Seems like a long time since I have written anything here. . . writing has sort of suffered the same fate as my "I will work out every day" and "I will experiment with cooking new and tasty foods" and "I'll make weekly menus" and . . . well most of my good intentions to do anything on a regular basis. Kids get sick, visas expire, applications for permanent residency must be submitted (which means gathering a pile of paper work from official offices all over this island nation) and the ultimate death knell for personal plans and "me time", the husband gets sick and takes a week off work to recover at home.
Oh, and the start of a new school year is always loads of fun. I don't know what it would entail in the U.S. (my Native country) but here in Japan it meant that I got to go to parent-teacher conferences, PTA meetings and spend many evenings labeling small objects with my children's names. And this year I got to sew "loops" onto nearly every piece of clothing my Miss 4 wears to Pre-school--except for her socks! The school has them wear their uniforms to school, then upon arriving at the school every morning the kids change out of their uniforms into their gym shorts and smocks. . . so everything has to have a big "loop" on it so that they can hang things in their cubbies. I'm not so sure about all this time being spent on changing into and out of clothing. . . seems like one sure way to kill about an hour of the school day.
Although, I have to admit, the pride and confidence that radiated from Miss 4 the first morning here at home when she declared herself able to "do it myself" when it came time to don the pleated wool skirt, tights, long sleeve blouse, jacket, and bow tie was something I curled right up to and basked in--while it lasted. She did end up nearly strangling herself with the bow tie and in a towering rage threatened to "cut it up". But otherwise, she looked so grown up and determined attiring herself all by herself like that!
So. Currently my husband (who has influenza B) is out with Miss 9 (who also has Influenza B) at the local pediatrician. I think it is cute that my husband is too busy to go to a regular doctor. He gets seen by the pediatrician too! He left complaining about the cute little kitten holding a balloon on his patient card and I had to smile. . . I mean, "Honey, she is a doctor for children after all!" And Miss 4 passed out on the carpet while watching Madeline on the T.V. for a short nap. So I decided to just sit and do it. Blog something.
There hasn't been anything terribly exciting in my life recently. There was the PTA meeting. It was the first I had ever been to as when Miss 9 started elementary school I was working full-time and unable to go to them and then when we moved here last year I was just too overwhelmed by everything to subject myself to that kind of thing. For those of you who live in your native countries to help you get an idea of what a PTA meeting for me in Japan is like, first imagine the longest and most boring meeting you've ever been forced to attend. Then imagine the whole thing was conducted in a language that to you sounded like one word of English mixed in with the sound of nails on a chalk board (I'm trying to get you to my level of frustration with my lack of Japanese conversational skill). Next, imagine that everyone at the meeting didn't want to volunteer to do a single thing and the fact that you didn't understand what the hell was going on just looked like a bad attempt to get off easy in their eyes.
Yes, they actually nearly nominated me head of my class committee. And mothers actually did play rock, paper, scissors to decide who HAD to fill certain positions. And--no one laughed.
I, of course, sat with my committee for the full 40 minutes that we were supposed to--mapping out our plan of action for the year. No one introduced themselves to me. No one looked at me. They talked and laughed for a good 40 minutes while I played with my electronic dictionary and kept raging to myself "I am NOT a moron. I just can't speak Japanese. I am NOT a moron." Then I took out my glasses cleaning kit, took off my glasses, sprayed one side of the lenses and then, without flipping them over as I didn't want it to drip all over me, proceeded to spray the other side and since I am blind as a dead mole without my glasses I leaned in and ended up spraying myself directly in the eyes. My eyes instantly teared up and I think I made some strangled noises indicating great pain. Of course for the class PTA meeting we were all sitting in one large circle. . . when I put my glasses back on I could see several amused glances being cast my way. When the tears finally cleared up the lady next to me finally spoke to me.
"What country are you from?"
"America"
"Oh. America. I have an exchange student from, how do you say Kangoku?"
"Korea?"
"Yes, from Kangoku. Your Japanese is much better than it was last year."
"Oh?" this one threw me and I must have expressed all my confusion plainly on my face as she finally laughed gently and said, "I called you once last year for the class phone list."
Oooooooohhhhhh. One of those calls. How embarrassing. I wonder how much I had not understood that time.
"Your Japanese is much better now."
"Thank you?" (you have to ask it like a question when it just seems like an absurdly apparent bald faced lie kind of compliment.)
"Can you understand?" she asked while waving her hand in the direction of the still laughing and speed talking other mothers on our committee.
"No. Not when people talk that fast."
"But . . . if. . . they. . . talk. . . slowly. . . and . . . . clearly?"
"Yes. Then I can understand."
It was kind of a funny conversation, a bit irritating in places, but the major feeling I came away with was happiness. Someone had finally talked TO me! And thanks to her I found out a way to contribute to the PTA this year. I will go to the school once in July and once in February and I will help clean windows. I will bring a zoukin (a Japanese dust cloth) and I will clean class room windows.
Whew.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Thursday, March 8, 2007
Off the Hook: or Trying to Teach My Child Some Sense of Responsibilty
I should have taken some pictures, you know before and after ones. They would have been remarkable. The thought occurred to me when I was about halfway through scrubbing off the underwater-decorative-hollow-log. A horrible scent, something between dead fish, live fish and mold was wafting up out of the fish tank towards me as I laboriously scrubbed the inside of the decorative log with a toothbrush. As I tried to remember to breath through my mouth I thought, "Damn. I shoulda taken pictures. Look at that. It's actually a pale tan color--not dark brown, I'd forgotten!"
But it is probably better that I didn't take the photos. I'm not sure where animals stand in Japan as far as their rights and humane treatment are concerned (I'd hazard a guess that they are just a few up on the treatment of insects. . . but that's a whole 'nother essay) but as these photos would have accompanied a piece on my blog the chance that U.S. SPCA officials might have stumbled across it and plotted ways to arrest me on my next visit home were too high.
Those poor fish were living in just about 10 inches of filthy, dirty, as aforementioned stinky water. Their water heater was 3/4's of the way out of the water. . .and covered in molding and rotting fish food. Yes, that flaky stuff gold fish eat will rot when appropriately soggy.
I was trying to teach my eldest daughter about "responsibility." When the last batch of gold fish all mysteriously turned belly up (and it really was a mystery because their tank I cleaned religiously!) I had refused to replace them for weeks.
"Not until you are old enough to care for them yourself!" I declared.
And while, my DD#1 may suck at animal husbandry she is really skilled at whining, pleading and deception. She had me totally believing that she was, "tah dah!" so dedicated to having more gold fish that she was willing and able to care for them. She even suspiciously looked a little taller as she proudly stood in front of me and swore to care for them--herself.
So in came new gold fish. One gold one with googly eyes, one black one with googly eyes and one trim one with eyes which are not googly. These we carefully selected at the local home goods store. . . or that's where we attempted to select them. Basically we pointed out the fish we wanted and a woman with the worst fish catching skills I have ever seen spent about 15 minutes futilely terrorizing the entire tank of gold fish. When these three landed in her net we choose them.
The first week when it came time to clean their tank I ceremoniously told DD#1 that this time we would clean the tank together. I was going to teach her the skills she would need to clean a fish tank; after that one time she was to become the sole caretaker of the fish.
It was about three weeks later that nature started to really impress me. It is so strong and resilient. I mean, after one month in the same water with fish flake food tossed in only when DD#1 happened to remember. . . those fish were still alive! They even seemed to swim about happily. Then after two months with the water slightly clouded and DD#1 now having to be begged, "for the love of god, feed your fish!" those gold fish were still happily swimming about.
Then she brought home the guppy. I liked it immediately because it darts around really fast in the tank making the goldfish look like floating blobs of color. It is arrow dynamic and matches the grey of the pebbles on the bottom of the tank. When DD#1 first brought it home I refused to let her keep it, telling her that the other fish, as she was wont to starve them, would probably eat it. They were much bigger than the guppy and they were, it was true, usually ravenously hungry. But her friend who had given her the fish looked at me and close to tears told me, "I can't take it back home!" Mmmmm. . . . I sensed another mother who hated cleaning up fish tanks behind this gift.
So, I let DD#1 and her friend put the guppy in with the gold fish and the first thing I thought was, "Damn, that's one fast fish! Huh? Where is it?" and realized that if any fish was equipped to survive with those hungry gold fish it was that frightened little guppy.
Then the wonder and beauty of nature turned into macabre fascination. Looking at the fish tank started to take a lot of courage. Three months, passed and DD#1 still did not clean the tank, then four months. The first day that I realized that the water level in the tank was decreasing was unsettling. Now the lectures started.
"What you are doing to those fish is sick. You are slowly killing them." I announced with lots of emphasis on the word "sick".
When my DD#1 suddenly whirled around and looked at me shrieking, "Then YOU clean their tank! I don't waaaaaaaaannnnt to!" I was furious. Just the tone of her voice took 2-3 years off her age. Where she had stood proud and tall when trying to convince me to let her have the fish, she shrunk at an alarming rate when she reneged on the deal. My 8 year-old did an impressive impression of a five-year-old. The siege began.
Daily I would remind her that the fish were her responsibility, not mine. I tried to reach her through empathy, "just imagine how they feel? Their water is disappearing!" through confrontation, "You promised me you'd care for these fish!" through guilt, "how will you feel when you walk in your room one day and they're all dead?" and finally through indifference.
I thought maybe the drama of the whole "clean-your-fish-tank-for-the-love-of-all-things-great-and-small-in-the-universe" might be feeding her reluctance to do it in some way. You know, making her feel like the creator, the puppeteer, the one in charge way up there towering over that filthy fish tank. Maybe she wanted to see just how much water it took to keep fish alive, or how much filth it took to kill them. The only positive here was perhaps it showed a scientific mind? You know, maybe she was mentally keeping notes on the ever receding water level in the tank and tracking to see what was the least amount of water required in order to keep fish alive?
But today, I woke up and realized that the siege had gone on long enough. My daughter was going to kill those fish and by standing by and doing nothing about it myself I was going to be an accomplice to aquatic murder. I was an accomplice to unspeakable horrifyingly abusive fish keeping practices.
So I picked up the tank and carried it downstairs. Usually this would be difficult, but as there wasn't much water left in the tank and algae appears to be quite light, I managed it easily. First I netted the googly eyed fish (they being so slow were really easy to get) and then I went for the trim gold fish. He was disturbingly easy to get as well. "Their energy must be ebbing now. . . " and then when I put the net back in the tank, the quick and lithe guppy. . . simply looked at the net and swam in and waited. So I pulled it up and plopped him in the bucket with the others.
