ship and almost everyone I knew was asleep. And then the long-awaited loneliness rushed in.

I went to sit in the hammock chair on the front porch and write about my angst while attempting to enjoy this lovely sunny day. Two paragraphs into my journal entry, the winds began to push the chair around and then sky opened up and the rain poured down, matching my mood exactly. And so there it is. It’s fantastic to be here with my family and to enjoy the things we couldn’t enjoy anywhere else. And, as all of you know, we’re very nearly alone here. Trish and Keith and Marianne have been amazing—and it has been the saving grace to have them here—we couldn’t do this without them. But no matter how welcoming they are, we are not beloved old friends or family with them, and their graciousness and eagerness to help doesn’t change that. We’re newbees.

This somehow became more clear last night, at Marianne and Keith and Rhonda’s joint birthday party, we watched old friends meet one another and catch up, and we watched it as from a great distance. As I sat (eating the best guacamole I’ve ever had), I looked around at the faces of mostly strangers—kind and smart and interesting strangers, but strangers none the less. And we know that even those people who are our friends are our very new friends, but they are steeped in a group of friendships that are long and deep. With every story of a friendships 20 years old, every cultural joke which people kindly and patiently explain, we feel again the newness of all of these connections, and know that there aren’t any folks here who have been in our lives long enough to have these kinds of connections to us. No one here watched me agonize about my dissertation topic, saw us cradle our newborns in our arms, or secretly thought we were too young to get married. None of our life transitions, each of which has changed us, has been experienced by anyone for thousands of miles.

We live in a strange house, watching strange birds land on strange trees, and we sit on, sleep in and eat off of other people’s furniture. We don’t have any of our stuff, our dog is in quarantine, and I don’t know what I’m going to do in a country without summer camp for the next six weeks. We are far away from home.

And we are also trying to make a home here. There are kind friends and strangers who have lent us their things, who have taught us about fighting lice, who have given us tea towels and lemon cordial. On some days everything feels easy and joyful. On some days it feels hard and frightening. And some days it is both.

I hope wherever you are reading this, you can find a family member or old friend and appreciate the connection that lasts through the ages. And I know that most of you reading this are family members and old friends of ours, and that you know that our love and connection travels through these strange computer codes. While we won’t be celebrating the new year on the same day as most of you (New Zealand is the first country in the world to see the new year), we will lift a glass to you and hope that this new year brings us all old friends and new, and deepening connections in whatever place we call home right now.

And as I am going to be spinning quite a lot in these next months, I’ll hope to have Aidan show me how to do it with grace and laughter. He reminds me that being upside-down isn’t the worst thing in the world, which is a great thing to remember if you've just moved to New Zealand.