Reinvention

How many times in our lives do we get to reinvent ourselves? Really. How many times have you had? When your family moved to a new town when you were 12? When you went off to college? I study adult development, so I know about transitions and growth over the lifespan, and I know that we’re changing all the time, most of us, and that our perspective changes as we gain experiences. But how often do we actually get to become whoever we want to be—far away from who we’ve been before?

I remember facing the inevitable pieces of my past when we moved to Georgia. There were some lovely things about that—people really knew me, held pieces of my childhood in their minds. And at the same time, it’s limiting to be in a place where you’ve been known over time. People have assumptions about you, people remember parts of you you’d rather have them forget. And those assumptions hold on forever—assumptions are really hard to change.

I saw a woman after the St. John concert in November in Augusta. Kitty, who had been the DFA choir teacher, had taught across the hall from me for the three years before her retirement. I wanted her to meet my children, to show them a piece of my past when I was a school teacher. I introduced them to her, and the story she told them was not about our DFA days together, was not about students we’d had and what had happened to them. The story she told was that when I was 12 years old, my father brought me to her house and I swam in her pool. Somehow, time had shifted between us. I was wanting to introduce her as a former colleague, and she had remembered me as a little kid. I wondered how much of her time she spent thinking of me as little Jenny as she taught across the hall from me.

Here there is none of that. No one thinks about little Jenny. Who am I? What patterns of my personality, my quirks, my habits do I hold on to, and which do I leave behind? I baked a cake for Aidan’s half birthday, but he only gets half the cake and something had to be done with the other half. In DC, we’d have given it to a neighborhood friend. In Cambridge, we’d have given in to Graeme. We’re still looking for those friends (there’ll never be another Graeme), so here we wandered around looking for folks at home who might like a cake. And it was only after Michael and Aidan left, cake in hand, that I wondered whether I wanted my New Zealand self to be someone who brings cakes to people. In Boston and DC people knew me for my baking. Maybe that was limiting and maybe it’s time to try a new thing.

I don’t dance or paint or pot. Or maybe I didn’t used to dance or paint or pot, but here I do those things. I have traditionally worked too many hours each week. Do I still do that here? I am a vegetarian. Does that change here where the animals are raised in more humane ways and the meat is among the best in the world?

Since I was a teenager, I’ve kept my toes polished, and you can track the stage of my life with the color of the toes: pale pink when I was in high school, red in my early 20s, and then the oddest colors I could find—blues and greens and purples—in the last decade or so. Naomi and I used to paint each toe a different color sometimes. I am not a splashy person, but for nearly all of my life in memory, I’ve had pretty splashy toes. For the last week, my toes have been naked. I see them, utterly unfamiliar, and wonder whether I should get used to the look of my naked toes. Or maybe playful and adorned toes is still who I am, but something else changes (the haircut change, however, didn’t go that well).

How do I want to be in the world? Who am I here in this new context? Who do I like best about the selves I can be, and how do I encourage those pieces of my selves to come more to life?

Today, we went to the stream and the kids and Perry played until all were wet and sandy (I think it may have been the best day of Perry’s life thus far). Today I read to Aidan and we snuggled together and tickled. This evening we played rugby on the beach with some new friends, Brits newly moved to this country. On the way home, Naomi and I walked down the beach, talking about the nature of the universe until the comet made a dazzling appearance. When I finish this entry and hit “post,” I’ll slip on a coat and walk Perry with Michael on the beach. These things are the pieces of my life here, the pieces of who I am becoming. Some pieces I choose and others choose me, and the whole thing unfolds: me, in the kiwi context. (And, as of this afternoon, with purple toes.)