The next hour was spent thoroughly scrubbing the tank, the tubing to the water filter, the heater casing, etc. Early on I realized that I needed a toothbrush for the harder to reach spaces. Having just had a fight with my husband that very morning I reached for one of his. As I scrubbed off several layers of algae, mold and filth I occasionally considered putting his toothbrush back where I had found it after all this. I am a small person by nature. The pleasure I would receive from watching him use said toothbrush after I had thus employed it would be great. But it would be a bad example for the children to see. So I imagined about doing it some more and enjoyed myself greatly and then decided that was enough and discarded the idea. Although it has brought a smile to my face to recall it now. . .
However, the point of cleaning the tank was not to manufacture a weapon with which to punish my husband (who as usual that morning had been on the wrong side of the argument). It was to save the fish. To end the siege and give up on forcing my daughter to be responsible. The price had been too high. How could I have looked into their blank little googly (and none googly) eyes as I flushed them? I wouldn't have been able to, and if I hadn't looked closely I might have mistakenly dumped their dead lifeless little bodies on the bathroom floor. And then I would have had to clean that up.
So, siege over, fish saved, where were we now? I sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of Chai spice tea trying to rev up for the arrival of my 4-year-old home from preschool soon. Maybe the four-year old will learn to take care of the fish. She likes feeding the cats. The cats! Now there was a glimmer of hope. DD#1 has recently become much more considerate of the cats. She even consoles them when I scold them for scratching the wall. More importantly she sometimes feeds them without being asked. She once mentioned that she could probably clean out their litter boxes. . . maybe she just isn't a fish person? Hmmmmm. . . probably too early to entrust the litter boxes to her care (I don't even want to imagine what those would look like if we um, engaged in battle over cleaning duties for those.) but she is helping me clip their claws weekly now, as well as brushing them. Yes cats. Let the cats teach her responsibility. I should go tell the fish that they're off the hook so to speak. They'll be so relieved and happy they'll blow me bubbly little kisses. And if they do, I promise, that I'll take a picture of!
But it is probably better that I didn't take the photos. I'm not sure where animals stand in Japan as far as their rights and humane treatment are concerned (I'd hazard a guess that they are just a few up on the treatment of insects. . . but that's a whole 'nother essay) but as these photos would have accompanied a piece on my blog the chance that U.S. SPCA officials might have stumbled across it and plotted ways to arrest me on my next visit home were too high.
Those poor fish were living in just about 10 inches of filthy, dirty, as aforementioned stinky water. Their water heater was 3/4's of the way out of the water. . .and covered in molding and rotting fish food. Yes, that flaky stuff gold fish eat will rot when appropriately soggy.
I was trying to teach my eldest daughter about "responsibility." When the last batch of gold fish all mysteriously turned belly up (and it really was a mystery because their tank I cleaned religiously!) I had refused to replace them for weeks.
"Not until you are old enough to care for them yourself!" I declared.
And while, my DD#1 may suck at animal husbandry she is really skilled at whining, pleading and deception. She had me totally believing that she was, "tah dah!" so dedicated to having more gold fish that she was willing and able to care for them. She even suspiciously looked a little taller as she proudly stood in front of me and swore to care for them--herself.
So in came new gold fish. One gold one with googly eyes, one black one with googly eyes and one trim one with eyes which are not googly. These we carefully selected at the local home goods store. . . or that's where we attempted to select them. Basically we pointed out the fish we wanted and a woman with the worst fish catching skills I have ever seen spent about 15 minutes futilely terrorizing the entire tank of gold fish. When these three landed in her net we choose them.
The first week when it came time to clean their tank I ceremoniously told DD#1 that this time we would clean the tank together. I was going to teach her the skills she would need to clean a fish tank; after that one time she was to become the sole caretaker of the fish.
It was about three weeks later that nature started to really impress me. It is so strong and resilient. I mean, after one month in the same water with fish flake food tossed in only when DD#1 happened to remember. . . those fish were still alive! They even seemed to swim about happily. Then after two months with the water slightly clouded and DD#1 now having to be begged, "for the love of god, feed your fish!" those gold fish were still happily swimming about.
Then she brought home the guppy. I liked it immediately because it darts around really fast in the tank making the goldfish look like floating blobs of color. It is arrow dynamic and matches the grey of the pebbles on the bottom of the tank. When DD#1 first brought it home I refused to let her keep it, telling her that the other fish, as she was wont to starve them, would probably eat it. They were much bigger than the guppy and they were, it was true, usually ravenously hungry. But her friend who had given her the fish looked at me and close to tears told me, "I can't take it back home!" Mmmmm. . . . I sensed another mother who hated cleaning up fish tanks behind this gift.
So, I let DD#1 and her friend put the guppy in with the gold fish and the first thing I thought was, "Damn, that's one fast fish! Huh? Where is it?" and realized that if any fish was equipped to survive with those hungry gold fish it was that frightened little guppy.
Then the wonder and beauty of nature turned into macabre fascination. Looking at the fish tank started to take a lot of courage. Three months, passed and DD#1 still did not clean the tank, then four months. The first day that I realized that the water level in the tank was decreasing was unsettling. Now the lectures started.
"What you are doing to those fish is sick. You are slowly killing them." I announced with lots of emphasis on the word "sick".
When my DD#1 suddenly whirled around and looked at me shrieking, "Then YOU clean their tank! I don't waaaaaaaaannnnt to!" I was furious. Just the tone of her voice took 2-3 years off her age. Where she had stood proud and tall when trying to convince me to let her have the fish, she shrunk at an alarming rate when she reneged on the deal. My 8 year-old did an impressive impression of a five-year-old. The siege began.
Daily I would remind her that the fish were her responsibility, not mine. I tried to reach her through empathy, "just imagine how they feel? Their water is disappearing!" through confrontation, "You promised me you'd care for these fish!" through guilt, "how will you feel when you walk in your room one day and they're all dead?" and finally through indifference.
I thought maybe the drama of the whole "clean-your-fish-tank-for-the-love-of-all-things-great-and-small-in-the-universe" might be feeding her reluctance to do it in some way. You know, making her feel like the creator, the puppeteer, the one in charge way up there towering over that filthy fish tank. Maybe she wanted to see just how much water it took to keep fish alive, or how much filth it took to kill them. The only positive here was perhaps it showed a scientific mind? You know, maybe she was mentally keeping notes on the ever receding water level in the tank and tracking to see what was the least amount of water required in order to keep fish alive?
But today, I woke up and realized that the siege had gone on long enough. My daughter was going to kill those fish and by standing by and doing nothing about it myself I was going to be an accomplice to aquatic murder. I was an accomplice to unspeakable horrifyingly abusive fish keeping practices.
So I picked up the tank and carried it downstairs. Usually this would be difficult, but as there wasn't much water left in the tank and algae appears to be quite light, I managed it easily. First I netted the googly eyed fish (they being so slow were really easy to get) and then I went for the trim gold fish. He was disturbingly easy to get as well. "Their energy must be ebbing now. . . " and then when I put the net back in the tank, the quick and lithe guppy. . . simply looked at the net and swam in and waited. So I pulled it up and plopped him in the bucket with the others.
The next hour was spent thoroughly scrubbing the tank, the tubing to the water filter, the heater casing, etc. Early on I realized that I needed a toothbrush for the harder to reach spaces. Having just had a fight with my husband that very morning I reached for one of his. As I scrubbed off several layers of algae, mold and filth I occasionally considered putting his toothbrush back where I had found it after all this. I am a small person by nature. The pleasure I would receive from watching him use said toothbrush after I had thus employed it would be great. But it would be a bad example for the children to see. So I imagined about doing it some more and enjoyed myself greatly and then decided that was enough and discarded the idea. Although it has brought a smile to my face to recall it now. . .
However, the point of cleaning the tank was not to manufacture a weapon with which to punish my husband (who as usual that morning had been on the wrong side of the argument). It was to save the fish. To end the siege and give up on forcing my daughter to be responsible. The price had been too high. How could I have looked into their blank little googly (and none googly) eyes as I flushed them? I wouldn't have been able to, and if I hadn't looked closely I might have mistakenly dumped their dead lifeless little bodies on the bathroom floor. And then I would have had to clean that up.
So, siege over, fish saved, where were we now? I sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of Chai spice tea trying to rev up for the arrival of my 4-year-old home from preschool soon. Maybe the four-year old will learn to take care of the fish. She likes feeding the cats. The cats! Now there was a glimmer of hope. DD#1 has recently become much more considerate of the cats. She even consoles them when I scold them for scratching the wall. More importantly she sometimes feeds them without being asked. She once mentioned that she could probably clean out their litter boxes. . . maybe she just isn't a fish person? Hmmmmm. . . probably too early to entrust the litter boxes to her care (I don't even want to imagine what those would look like if we um, engaged in battle over cleaning duties for those.) but she is helping me clip their claws weekly now, as well as brushing them. Yes cats. Let the cats teach her responsibility. I should go tell the fish that they're off the hook so to speak. They'll be so relieved and happy they'll blow me bubbly little kisses. And if they do, I promise, that I'll take a picture of!
Friday, February 23, 2007
Universal Cosmic Protection Plan
The other day I found myself standing in a cooking class room with 8 Japanese high school boys. I was trying to look as confident and poised as possible as I instructed them in how to bake an American pound cake. (I had never baked a pound cake in my life before that moment.) Although I had to pause frequently to stare fiercely at the recipe, things went fairly smoothly. They seemed to truly enjoying baking something and while we were baking I was teaching them bits of useful English like, "teaspoon, mixer, batter, pour, measuring cup." I was the guest English speaker for the day.
I don't recall anyone's foreign born mother getting coaxed into coming to my high school to say, whip up a French crepe or reveal the secret to her amazing enchiladas. . . but when a teacher from this local high school turned up on my doorstep to invite me to come as a guest speaker for a day even his suggestion that having the kids cook something American would be fun made perfect sense to me.
I have lived in Japan for so long now that it is hard for me to extract amusing cultural differences to hand out to friends back home like little gems gathered on a foreign shore. Everything here seems normal to me now and it is only occasionally that something jars me out of myself. I suppose the flyer in the newspaper yesterday for a new restaurant that featured a bowl of miso soup with a crab perched in the middle of it was one of those moments. I mean really, who wants to eat soup that has the potential to reach up and pinch you on the nose?
