If you know me, you will know that I am terrified of the thought of having children. Not because I don't like children, in actual fact, I love them. I work with lots of babies every day, and I'm a trained teacher! I have 2 beautiful, wonderful nieces and I adore every fibre of their being. I have the best conversations with children, sprinkled with innocence and also a certain level of straight down the line intellect that gets shrouded and corrupted as you get older and pumped with information. So, this Baby Fear doesn't come from a dislike of children at all.
In fact, I'm not sure where it comes from. I often think it's a sense of responsibility that seems far greater than me, something out of control massive, something so monumental that it sort of deserves the fear that I've attached to it.
I work in a place where families can get support for all kinds of reasons, and we see a lot of different families and children come through our doors. Similarly, I've worked in varying school settings where all manner of children are all sat down on one bit of carpet, and are taught the same curriculum. The title of this post is new beginnings, because essentially that is what children are, it's a new life, and a new beginning. But I was looking around me in the baby room at work the other day and just having a moment of distinct realisation about these new beginnings.
There is a song by a band called MuteMath which is called We All Break The Same. It's true, we do. We all begin somewhere that everyone begins. The words to that MuteMath song go 'all the tears we cry tell us we're made the same'. We all start life in the physical sense the same way that everyone starts. We are all born of our mother, and we all begin life with that first scream, drawing our first breath of this world in the same way that everyone else does. But then, that's it. It's as if the 6 billion people on the planet have the same starting point which then breaks off into 6 billion tiny little paths, weaving upwards and onwards onto something different. There are of course moments where we will all go through similar events, but everything before or after these events will shape us, mould us and cause us to react to these events in different ways. But the fact remains, we all come from somewhere.
We all have a new beginning.
So, I feel I may have buried my point here amid all this talk of babies and contemplating the population of our planet, but while I was looking around the room at these tiny little lives, some barely crawling, walking or talking I was amazed. That we all start at the same place, yet any one of those children could in ten years be in a completely different place than another. And also that a new beginning can happen at any point in those fragile little lives, leaving something behind and moving onwards towards a brand new adventure.
Life is really exciting.
