New beginnings

After all of the weeks of staying home with the children, yesterday I went to work for the first time. I have a very part time job at NZCER (nzcer.org.nz), where I’m a senior researcher trying to begin to understand the NZ educational system. But before I start beginning to understand the educational system, I suppose I have to begin to understand my role there and what I’ll actually do.
And so it was another new beginningish sort of day. There were people who came to say hello to me whose names I forgot instantly, there were awkward moments of wandering around and seeing people in the kitchen or in the toilet and thinking that maybe they had introduced themselves to me or maybe they hadn’t. So do I introduce myself to them—rude, if we’ve just been talking and I’ve just got it confused. Or do I not introduce myself—rude if we haven’t been introduced. Sigh. There’s all this awkward new beginnings flavour to all of this, and I must admit that I’m a wee bit weary of new beginnings. It seems like I’ve faced just about enough of those at this point. I’ll trade you six new beginnings for one familiar—even tedious—conversation.
It was so interesting to enter into a place where no one particularly knows me or thinks about me. I’ve been at GMU almost 5 years now, and even though I don’t know everyone at the large College of Education and Human Development faculty meetings, I do know lots of people, and I have a sense of the place. I know how it works and what some of the divisions are and which people always eat lunch together on retreat days. I know that I can talk candidly with my dean and become more impressed with him each time. I know that if I come up with an idea I’m really excited about, the administration will really try hard to make it work. GMU is a fantastic place to work, and I’ve known that. The thing I didn’t understand so much until yesterday is that not only do I know them, but I feel like the folks there really know me. In the huge Mason campus in Fairfax, I almost never run into anyone I know, and so I would never before have said that I felt really connected to that campus (I mostly work at the little Arlington campus). Yesterday, though, I discovered the difference between not knowing every single person (the way I am at GMU) and not knowing anyone at all. That turns out to be a rather large difference. It’s amazing how obvious that looks written down.
And, in case I wasn’t feeling quite disconnected enough about being at a place where no one knew me, on the train ride home we got a call from the mother of our babysitter. Aidan had fallen at the park, and our babysitter, fast on her feet, had carried him to her mother’s house. I could hear him screaming on the background as I tried to discreetly talk on a crowded train. He’s fine. He fell on a climbing structure and hit his mouth on the metal bars. He cut both his lips, badly chipped a tooth, and may, of course, have done worse damage to his teeth than we yet know. It’s all ok—it was looking at his mouth once I got home that it first really hit me why we have baby teeth in the first place. Very clever design feature. But, even though I wouldn’t have done anything differently, I wish I had been there with him when he fell, wish I had been able to comfort him and care for him. So it’s more mixed bag.
What isn’t mixed at all is that Michael and I have been taking Perry for a walk in the morning before the children wake up. We throw the ball down long stretches of empty beach and watch Perry’s footprints in the sand—fast heavy ones on the way to fetch the ball, lighter trotting ones on the way back. Even if the weather has been awful (as it continues to be nearly every day), there is nothing mixed about that walk. On the rare sunny morning, the sun glints off the waves and illuminates the foot of Kapiti island first before flooding the beach with light. On grey mornings, we can look up and see the clouds caught in the hills, admire all the layers and textures that grey knows how to be. The beauty of this place is creeping into me and becoming part of who I am somehow. It is as certain as sand in my sheets, as Perry’s tail wagging, as Aidan asking to be tickled. And it is part of the rhythm of my day, seeing beautiful things everywhere I look. That is one new beginning that I’m not tiring of experiencing, the question of what the beach will look like this morning, of what shape and texture the sand might be today, of what patterns the clouds might make this morning. And there will be evening and there will be morning, another new day.