But more often than not it is something in me that is more inborn, an unconscious response conditioned during my infancy/childhood/young adult days of living in America that registers a cultural difference. In the middle of baking the pound cake I experienced one of those, or actually a series of those moments. First came the flash backs--my mother baking in the kitchen while my brother and I circled her, tiny vultures waiting for the demise of the beaters so we could lick them clean. Then memories of my grade school girlfriends and me baking cookies together. . . having egg fights, eating fist fulls of cookie dough, proudly presenting our mothers with a plate of three or four surviving cookies.
But it was a stronger impulse that led me to squeak, "chotto matte, wait!" "When I saw one of the towering high school boys (Japanese men are no longer short! All over Japan the high school and junior high school boys are looking down on their male authority figures--fathers, uncles, teachers) scooping a finger full of butter, sugar and creamed raw egg up to his lips. "Salmonella!" The Japanese English teacher with whom I was co-teaching the class inquired as to what that was exactly. I just paused and waved the boy on-- "Sorry.Go ahead."
While America has become super conscious to the risks of contracting salmonella from raw eggs in Japan raw eggs are still an accepted part of the National diet. Many dishes arrive on a diner's plate with a spectacular raw egg floating in the middle. Asking for them to leave the raw egg out has always resulted in consternation and confusion on the part of the staff. . . at least in my experience. So I have taken to deftly scooping the raw egg out on my own. I would never be so mule headed or foolhardy as to eat a raw egg.
I don't remember exactly when my mother decided that we should no longer touch raw eggs and that the act of touching, much less consuming raw egg yolk or egg white promised dire consequences for us. . . .but she imprinted it well. Should someone offer me a raw egg my response is similar to being invited to play a round of Russian roulette. RAW egg? Raw egg is dangerous. I assume my mother must have given me many detailed descriptions of what dying from salmonella would be like. I don't remember the exact warnings, but my body remembers the feeling those warnings left me with. I touch raw egg and my body tenses just like it does when I touch a loaded fire arm.
I do remember her warning about the tornado bell in Minnesota when I was three. "They found her arm on Evergreen Street and her leg on North Toledo Avenue. They never did find her head." And that was what happened to little girls who didn't heed the tornado bell and come home promptly to take cover.
My mother's method of raising strong independent children who could take on whatever life had to offer was to tell us in detail all about what life could throw at us. It used to kind of knock the wind out of my friends when they got caught in the teaching process. For example:
My thirteen year old friend and I are leaving my house on a beautiful California summer evening. We saunter down the gravel drive way, setting out on the three mile walk to the tennis courts inside the gated upper middle class foot hill community in which both our families live, tennis rackets swinging at our sides, laughing and occasionally stopping to strike absurd "tennis" poses. We stop when my mother yells for us to wait as she comes running after us stirring up a storm of chalky gravel powder in her wake. My 5 foot 4 inch mother stops in front of us, panting to tell us a cautionary tale. "Last week, just last week, 2 young girls like you were viciously beaten and raped at a tennis court." Then she cheerfully tells us to be careful and starts back up the gravel driveway, the chalky gravel dust seemingly parting to let the petite prophet of doom pass.
So, did my mother raise me to be fearless or fearful? Mostly fearful and pessimistic or at least that is how I turned out. Whose to say how much of that outcome had to do with her penchant for telling chilling tales from the real world and how much of it comes simply from my own personality? Regardless of how it was formed, mine is an outlook that is always waiting for what is not on the scene. If there is sunshine and blue skies outside the window I still check the weather channel before going out--they have radar that will show what storm clouds may be lurking out there waiting to roll in later.
An example of how this outlooks spills over into my life is: Even after getting married a decade ago I still occasionally have dreams in which my husband reveals that he has never really loved me and never will and that our 10 year courtship was all an elaborate plot/hoax just to ultimately expose me as a complete fool and laughing stock. In the nightmare he always delivers the same speech in the same flat emotionless voice except for when he turns to the woman he has his arms around (he has been talking to me over her shoulder while she has been sneering at me the whole time) and then his voice turns very warm and vibrant as they laugh together--at me.
When I wake up I am usually grumpy and short tempered with him for the whole day. Although as we are truly an old married couple now and our children are growing up I am getting a little better at reminding myself, "for the love of God, it was only a nightmare. . . "
I think I chose him (and oh yes, I did choose him. It was my intention to keep him the first time I met him) partly because he was so diametrically unlike my pessimistic mother. He took life as it came and didn't waste any time worrying about the future or the past. He was of the moment.
Our first date was in Portland, Oregon and the car broke down on Burnside--in basically the most dangerous area of the city. When we first met he was an exchange student from Yokohama, Japan at my University in Oregon. When the car broke down just as we were leaving the city it didn't seem to phase him at all. If it had phased him, even a tiny bit, I would have felt comfortable enough to begin my headless chicken dance of panic. My friends have seen the dance. I'm famous for quoting Indiana Jone's movies "We're gonna die in here!" over something as simple as missing the right freeway exit. But he didn't panic. He smiled sort of shyly about the car breaking down. He apologized. He looked incredibly cute.
We ended up walking all along Burnside, smoking as we walked and stopping frequently as the inhabitants of Burnside (mostly prostitutes and homeless men and women) would invariably, drawn by the plums of smoke, come investigate whether or not we had a cigarette to spare. He handed out almost a whole pack, smiling each time he was approached. As the night turned to dawn we finally encountered a taxi. The driver looked at us with wide eyes and told us we were in the "wrong" neighborhood and took us off to a Red Lion Hotel in a safer part of the city.
But I had found that even in the wrong place I felt safe with him. Without him I would have seen murders, drug addicts and rapist on every street corner (or better yet, hiding around the street corners out of sight), with him I was able to see who he saw, people who wanted a smoke--people who perhaps used drugs or performed sexual acts for money but people. For that night, he had managed with only his presence to help alter the filter through which I was used to interpreting my world.
Plus he had this notion that he was living a blessed life. Literally, he felt that he was under some sort of cosmic protection and that "nothing bad" would ever happen to him. If he loved me than that cosmic protection automatically extended to cover me as well.
After growing up amid body parts flung about by the wrathful winds of nature and violent rapists waiting at every tennis court. . . it was an irresistible invitation into a much more welcoming world.
So, despite language difficulties (he was really a beginning level English speaker when I met him and my Japanese was even worse) and geographic challenges we somehow managed to arrive at the state of marital bliss in 1996, just months shy of 10 years from the first day we met. Of course, by the time we were swapping vows he had become fluent in English and I could at least converse at the level of a grade-schooler in Japanese.
And those were pretty good--luck wise--years. Nothing horrible happened to either one of us. While my husband's car at one point was flattened into a tin can--he and all the passengers in his car escaped unscathed. We both flew many times, on both domestic and international flights without any kind of aviation glitches ever taking place. I don't even remember getting a bad bout of the flu until years later when my daughters started to bring it home to me! But the year 2000, having missed the boat on the millennium bug, seemed set to deliver us a message of doom none-the-less.
Life was really coming together. The evening my husband arrived back from interviewing for a new job in Japan, one that would be higher paying and give him more social status, was the same evening that my home pregnancy kit told me we were expecting baby number two! And, as he had gotten the job in Japan, the pink plus sign I showed him on the pee stick didn't even phase him . So we both spent the following three months looking forward to the future. He was enjoying telling everyone at his present workplace exactly what he thought of the board members and upper echelon administrators as he prepared to leave for the new job in Japan and I was excited about the prospect of being able to afford to buy meat again not to mention having health insurance for the whole family! And as most pregnant women do, I was reveling in the role of "mother earth".
My first pregnancy at the age of 32 while in the midst of a PhD. program had taken me completely by surprise. I had gone into the University's health center thinking I had the flu and had come out pregnant. And for some reason I had pregnancy symptoms when I was only about a week along so I spent the first month obsessing over whether or not the pregnancy would continue. The doctor had basically told me, "You're pregnant but it is so early that I wouldn't be surprised if you miscarried. Many women miscarry this early without ever realizing that they have even been pregnant." Then she sort of patted my hand, gave me pamphlets on different "choices" and told me that I should stop smoking and drinking coffee if I was going to keep the baby.
So for about a month I spent most of the time between dawn and dusk wondering how things were going on in there. Then I had an episode of spotting and light bleeding. Anxious phone calls to the Health Center told me that I should just take it easy and wait until the first trimester was up when I could go to the ob-gyn. for my first official pregnancy exam.
The rest of the pregnancy I stayed just about as tense and worried as I was those first four weeks of it. I hate that bible of pregnancy "What to Expect When you are Expecting". It is probably actually quite a good reference book for people who use it responsibly. But I was always reading in the areas I wasn't supposed to be in, "if a problem arises. . . when the baby's heart rate drops. . . " and so I spent a lot of time imagining the worst possible outcomes.
I think that first month of being pregnant but not "knowing" what was going on made me fundamentally distrust my own body. I mean, here I was, "pregnant" but I had no way of knowing what was happening in there. Was the pregnancy progressing? Was it progressing the way it should? Then the bleeding in the second month of the pregnancy really shook me up. I had just begun to settle into being "comfortable" with being pregnant and suddenly my body starts to do something that it shouldn't. I never trusted it for a second after that. It was a classic by the book pregnancy after that but I never relaxed.
So with my second pregnancy I decided to enjoy myself. I looked at my then nearly two-year-old daughter and thought, "look what you can do! You did that!" and silenced any of the doubting worrisome voices that tried to get my attention. I decided that my body was wonderful. It could grow and nurture new life. I was sickeningly in love with being pregnant.
Then, just a day shy of the end of my first trimester of pregnancy, I spotted. I debated over whether or not this merited a trip to the doctors and after ringing them was told that although it was probably nothing, as I would basically just be coming in a day early to go ahead and drop by. My husband enthusiastically offered to go with me which puzzled me at the time. Generally he was not excited by keeping our young daughter entertained in public areas. I learned later there was a rheumatology hospital located opposite the Royal Woman's Hospital where I was going and that is where he really wanted to go.
Just before I was called into the examination room, my husband mentioned that he wanted to dash across the street for a moment to get a consult on his knee. His knee had been bothering him for several months but then this was the same man who during graduate school used to poke himself in the armpit to the point of causing pain. He poked at it in the morning. He poked at it in the evening. Sure enough, no matter what time of day it was, if he poked at it hard enough it hurt. The doctor at the University Health Center all but wrote out the word "hypochondriac" on his forehead. So I had been treating this more recent "my knee hurts" episode as more of the same. While I was a bit vexed by his choice of timing, I acquiesced. So when they ended up subjecting me to numerous ultrasounds (invasive included) while my exuberant toddler raced around the examination room unconfined and stopping every few minutes to look at the blank monitor and chant in a singsong voice, "where's the baby? where's the baby? baby? baby? baby?" I was effectively, emotionally, all alone. There was no baby. My wonderful Mother Earth Temple had crumbled. I was living in the ruins, had been living in the ruins for weeks and not even known it. Silly me, doing my palace dances and singing my palace songs. If my body were anything really, it was a walking coffin.
