Assembling

It’s a grey Friday afternoon here. As my friends and family in the US endure a heat wave strange enough to break records and spark a tornado in Brooklyn, I work on my fire-building skills and see how much second-hand cashmere I can get on my body at any one time. Today I’m wearing a turtleneck, woolen long johns, and a wool sweater I bought in high school. It has moth holes by now, but then, don’t we all?. Aidan, more warm-blooded than I, sits at the dining room table in a t-shirt making paper airplanes and singing the New Zealand anthem in Māori. How weird is my life?

Today was the “Paekakariki Idol” at the kids’ school. They begged me to come even though neither of them would be performing. And so, from 9 until 10 this morning, I sat with a handful of other parents and the entire student body of the school watching 5 to 13 year-olds sing and dance to win the hearts of the two judges. It was what you’d expect from an event like this: children nervously mumbling into microphones, sometimes—and sometimes not—raising their voices to be heard over the backup music (which was just the particular pop song, played softly enough so that the kid would be at least minimally audible). Some of the children moved their bodies comfortably to the music, born performers. Some of them stood stiff as boards and looked, terrified, at the audience, red blotches on their cheeks standing out like the apple-red blush of a raggedy-anne doll. Some straddled a combination of these: swaying in terrified time to the music and bringing in rehearsed hand motions half a beat too late.

In many ways, it was exactly like what I’ve seen at events like it half a world away: utterly familiar were the forgotten words, the struggle with the microphone, the recurring thought (was I the only one having it?) that pop-songs are vapid—and endless.

And in other ways, I felt totally alone and foreign in this talent show on the other side of the world. There were no parents I knew by name in the dozen or so gathered to clap for their children. I sometimes thought that I couldn’t quite pick out the language the kids were singing in—was that te reo Māori? Was it Japanese? And then I’d recognise with a start that it was, er, English, with the mumbling in a kiwi accent rather than a US one.

And, as I felt aloneness and melancholy sweep through me, I realized that school assemblies are the most familiar and foreign places in the world, timeless and also markers of how time is spinning out of control. Naomi sang at the first talent show at Oyster as a 5 year old. She and her best friend Amanda held hands and sang the little song they made up together with perfect 5-year-old logic: “When best friends are fighting with each other/the only thing to say is ‘I don’t care.’” (I never could figure out whether that was some Buddhist release of attachment to the fight or a pre-pubescent form of mocking.) Now Naomi’s contemporaries are singing “You’re the one that I want,” from Grease, a song which looked fine on Olivia Newton John, but which horrifies me when accompanied by the gyrations of an 11-year-old who should still be playing with dolls and not telling 150 little kids that she needs a man. These children are teasing their hair and matching their clothes to the ragged rock stars\ look, and they’re racing to be big. And I’m settling into wrinkle cream and a regular exercise program and wondering where all that time went.

I know that this is part of the human condition and not a function of living in New Zealand. But somehow living across the world from my family and friends magnifies this for me. My uncertainty and off-centredness ratchets up the emotions I’d feel about having a daughter big enough to go to sleep away camp—and I get caught in the doubleness of 1) that she’s going away for 10 days over the summer and 2) that the summer happens in JANUARY. It’s foreign on foreign.

Now I’ll light a fire to stave off the coming evening chill, and I’ll walk Perry in the sunset before cooking dinner for MH and her daughter, coming for a now-weekly catch up. We’ll talk about her impending move (to another house in the village), about my struggles with the house this week. And then it’s the weekend. Saturday is about soccer games and grocery shopping—the Saturday itinerary no matter what the country, it would seem. On Sunday I’ll have the spa day Michael bought me for Mother’s day. I’ll try to open myself to the hands kneading my back and let the tension of my foreign-self slip away. I’ll breathe in the sea air and hear the drumming of the surf. I’ll pull hot bread out of the oven and roll on the floor with the children. I may be foreign, but I’ll work at feeling more at home.