My body was a failure. The pregnancy ended in a D & C (dilate and curate) which got me one night's stay at the hospital before I went back home and started to pack up our life in Australia and get ready for the move to Japan.
I eventually got over the miscarriage but just a year after the birth of our second daughter, my husband finally got a positive diagnosis on why his knee (and by that point his wrist, right index finger, lower back, right shoulder) was so painful. He was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. He was 40 and suddenly the universe had revoked it's cosmic protection. I only realized much later that his first symptom of RA had stood up to be accounted present at the same exact moment that the doctors had been staring at the ultrasound monitor looking at the absence of a baby. . . I guess if his universal protection policy had covered me as well then I lost my coverage along with him.
The future suddenly disappeared. Being told that the pain you are experiencing is of a chronic nature and that the disease causing it is terminal sort of wrings the last drop of optimism out of future vistas. We are probably both still in some stage of denial but for now our focus has swung completely onto the present. I have ventured on-line and googled RA only a handful of times since my husband's diagnosis and each time I have left with a new appreciation of why his doctor once told him, "best not to think about what the future may hold. If you think about all the different twists and turns that RA can take you'll become suicidal."
The present however is very helpful in keeping us awake, alert and on the scene. You can't have two children under the age of 10 in your household and NOT be living in the moment! They need orange juice, and they need it now. The smaller one (only just four-years-old at this writing) can't possibly pee without an audience and the older one (at eight years of age) still can't fall asleep at night unless you are holding her hand. Since my future has temporarily evaporated (I'm sure that we will regain it eventually. It is there, just as solid and inescapable as the past, we in our disillusion are just looking the wrong direction--when we lift up our eyes from the ground where we have been hurled it will be there, in front of us still) I have found a kind of comfort in experiencing the present, in relishing the present.
But the shift in the nature of the universe from benevolent to malevolent has led me closer to the world that I tried all those years ago to escape. I want to get those muggers and mad men out of the shadows. Realistically speaking, concern over the safety of children has increased in both Japan and the U.S. since the 1970's and 80's when I was a child growing up with the petite prophet of doom. Growing up my schools never had a color/level warning system in place for parents to alert them to the possibility of harm occurring to their children or the presence of a child predator in the area. My mother never received a phone call that told her to come gather me at the school gates because someone had sent the school a letter threatening to kill one first grader every day that week. My older daughter's school in Osaka did phone me with that message. And now in America, when I was home on a visit, my friend popped the trunk to her car and hauled out an extra pair of jeans for my daughter. We were visiting a Chuck E. Cheese's (child pizza and play area) and she advised me that it would be prudent to have my three-year-old daughter don the jeans instead of the skirt she was wearing. She explained to me that children who have been the victims of sexual preditators in turn sometimes perpetrate sexual violence on smaller children. She had a friend in child protective services who had taken her aside and warned her. Suddenly, my daughter needed to be wearing protective clothing in order to enjoy the indoor slides/climing maze.
So, yes, unfortunately we as parents need to take more precautions regarding our children's safety than parents of yore. But I don't want my children to play tennis nervously, I want them to play joyfully! And I realized that my husband's (and my) new found sense of dread was threatening to change a sunny world view into one that focused instead on all those resulting shadows the sun casts.
It wasn't a subtle realization that came to me as I sat in the park watching the girls play. It didn't come to me in a quiet moment over a cup of morning coffee in the stillness of the house that I enjoy before the girls wake up. . . No, simply put it was a few weeks ago at bedtime when my eight-year-old, with my hand firmly grasped in hers as we both snuggled down under our winter comforters (My four-year-old was already asleep on the other side of me, her little hand still resting on my tummy.) suddenly sat up and said, "Mommy?"
"Yes?"
"Mommy. . . can you tell Daddy to stop telling me those stories?"
"What stories?"
"The ones he sees on the T.V."
"Oh." (I knew instantly what she was talking about--I had caught him telling her in detail all about a 10-year-old girl who had been killed--run over and dragged several meters by a big rig truck in Tokyo.)
"I keep having bad dreams. . . make him stop okay?"
I know why he told her that story. He didn't need to, and he shouldn't have, but I know why he did it. He did it because he is scared--of the malevolent future. When I broached the subject with him he was quick to point out the 30 minute walk to and from school she has each day--all those shopping centers that she walks past, cars going in and out, the icy roads of winter, children laughing, talking, not paying attention to traffic.
But the child who was tragically killed in Tokyo was crossing an intersection after looking both ways, the walk signal was on, she was doing everything right. It was the truck driver who came careening around a blind corner and simply swept right over her who was not doing right.
The potential dangers that he identified in our daughter's commute to school would have been better addressed in a simple traffic safety talk not in the gory details of the tragedy on the T.V. news. I grew up with a small girl's body parts littering the neighborhood because she didn't heed the tornado bell. Do I want my daughters to grow up with little girls pinned beneath the tires of every big rig on the road?
Where my husband used to quiet my general misgivings and "what if?"s he now silently absorbs them, he lets them settle and solidify there before us, and before our children. So I have suddenly learned to quiet them myself. In an odd way, losing the future temporarily has helped me really embrace and live the present. The present makes an excellent shield. Do my children need to watch the tragedy unfolding on the T.V. about the 34 year old local mother who threw her daughter off a bridge?--no, deflect it. It is also a useful sword. Can anything be gained by watching the T.V. footage of cars sliding into each other on ice coated roads? Perhaps, but the best way to illustrate the slipperiness of ice? It's the puddle frozen out back in the garden! If there are bad things waiting in the future than I'll take the opportunity now to sharpen my sword. I will not poke holes in my own armour with self-doubts, fears and general forebrooding. Nor will I weaken my children's defenses by drawing murals of modern day cautionary tales from the evening or morning news in their dreams. Instead I will teach them how to hold the sheild, how to lower it and jab with the sword. I will teach them how to spot black ice and let them practice how to fall when they do hit it.
We couldn't have ever planned for living life at the mercy of an incurable terminal immune disorder. And even if we could have, wouldn't it just have sucked all the joy and fun out of the years prior to the official diagnosis? (something I had a taste of in my child hood. . . ) Or maybe the fear of its shadowy presence solidifying would have propelled us into a head long rush into overdrive and self-destruction--neither ways of living life very appealing.
I know why he did it. My husband was scared. He is scared. I am too. Of course I feel my chest tighten, my heart contract whenever I realize that a child, a child like one of my children has been hurt, abducted, abused, killed--in accidental or criminal circumstances. But I am not going to raise potential victims. I want to raise happy, confident children who grow up into young adults who choose wisely. I want to bring up my children as safely as I can. I want them to have long and interesting childhoods. Then when they are teens, I want them to explode the world and set out to find what in it is theirs. I want them to find out how they fit into the world, what they can do here and what they can do well. Of course they will make mistakes and take risks: it is through finding out who you aren't that you often discover who you are. Failure leads to success, eventually. But I want to weight the odds in their favour. I want to increase the probablity that they will make good choices. I am a mother after all. I want them to avoid doing foolish, mule headed things like smoking a cigarrette because it will cut their appetite, drinking to get drunk, forgoing the use of a condom in the heat of the moment, or eating--God forbid--raw eggs. But the bottom line is that I want them to grow up secure enough to be optimistic--not looking fearfully into the future over what it might disclose, but eagerly looking into the future exicited to engage it, live it and make it uniquely theirs.
I don't recall anyone's foreign born mother getting coaxed into coming to my high school to say, whip up a French crepe or reveal the secret to her amazing enchiladas. . . but when a teacher from this local high school turned up on my doorstep to invite me to come as a guest speaker for a day even his suggestion that having the kids cook something American would be fun made perfect sense to me.
I have lived in Japan for so long now that it is hard for me to extract amusing cultural differences to hand out to friends back home like little gems gathered on a foreign shore. Everything here seems normal to me now and it is only occasionally that something jars me out of myself. I suppose the flyer in the newspaper yesterday for a new restaurant that featured a bowl of miso soup with a crab perched in the middle of it was one of those moments. I mean really, who wants to eat soup that has the potential to reach up and pinch you on the nose?
But more often than not it is something in me that is more inborn, an unconscious response conditioned during my infancy/childhood/young adult days of living in America that registers a cultural difference. In the middle of baking the pound cake I experienced one of those, or actually a series of those moments. First came the flash backs--my mother baking in the kitchen while my brother and I circled her, tiny vultures waiting for the demise of the beaters so we could lick them clean. Then memories of my grade school girlfriends and me baking cookies together. . . having egg fights, eating fist fulls of cookie dough, proudly presenting our mothers with a plate of three or four surviving cookies.
But it was a stronger impulse that led me to squeak, "chotto matte, wait!" "When I saw one of the towering high school boys (Japanese men are no longer short! All over Japan the high school and junior high school boys are looking down on their male authority figures--fathers, uncles, teachers) scooping a finger full of butter, sugar and creamed raw egg up to his lips. "Salmonella!" The Japanese English teacher with whom I was co-teaching the class inquired as to what that was exactly. I just paused and waved the boy on-- "Sorry.Go ahead."
While America has become super conscious to the risks of contracting salmonella from raw eggs in Japan raw eggs are still an accepted part of the National diet. Many dishes arrive on a diner's plate with a spectacular raw egg floating in the middle. Asking for them to leave the raw egg out has always resulted in consternation and confusion on the part of the staff. . . at least in my experience. So I have taken to deftly scooping the raw egg out on my own. I would never be so mule headed or foolhardy as to eat a raw egg.
I don't remember exactly when my mother decided that we should no longer touch raw eggs and that the act of touching, much less consuming raw egg yolk or egg white promised dire consequences for us. . . .but she imprinted it well. Should someone offer me a raw egg my response is similar to being invited to play a round of Russian roulette. RAW egg? Raw egg is dangerous. I assume my mother must have given me many detailed descriptions of what dying from salmonella would be like. I don't remember the exact warnings, but my body remembers the feeling those warnings left me with. I touch raw egg and my body tenses just like it does when I touch a loaded fire arm.
I do remember her warning about the tornado bell in Minnesota when I was three. "They found her arm on Evergreen Street and her leg on North Toledo Avenue. They never did find her head." And that was what happened to little girls who didn't heed the tornado bell and come home promptly to take cover.
My mother's method of raising strong independent children who could take on whatever life had to offer was to tell us in detail all about what life could throw at us. It used to kind of knock the wind out of my friends when they got caught in the teaching process. For example:
My thirteen year old friend and I are leaving my house on a beautiful California summer evening. We saunter down the gravel drive way, setting out on the three mile walk to the tennis courts inside the gated upper middle class foot hill community in which both our families live, tennis rackets swinging at our sides, laughing and occasionally stopping to strike absurd "tennis" poses. We stop when my mother yells for us to wait as she comes running after us stirring up a storm of chalky gravel powder in her wake. My 5 foot 4 inch mother stops in front of us, panting to tell us a cautionary tale. "Last week, just last week, 2 young girls like you were viciously beaten and raped at a tennis court." Then she cheerfully tells us to be careful and starts back up the gravel driveway, the chalky gravel dust seemingly parting to let the petite prophet of doom pass.
So, did my mother raise me to be fearless or fearful? Mostly fearful and pessimistic or at least that is how I turned out. Whose to say how much of that outcome had to do with her penchant for telling chilling tales from the real world and how much of it comes simply from my own personality? Regardless of how it was formed, mine is an outlook that is always waiting for what is not on the scene. If there is sunshine and blue skies outside the window I still check the weather channel before going out--they have radar that will show what storm clouds may be lurking out there waiting to roll in later.
An example of how this outlooks spills over into my life is: Even after getting married a decade ago I still occasionally have dreams in which my husband reveals that he has never really loved me and never will and that our 10 year courtship was all an elaborate plot/hoax just to ultimately expose me as a complete fool and laughing stock. In the nightmare he always delivers the same speech in the same flat emotionless voice except for when he turns to the woman he has his arms around (he has been talking to me over her shoulder while she has been sneering at me the whole time) and then his voice turns very warm and vibrant as they laugh together--at me.
When I wake up I am usually grumpy and short tempered with him for the whole day. Although as we are truly an old married couple now and our children are growing up I am getting a little better at reminding myself, "for the love of God, it was only a nightmare. . . "
I think I chose him (and oh yes, I did choose him. It was my intention to keep him the first time I met him) partly because he was so diametrically unlike my pessimistic mother. He took life as it came and didn't waste any time worrying about the future or the past. He was of the moment.
Our first date was in Portland, Oregon and the car broke down on Burnside--in basically the most dangerous area of the city. When we first met he was an exchange student from Yokohama, Japan at my University in Oregon. When the car broke down just as we were leaving the city it didn't seem to phase him at all. If it had phased him, even a tiny bit, I would have felt comfortable enough to begin my headless chicken dance of panic. My friends have seen the dance. I'm famous for quoting Indiana Jone's movies "We're gonna die in here!" over something as simple as missing the right freeway exit. But he didn't panic. He smiled sort of shyly about the car breaking down. He apologized. He looked incredibly cute.
We ended up walking all along Burnside, smoking as we walked and stopping frequently as the inhabitants of Burnside (mostly prostitutes and homeless men and women) would invariably, drawn by the plums of smoke, come investigate whether or not we had a cigarette to spare. He handed out almost a whole pack, smiling each time he was approached. As the night turned to dawn we finally encountered a taxi. The driver looked at us with wide eyes and told us we were in the "wrong" neighborhood and took us off to a Red Lion Hotel in a safer part of the city.
But I had found that even in the wrong place I felt safe with him. Without him I would have seen murders, drug addicts and rapist on every street corner (or better yet, hiding around the street corners out of sight), with him I was able to see who he saw, people who wanted a smoke--people who perhaps used drugs or performed sexual acts for money but people. For that night, he had managed with only his presence to help alter the filter through which I was used to interpreting my world.
Plus he had this notion that he was living a blessed life. Literally, he felt that he was under some sort of cosmic protection and that "nothing bad" would ever happen to him. If he loved me than that cosmic protection automatically extended to cover me as well.
After growing up amid body parts flung about by the wrathful winds of nature and violent rapists waiting at every tennis court. . . it was an irresistible invitation into a much more welcoming world.
So, despite language difficulties (he was really a beginning level English speaker when I met him and my Japanese was even worse) and geographic challenges we somehow managed to arrive at the state of marital bliss in 1996, just months shy of 10 years from the first day we met. Of course, by the time we were swapping vows he had become fluent in English and I could at least converse at the level of a grade-schooler in Japanese.
And those were pretty good--luck wise--years. Nothing horrible happened to either one of us. While my husband's car at one point was flattened into a tin can--he and all the passengers in his car escaped unscathed. We both flew many times, on both domestic and international flights without any kind of aviation glitches ever taking place. I don't even remember getting a bad bout of the flu until years later when my daughters started to bring it home to me! But the year 2000, having missed the boat on the millennium bug, seemed set to deliver us a message of doom none-the-less.
Life was really coming together. The evening my husband arrived back from interviewing for a new job in Japan, one that would be higher paying and give him more social status, was the same evening that my home pregnancy kit told me we were expecting baby number two! And, as he had gotten the job in Japan, the pink plus sign I showed him on the pee stick didn't even phase him . So we both spent the following three months looking forward to the future. He was enjoying telling everyone at his present workplace exactly what he thought of the board members and upper echelon administrators as he prepared to leave for the new job in Japan and I was excited about the prospect of being able to afford to buy meat again not to mention having health insurance for the whole family! And as most pregnant women do, I was reveling in the role of "mother earth".
My first pregnancy at the age of 32 while in the midst of a PhD. program had taken me completely by surprise. I had gone into the University's health center thinking I had the flu and had come out pregnant. And for some reason I had pregnancy symptoms when I was only about a week along so I spent the first month obsessing over whether or not the pregnancy would continue. The doctor had basically told me, "You're pregnant but it is so early that I wouldn't be surprised if you miscarried. Many women miscarry this early without ever realizing that they have even been pregnant." Then she sort of patted my hand, gave me pamphlets on different "choices" and told me that I should stop smoking and drinking coffee if I was going to keep the baby.
So for about a month I spent most of the time between dawn and dusk wondering how things were going on in there. Then I had an episode of spotting and light bleeding. Anxious phone calls to the Health Center told me that I should just take it easy and wait until the first trimester was up when I could go to the ob-gyn. for my first official pregnancy exam.
The rest of the pregnancy I stayed just about as tense and worried as I was those first four weeks of it. I hate that bible of pregnancy "What to Expect When you are Expecting". It is probably actually quite a good reference book for people who use it responsibly. But I was always reading in the areas I wasn't supposed to be in, "if a problem arises. . . when the baby's heart rate drops. . . " and so I spent a lot of time imagining the worst possible outcomes.
I think that first month of being pregnant but not "knowing" what was going on made me fundamentally distrust my own body. I mean, here I was, "pregnant" but I had no way of knowing what was happening in there. Was the pregnancy progressing? Was it progressing the way it should? Then the bleeding in the second month of the pregnancy really shook me up. I had just begun to settle into being "comfortable" with being pregnant and suddenly my body starts to do something that it shouldn't. I never trusted it for a second after that. It was a classic by the book pregnancy after that but I never relaxed.
So with my second pregnancy I decided to enjoy myself. I looked at my then nearly two-year-old daughter and thought, "look what you can do! You did that!" and silenced any of the doubting worrisome voices that tried to get my attention. I decided that my body was wonderful. It could grow and nurture new life. I was sickeningly in love with being pregnant.
Then, just a day shy of the end of my first trimester of pregnancy, I spotted. I debated over whether or not this merited a trip to the doctors and after ringing them was told that although it was probably nothing, as I would basically just be coming in a day early to go ahead and drop by. My husband enthusiastically offered to go with me which puzzled me at the time. Generally he was not excited by keeping our young daughter entertained in public areas. I learned later there was a rheumatology hospital located opposite the Royal Woman's Hospital where I was going and that is where he really wanted to go.
Just before I was called into the examination room, my husband mentioned that he wanted to dash across the street for a moment to get a consult on his knee. His knee had been bothering him for several months but then this was the same man who during graduate school used to poke himself in the armpit to the point of causing pain. He poked at it in the morning. He poked at it in the evening. Sure enough, no matter what time of day it was, if he poked at it hard enough it hurt. The doctor at the University Health Center all but wrote out the word "hypochondriac" on his forehead. So I had been treating this more recent "my knee hurts" episode as more of the same. While I was a bit vexed by his choice of timing, I acquiesced. So when they ended up subjecting me to numerous ultrasounds (invasive included) while my exuberant toddler raced around the examination room unconfined and stopping every few minutes to look at the blank monitor and chant in a singsong voice, "where's the baby? where's the baby? baby? baby? baby?" I was effectively, emotionally, all alone. There was no baby. My wonderful Mother Earth Temple had crumbled. I was living in the ruins, had been living in the ruins for weeks and not even known it. Silly me, doing my palace dances and singing my palace songs. If my body were anything really, it was a walking coffin.
My body was a failure. The pregnancy ended in a D & C (dilate and curate) which got me one night's stay at the hospital before I went back home and started to pack up our life in Australia and get ready for the move to Japan.
I eventually got over the miscarriage but just a year after the birth of our second daughter, my husband finally got a positive diagnosis on why his knee (and by that point his wrist, right index finger, lower back, right shoulder) was so painful. He was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. He was 40 and suddenly the universe had revoked it's cosmic protection. I only realized much later that his first symptom of RA had stood up to be accounted present at the same exact moment that the doctors had been staring at the ultrasound monitor looking at the absence of a baby. . . I guess if his universal protection policy had covered me as well then I lost my coverage along with him.
The future suddenly disappeared. Being told that the pain you are experiencing is of a chronic nature and that the disease causing it is terminal sort of wrings the last drop of optimism out of future vistas. We are probably both still in some stage of denial but for now our focus has swung completely onto the present. I have ventured on-line and googled RA only a handful of times since my husband's diagnosis and each time I have left with a new appreciation of why his doctor once told him, "best not to think about what the future may hold. If you think about all the different twists and turns that RA can take you'll become suicidal."
The present however is very helpful in keeping us awake, alert and on the scene. You can't have two children under the age of 10 in your household and NOT be living in the moment! They need orange juice, and they need it now. The smaller one (only just four-years-old at this writing) can't possibly pee without an audience and the older one (at eight years of age) still can't fall asleep at night unless you are holding her hand. Since my future has temporarily evaporated (I'm sure that we will regain it eventually. It is there, just as solid and inescapable as the past, we in our disillusion are just looking the wrong direction--when we lift up our eyes from the ground where we have been hurled it will be there, in front of us still) I have found a kind of comfort in experiencing the present, in relishing the present.
But the shift in the nature of the universe from benevolent to malevolent has led me closer to the world that I tried all those years ago to escape. I want to get those muggers and mad men out of the shadows. Realistically speaking, concern over the safety of children has increased in both Japan and the U.S. since the 1970's and 80's when I was a child growing up with the petite prophet of doom. Growing up my schools never had a color/level warning system in place for parents to alert them to the possibility of harm occurring to their children or the presence of a child predator in the area. My mother never received a phone call that told her to come gather me at the school gates because someone had sent the school a letter threatening to kill one first grader every day that week. My older daughter's school in Osaka did phone me with that message. And now in America, when I was home on a visit, my friend popped the trunk to her car and hauled out an extra pair of jeans for my daughter. We were visiting a Chuck E. Cheese's (child pizza and play area) and she advised me that it would be prudent to have my three-year-old daughter don the jeans instead of the skirt she was wearing. She explained to me that children who have been the victims of sexual preditators in turn sometimes perpetrate sexual violence on smaller children. She had a friend in child protective services who had taken her aside and warned her. Suddenly, my daughter needed to be wearing protective clothing in order to enjoy the indoor slides/climing maze.
So, yes, unfortunately we as parents need to take more precautions regarding our children's safety than parents of yore. But I don't want my children to play tennis nervously, I want them to play joyfully! And I realized that my husband's (and my) new found sense of dread was threatening to change a sunny world view into one that focused instead on all those resulting shadows the sun casts.
It wasn't a subtle realization that came to me as I sat in the park watching the girls play. It didn't come to me in a quiet moment over a cup of morning coffee in the stillness of the house that I enjoy before the girls wake up. . . No, simply put it was a few weeks ago at bedtime when my eight-year-old, with my hand firmly grasped in hers as we both snuggled down under our winter comforters (My four-year-old was already asleep on the other side of me, her little hand still resting on my tummy.) suddenly sat up and said, "Mommy?"
"Yes?"
"Mommy. . . can you tell Daddy to stop telling me those stories?"
"What stories?"
"The ones he sees on the T.V."
"Oh." (I knew instantly what she was talking about--I had caught him telling her in detail all about a 10-year-old girl who had been killed--run over and dragged several meters by a big rig truck in Tokyo.)
"I keep having bad dreams. . . make him stop okay?"
I know why he told her that story. He didn't need to, and he shouldn't have, but I know why he did it. He did it because he is scared--of the malevolent future. When I broached the subject with him he was quick to point out the 30 minute walk to and from school she has each day--all those shopping centers that she walks past, cars going in and out, the icy roads of winter, children laughing, talking, not paying attention to traffic.
But the child who was tragically killed in Tokyo was crossing an intersection after looking both ways, the walk signal was on, she was doing everything right. It was the truck driver who came careening around a blind corner and simply swept right over her who was not doing right.
The potential dangers that he identified in our daughter's commute to school would have been better addressed in a simple traffic safety talk not in the gory details of the tragedy on the T.V. news. I grew up with a small girl's body parts littering the neighborhood because she didn't heed the tornado bell. Do I want my daughters to grow up with little girls pinned beneath the tires of every big rig on the road?
Where my husband used to quiet my general misgivings and "what if?"s he now silently absorbs them, he lets them settle and solidify there before us, and before our children. So I have suddenly learned to quiet them myself. In an odd way, losing the future temporarily has helped me really embrace and live the present. The present makes an excellent shield. Do my children need to watch the tragedy unfolding on the T.V. about the 34 year old local mother who threw her daughter off a bridge?--no, deflect it. It is also a useful sword. Can anything be gained by watching the T.V. footage of cars sliding into each other on ice coated roads? Perhaps, but the best way to illustrate the slipperiness of ice? It's the puddle frozen out back in the garden! If there are bad things waiting in the future than I'll take the opportunity now to sharpen my sword. I will not poke holes in my own armour with self-doubts, fears and general forebrooding. Nor will I weaken my children's defenses by drawing murals of modern day cautionary tales from the evening or morning news in their dreams. Instead I will teach them how to hold the sheild, how to lower it and jab with the sword. I will teach them how to spot black ice and let them practice how to fall when they do hit it.
We couldn't have ever planned for living life at the mercy of an incurable terminal immune disorder. And even if we could have, wouldn't it just have sucked all the joy and fun out of the years prior to the official diagnosis? (something I had a taste of in my child hood. . . ) Or maybe the fear of its shadowy presence solidifying would have propelled us into a head long rush into overdrive and self-destruction--neither ways of living life very appealing.
I know why he did it. My husband was scared. He is scared. I am too. Of course I feel my chest tighten, my heart contract whenever I realize that a child, a child like one of my children has been hurt, abducted, abused, killed--in accidental or criminal circumstances. But I am not going to raise potential victims. I want to raise happy, confident children who grow up into young adults who choose wisely. I want to bring up my children as safely as I can. I want them to have long and interesting childhoods. Then when they are teens, I want them to explode the world and set out to find what in it is theirs. I want them to find out how they fit into the world, what they can do here and what they can do well. Of course they will make mistakes and take risks: it is through finding out who you aren't that you often discover who you are. Failure leads to success, eventually. But I want to weight the odds in their favour. I want to increase the probablity that they will make good choices. I am a mother after all. I want them to avoid doing foolish, mule headed things like smoking a cigarrette because it will cut their appetite, drinking to get drunk, forgoing the use of a condom in the heat of the moment, or eating--God forbid--raw eggs. But the bottom line is that I want them to grow up secure enough to be optimistic--not looking fearfully into the future over what it might disclose, but eagerly looking into the future exicited to engage it, live it and make it uniquely theirs.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
"Valentine's Day" or "It is better to Give than to Receive"
As a elementary school student I remember the thrill and joy of Valentine's Day in the early grades. Back then it was a day to stuff your Valentines cards into all your friends/classmates Valentine's Day mail boxes set up on each child's desk. It was fun. Opening up your own mail box at the end of the day and sorting through all the different cute and funny cards. . . eating the chocolate frosted cupcakes that someones mother had brought in and giggling over the messages on the candy hearts perched on top of them--February the 14th was a candy coated, smooth chocolaty comforting day.
When it suddenly switched from a day of expressing "love" for all your friends and became tinged with the pre-pubescent romantic notions of fifth and sixth graders I began to grow decidedly more and more uneasy. If there was one day out of the entire school year that I would have joyfully fallen ill, victim to anything from a severe head cold to a bout of really nasty influenza--February the 14th would have been that day. When you are inside a changing body and spend most of your time fixating on which feature is your worst and which is your best and then on top of that are thrown into the kind of vicious social arena so many junior high and high schools can be. . . Valentine' s Day comes off as a pre-approved method for publicly stamping "reject" on your forehead.
Every year eating my mother-given chocolate and reading my mother-given, "We love you our beautiful daughter" card seemed to only underscore the pathetic state of my social life in reality. I can't remember ever receiving a bouquet of roses or even pink carnations while in the middle of any of my high school classes. No one ever had to interrupt class to present me with a bouquet of Valentine's Day balloons. I have very clear memories of other girls, the really pretty girls, the popular girls giggling and laughing, tossing their princess hair over their shoulders as they received their Valentine's day flowers and balloons. Very clear memories, crystal clear and sharp painful memories.
I slunk away from those high school Valentine's Days and went off to college where I was sure that I could, in my new found sophistication, scoff off the dreaded lover's holiday. And I was fairly successful. Annoyingly, I still had friends whose boyfriends provided them with romantic dinners and blood red roses perched atop heart shaped boxes of chocolate. However, in my new found maturity I forgave them their happiness and instead sought out my other boyfriend-less girl friends so we could complain about men together.
Then I met my future husband. Poor guy--I did everything but wrestle him to the ground and tag him like an endangered species upon first meeting him. From the first moment we met I knew that he was what I wanted. I didn't even know why, I just knew that this one I had to keep. Of course I was wise enough not to let him know about my long term plans for him--instead I gazed into his eyes and when he asked if I wasn't unsure about starting a relationship with someone from another country I simple replied seductively, "live for the moment!" He still wistfully remembers the gold pot he thought he'd found when I huskily whispered that against his neck.
I was mentally calculating at what age I would birth each of our future children.
We started dating in November and he left for his university and life back in Japan that December. Apparently my famous "live for the moment" quote had been passed off so successfully that he felt the need to try to secure my amorous affections so he was incredibly diligent with regular phone calls and love letters during our next semester apart. He sent me boxes of chocolates on February the 14th that year. I remember them all--one came in a champagne glass shaped like a woman's high heel shoe. The others were in heart shaped boxes, flower shaped boxes. . . there were so many! He had shipped two separate boxes full of Valentine's cards, letters, hand drawn pictures, chocolates. . . and he had fresh roses delivered to me.
When I got to Japan three months following my graduation from University I was not only in love, I myself was as good as hog tied and tagged. When my first Valentine's Day in Japan rolled around and wonders of wonders, they had gotten the holiday all wrong--in Japan women give men chocolate not vice versa--I realized exactly what he had done for me the previous year. I would have married him on the spot. He confessed that it had been one of the most embarrassing moments of his life, walking into the department stores and buying Valentine's Day chocolates and cards as in Japan only woman do that.
For the next few Valentine's days I joined the ranks of young Japanese women scouring the departos (department stores) for the rarest import chocolates with which to impress my love. After our fourth Valentine's day together though it began to dawn on me that this man of mine, who in the first year of our relationship had been quite the verbalizer of his unending love for me had succeeded in suddenly silencing any talk of engagement or marriage . . . and so I stopped buying big boxes of chocolates and instead waited at night for him to bring home all the chocolate he scored from woman co-workers, admires and friends. Then I would sit and consume most of them in front of him declaring that since he was mine, they were my spoils by default.
The only results were that I tended to put on a little weight every February for the next few years. By the eighth year of our relationship he had pretty much made me eat my famous "live for the moment" line. Turned out that the love letters he had posted to me with, "marry me!" "I can't live with out you" and various other lines in them had been penned on the advise of a Playboy magazine's article on how to keep a girl in a long distance relationship from cheating on you. As punishment I hung in there and nearly a decade after we first met we married.
Now, after a decade of being married, looking at the big 4-0 looming on the horizon for my March birthday this year I realize that I have been with the same man now for exactly half of my life. I met my husband when I was 20. He got my twenties and most of my thirties (There was a year or so in there that I had to finally put my foot down and leave him until he came to his senses and agreed to marry me.) and now it looks like he'll get whatever is left.
Nowadays when Valentine's Day rolls around I am, I imagine closer aligned to my Japanese contemporaries than I am to my American ones in how I perceive the holiday. This year I see it as more of a holiday for my two young daughters than for me. I will probably give my husband some form of chocolate but it will be in conjunction with my daughters. We will, all three of us, set out this evening to bake a chocolate roll cake to present the family male with.
Ironically it doesn't even enter my mind to stress over not receiving anything myself this year. Well, I can't lie. I was sort of shocked to realize that this year, while my mother sent the kids Valentine's Day cards she didn't send me one!
Yet, it seems kind of fitting that for a woman who grew up dreading the 14th of February every year after I hit the age of 10 I now live in a country where the holiday is all about women giving chocolate. As I approach 40 I can now say that from my experience yes, it is easier to be dumped than to be the dumpee; it is also easier to be the giver than the receiver--at least on Valentine's day!
When it suddenly switched from a day of expressing "love" for all your friends and became tinged with the pre-pubescent romantic notions of fifth and sixth graders I began to grow decidedly more and more uneasy. If there was one day out of the entire school year that I would have joyfully fallen ill, victim to anything from a severe head cold to a bout of really nasty influenza--February the 14th would have been that day. When you are inside a changing body and spend most of your time fixating on which feature is your worst and which is your best and then on top of that are thrown into the kind of vicious social arena so many junior high and high schools can be. . . Valentine' s Day comes off as a pre-approved method for publicly stamping "reject" on your forehead.
Every year eating my mother-given chocolate and reading my mother-given, "We love you our beautiful daughter" card seemed to only underscore the pathetic state of my social life in reality. I can't remember ever receiving a bouquet of roses or even pink carnations while in the middle of any of my high school classes. No one ever had to interrupt class to present me with a bouquet of Valentine's Day balloons. I have very clear memories of other girls, the really pretty girls, the popular girls giggling and laughing, tossing their princess hair over their shoulders as they received their Valentine's day flowers and balloons. Very clear memories, crystal clear and sharp painful memories.
I slunk away from those high school Valentine's Days and went off to college where I was sure that I could, in my new found sophistication, scoff off the dreaded lover's holiday. And I was fairly successful. Annoyingly, I still had friends whose boyfriends provided them with romantic dinners and blood red roses perched atop heart shaped boxes of chocolate. However, in my new found maturity I forgave them their happiness and instead sought out my other boyfriend-less girl friends so we could complain about men together.
Then I met my future husband. Poor guy--I did everything but wrestle him to the ground and tag him like an endangered species upon first meeting him. From the first moment we met I knew that he was what I wanted. I didn't even know why, I just knew that this one I had to keep. Of course I was wise enough not to let him know about my long term plans for him--instead I gazed into his eyes and when he asked if I wasn't unsure about starting a relationship with someone from another country I simple replied seductively, "live for the moment!" He still wistfully remembers the gold pot he thought he'd found when I huskily whispered that against his neck.
I was mentally calculating at what age I would birth each of our future children.
We started dating in November and he left for his university and life back in Japan that December. Apparently my famous "live for the moment" quote had been passed off so successfully that he felt the need to try to secure my amorous affections so he was incredibly diligent with regular phone calls and love letters during our next semester apart. He sent me boxes of chocolates on February the 14th that year. I remember them all--one came in a champagne glass shaped like a woman's high heel shoe. The others were in heart shaped boxes, flower shaped boxes. . . there were so many! He had shipped two separate boxes full of Valentine's cards, letters, hand drawn pictures, chocolates. . . and he had fresh roses delivered to me.
When I got to Japan three months following my graduation from University I was not only in love, I myself was as good as hog tied and tagged. When my first Valentine's Day in Japan rolled around and wonders of wonders, they had gotten the holiday all wrong--in Japan women give men chocolate not vice versa--I realized exactly what he had done for me the previous year. I would have married him on the spot. He confessed that it had been one of the most embarrassing moments of his life, walking into the department stores and buying Valentine's Day chocolates and cards as in Japan only woman do that.
For the next few Valentine's days I joined the ranks of young Japanese women scouring the departos (department stores) for the rarest import chocolates with which to impress my love. After our fourth Valentine's day together though it began to dawn on me that this man of mine, who in the first year of our relationship had been quite the verbalizer of his unending love for me had succeeded in suddenly silencing any talk of engagement or marriage . . . and so I stopped buying big boxes of chocolates and instead waited at night for him to bring home all the chocolate he scored from woman co-workers, admires and friends. Then I would sit and consume most of them in front of him declaring that since he was mine, they were my spoils by default.
The only results were that I tended to put on a little weight every February for the next few years. By the eighth year of our relationship he had pretty much made me eat my famous "live for the moment" line. Turned out that the love letters he had posted to me with, "marry me!" "I can't live with out you" and various other lines in them had been penned on the advise of a Playboy magazine's article on how to keep a girl in a long distance relationship from cheating on you. As punishment I hung in there and nearly a decade after we first met we married.
Now, after a decade of being married, looking at the big 4-0 looming on the horizon for my March birthday this year I realize that I have been with the same man now for exactly half of my life. I met my husband when I was 20. He got my twenties and most of my thirties (There was a year or so in there that I had to finally put my foot down and leave him until he came to his senses and agreed to marry me.) and now it looks like he'll get whatever is left.
Nowadays when Valentine's Day rolls around I am, I imagine closer aligned to my Japanese contemporaries than I am to my American ones in how I perceive the holiday. This year I see it as more of a holiday for my two young daughters than for me. I will probably give my husband some form of chocolate but it will be in conjunction with my daughters. We will, all three of us, set out this evening to bake a chocolate roll cake to present the family male with.
Ironically it doesn't even enter my mind to stress over not receiving anything myself this year. Well, I can't lie. I was sort of shocked to realize that this year, while my mother sent the kids Valentine's Day cards she didn't send me one!
Yet, it seems kind of fitting that for a woman who grew up dreading the 14th of February every year after I hit the age of 10 I now live in a country where the holiday is all about women giving chocolate. As I approach 40 I can now say that from my experience yes, it is easier to be dumped than to be the dumpee; it is also easier to be the giver than the receiver--at least on Valentine's day!
Monday, January 29, 2007
Hug Rehabilitation
I don't hug. I went through a "don't touch me, stay away, noooooooo!" phase around the age of nine. My father thought it was great fun to chase me around the family room. It only increased the panicked feeling of being "caught" though. To clarify, my father was an extremely nice, good father: I just suddenly didn't want to be touched and the idea of anyone encircling me made my skin crawl.
Fast forward to my Sophomore year in college when I pledged a sorority. Oh the horror of sisterhood hugs. Especially once they discovered my sure fire hug escape tactic. Hugging me is like hugging jello--jello that can dodge. I will mystically bend, weave and end up just outside the circle of your arms that were moments ago grasping me in a hug. And I won't say anything, I'll just stand at arms length and look at you like a bemused newt. Somewhere between the age of 9 (when yes, impending puberty probably had a lot to do with the original huge aversion) and the age of 19 I developed a natural escape and recoil reaction. Sometimes my newt like eyes will focus and realizing my misstep in protocol I'll apologize.
I have to credit my sorority sisters with having great senses of humor and forgiving hearts. I kept escaping their hugs for the rest of my time in University as they, bless them, kept trying to give them to me.
Now that I have kids of course, I have mellowed quite a bit towards hugs. I certainly don't recoil from the outstretched arms of my daughters and I remember the overwhelming flooding joy of motherhood realized when my eldest was able to give me a real bear hug for the first time at the age of 10 months or so.
Even before becoming a mother though I astonished my friends and family by flinging myself at my graduate committee members on stage during my graduation ceremony for my Masters Degree. Actually I sort of desperately hurled myself towards them and grappled them: I might have even squeezed and levered them several cm. off the stage floor. I guess that after the months of being locked in my room wrestling with my masters thesis and weekly receiving their very detailed comments and suggestions regarding what was WRONG with said thesis or what was MISSING from said thesis or what should be BOOTED OUT or CLARIFIED in said thesis I felt like a hostage receiving her freedom. And I totally loved my captors for releasing me! Plus, AFTER it was all over, I realized what wonderful guidance I had received from them. But the first thing my best friend since high school said to me after I descended the stage, degree in hand was, "Laura, you HUGGED your professors!"
My Dad thinks it is hilarious that he caught the moment on film.
I made giant strides forward in my hug rehabilitation program when I accepted the position of head teacher at an international preschool in Osaka, Japan. Which is sort of ironic in that a.) when imaging Japan most Westerns won't think of Japan as being a very "huggy" country and b.) I had spent so much time and effort at ensuring that I would never have to teach anyone under the age of 18. Yet there I was, in a classroom with 20 children aged 1.5-4 years old.
The first week was rough. One of my students had to be carried out side the classroom for a "time out" and inexperienced me picked him up from the front. For a three year old he could really land a punch and his kicks were pretty impressive too. My supervisor discreetly took me aside and demonstrated different useful "holds".
But sometime later, as the children become more accustomed to me and I to them. . . maybe it was during story time? A little hand rested on my knee. Then a sleepy little head pressed into my shoulder. A little arm wrapped around my thigh as I stood in the middle of the classroom during art time. And the spontaneous hugs that I was given were the best benefit I have ever received from a job. Especially when the hugger would giggle or throw themselves at me. Although the pensive, rather measured and restrained hugger was to be appreciated as well. Up would swagger a two year old. He'd look in my eyes. I'd look in his eyes. He'd cock his head to the side. I'd wonder. . . "did I pass muster?" And then I'd get the hug and I never had the slightest desire to flee.
When you've had a bad day, a fight with your spouse, trouble with disciplining your children, or simply news overload--how many people can get hug therapy at the workplace?
And here is what my hug rehabilitation taught me in the end. Previously I had been looking at the custom of hugging in the light of . . . well, as an intricate ritual like some kind of folk dance only a student of dance is competent to perform. Who leans in first, where will there be physical contact and for how long? when is it "appropriate" to hug? etc. etc. but after receiving a multitude of hugs, some sticky, some wet, some bear like, some slow and sleepy I realized, a hug isn't a ritual: it is a crystallization of grace and warmth.
So now, I actually frequently make mental notes to myself, opening a care package from a friend back home, "ooooooh, that's a hug!" rereading an e-mail that has left me giggling into my morning cup of coffee, "that's a hug!" and while I still won't partake in superficial social hugging I will hug the very dickens out a friend. I will hug the breath out of someone who has made me feel special, safe, appreciated and happy. I will pause at arms length. I might look you in the eyes. I might cock my head to one side and then--I'll hug, perhaps still a bit awkwardly, but sincerely.
Fast forward to my Sophomore year in college when I pledged a sorority. Oh the horror of sisterhood hugs. Especially once they discovered my sure fire hug escape tactic. Hugging me is like hugging jello--jello that can dodge. I will mystically bend, weave and end up just outside the circle of your arms that were moments ago grasping me in a hug. And I won't say anything, I'll just stand at arms length and look at you like a bemused newt. Somewhere between the age of 9 (when yes, impending puberty probably had a lot to do with the original huge aversion) and the age of 19 I developed a natural escape and recoil reaction. Sometimes my newt like eyes will focus and realizing my misstep in protocol I'll apologize.
I have to credit my sorority sisters with having great senses of humor and forgiving hearts. I kept escaping their hugs for the rest of my time in University as they, bless them, kept trying to give them to me.
Now that I have kids of course, I have mellowed quite a bit towards hugs. I certainly don't recoil from the outstretched arms of my daughters and I remember the overwhelming flooding joy of motherhood realized when my eldest was able to give me a real bear hug for the first time at the age of 10 months or so.
Even before becoming a mother though I astonished my friends and family by flinging myself at my graduate committee members on stage during my graduation ceremony for my Masters Degree. Actually I sort of desperately hurled myself towards them and grappled them: I might have even squeezed and levered them several cm. off the stage floor. I guess that after the months of being locked in my room wrestling with my masters thesis and weekly receiving their very detailed comments and suggestions regarding what was WRONG with said thesis or what was MISSING from said thesis or what should be BOOTED OUT or CLARIFIED in said thesis I felt like a hostage receiving her freedom. And I totally loved my captors for releasing me! Plus, AFTER it was all over, I realized what wonderful guidance I had received from them. But the first thing my best friend since high school said to me after I descended the stage, degree in hand was, "Laura, you HUGGED your professors!"
My Dad thinks it is hilarious that he caught the moment on film.
I made giant strides forward in my hug rehabilitation program when I accepted the position of head teacher at an international preschool in Osaka, Japan. Which is sort of ironic in that a.) when imaging Japan most Westerns won't think of Japan as being a very "huggy" country and b.) I had spent so much time and effort at ensuring that I would never have to teach anyone under the age of 18. Yet there I was, in a classroom with 20 children aged 1.5-4 years old.
The first week was rough. One of my students had to be carried out side the classroom for a "time out" and inexperienced me picked him up from the front. For a three year old he could really land a punch and his kicks were pretty impressive too. My supervisor discreetly took me aside and demonstrated different useful "holds".
But sometime later, as the children become more accustomed to me and I to them. . . maybe it was during story time? A little hand rested on my knee. Then a sleepy little head pressed into my shoulder. A little arm wrapped around my thigh as I stood in the middle of the classroom during art time. And the spontaneous hugs that I was given were the best benefit I have ever received from a job. Especially when the hugger would giggle or throw themselves at me. Although the pensive, rather measured and restrained hugger was to be appreciated as well. Up would swagger a two year old. He'd look in my eyes. I'd look in his eyes. He'd cock his head to the side. I'd wonder. . . "did I pass muster?" And then I'd get the hug and I never had the slightest desire to flee.
When you've had a bad day, a fight with your spouse, trouble with disciplining your children, or simply news overload--how many people can get hug therapy at the workplace?
And here is what my hug rehabilitation taught me in the end. Previously I had been looking at the custom of hugging in the light of . . . well, as an intricate ritual like some kind of folk dance only a student of dance is competent to perform. Who leans in first, where will there be physical contact and for how long? when is it "appropriate" to hug? etc. etc. but after receiving a multitude of hugs, some sticky, some wet, some bear like, some slow and sleepy I realized, a hug isn't a ritual: it is a crystallization of grace and warmth.
So now, I actually frequently make mental notes to myself, opening a care package from a friend back home, "ooooooh, that's a hug!" rereading an e-mail that has left me giggling into my morning cup of coffee, "that's a hug!" and while I still won't partake in superficial social hugging I will hug the very dickens out a friend. I will hug the breath out of someone who has made me feel special, safe, appreciated and happy. I will pause at arms length. I might look you in the eyes. I might cock my head to one side and then--I'll hug, perhaps still a bit awkwardly, but sincerely.
Monday, January 15, 2007
Christmas 2007
Christmas dinner in my family growing up usually meant that we would dine with someone from a foreign country. My mother’s solution to living 1,000’s of miles away from relatives on either side of our family was to invite over International students from the University where my father taught as an Organic Chemistry professor.
Inviting foreigners into our home to initiate them into an “American Christmas Dinner” you’d think my mother would have spent all day slaving over traditional dishes. Instead I seem to recall that she experimented a lot. Oyster stews, Sea food chowders, fondues, rice dishes with wild rice and cranberries and chicken in it. . . as my brother and I got older we began to request the things we knew our friends had grown up with: a turkey, a ham, some kind of stuffing. I think by that time (we were post undergrads then and had learned about the real world of Christmas dinner from being invited during our college years to our friends’ traditional sit down Christmas dinners with their families) it was just easier for my mother to have Dad pick up a smoked ham so finally, in our twenties our family's Christmas dinner matched the neighbors’.
When I married my husband and we moved to Australia we followed what the Brisbane locals told us was the normal fare for December the 25th-- fried chicken, potato salad and a barbecue on Christmas day. We celebrated with a Japanese family working for the same international University that my husband was working for. We settled around the barbeque for Christmas dinner at a local park with the kookaburras calling in the trees and the kids tossing bits of bread off the bridge to the frilled neck lizards, ducks and turtles in the stream. It was a beautiful hot summer day: the only attire my one year old daughter was wearing at the time was a diaper and a Santa hat.
When we relocated to Osaka , Japan I ate dinner with my daughter alone most Christmases as the 25th of December was a normal work day for my husband. But when I had my second daughter I started to feel like I needed some sort of “family dinner” to mark Christmas properly. By the time my kids were two and five I had given up on ever having a Daddy at the Christmas dinner table with us and so, my first real Christmas dinner as an adult was born. The fact that I was 37 at the time is just an incidental.
That year, I decided to do Christmas dinner with a friend and her two boys (aged 1 and 4) at my apartment in Osaka , Japan . Her Japanese husband was a doctor and had an even more demanding work schedule than my husband did at the time. She would do the turkey and the Christmas Cake and I would do the dinner rolls, cranberry sauce, hors d'oeuvres and the stuffing. I called my mother for my Grandmother’s dinner roll recipe and a week later nearly attacked a clerk in a local grocery store when I saw him carrying an American sized bag of fresh cranberries. He was about to divvy them up into little 100g bags for sale. I walked triumphantly home with the whole bag.
My friend kept me updated on the well fare and keep of her Christmas cake. I was fascinated with the whole idea and concept of a British Christmas Cake. This was not the Japanese Christmas cake―a flat white sponge cake with whip cream for frosting and strawberries teetering among chocolate Santas and Happy X-mas plaques on top. This was a real traditional British Christmas Cake--it was already months and months old! Each time she fed it some brandy my excitement mounted.
Then, in the two weeks before Christmas DD#1 got Influenza B and DD#2 got Influenza A. The following week they swapped. I got both strains as well. The two things that my refrigerator become stocked with were: suppositories, 1 type for anti-nausea and the other for lowering temperatures.
When my friend phoned on Christmas Eve to check if Christmas dinner was still on I swung open the refrigerator door, rifled through the contents of the side shelf and grasping my adult sized anti-nausea suppository confirmed that we were “on”.
Although the dinner rolls failed to rise properly they were deemed to be good despite their flattish shapes. The kids flew through their plates of turkey and cranberry sauce, gravy and stuffing. My kids happily ate the rock hard icing off their slices of Christmas Cake while my friend’s boys spurned their icing in favor of the fruit cake underneath. We topped them off with a dab of ice cream each. The magic of turkey and brandy drenched Christmas cake created a mellow group of children and two satisfied adults. It was the best Christmas dinner I had ever eaten.
This year, my husband was in hospital on the 25th. But the girls and I sat down to a turkey dinner, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. A Japanese fluff and no substance Christmas cake had snuck its way onto our holiday table. As I cut it my American heart yearned for that British fruit cake. Weeks later, long after the last of the turkey had gone, the wish bone had dried and been broken (Miss 8 won) my British friend arrived for a visit with her two boys (now 3 and 6!) and as she opened her suitcase and pulled out a tupperware I started to hear Christmas carols, on January 11th!
It wasn’t until late that evening, on January 11, 2007,with the children all finally asleep upstairs on their futons, that we sat down at my dinner table and over a slice of her Christmas Cake we talked and laughed and shared. Although it came on time, wrapped properly and cherished, met with joyous cries and squeals of excitement from my girls on the 25th, for me , it was on January 11th, late at night, with brandy soaked fruit cake sitting on a fork and a friend seated opposite me that Christmas arrived.
Inviting foreigners into our home to initiate them into an “American Christmas Dinner” you’d think my mother would have spent all day slaving over traditional dishes. Instead I seem to recall that she experimented a lot. Oyster stews, Sea food chowders, fondues, rice dishes with wild rice and cranberries and chicken in it. . . as my brother and I got older we began to request the things we knew our friends had grown up with: a turkey, a ham, some kind of stuffing. I think by that time (we were post undergrads then and had learned about the real world of Christmas dinner from being invited during our college years to our friends’ traditional sit down Christmas dinners with their families) it was just easier for my mother to have Dad pick up a smoked ham so finally, in our twenties our family's Christmas dinner matched the neighbors’.
When I married my husband and we moved to Australia we followed what the Brisbane locals told us was the normal fare for December the 25th-- fried chicken, potato salad and a barbecue on Christmas day. We celebrated with a Japanese family working for the same international University that my husband was working for. We settled around the barbeque for Christmas dinner at a local park with the kookaburras calling in the trees and the kids tossing bits of bread off the bridge to the frilled neck lizards, ducks and turtles in the stream. It was a beautiful hot summer day: the only attire my one year old daughter was wearing at the time was a diaper and a Santa hat.
When we relocated to Osaka , Japan I ate dinner with my daughter alone most Christmases as the 25th of December was a normal work day for my husband. But when I had my second daughter I started to feel like I needed some sort of “family dinner” to mark Christmas properly. By the time my kids were two and five I had given up on ever having a Daddy at the Christmas dinner table with us and so, my first real Christmas dinner as an adult was born. The fact that I was 37 at the time is just an incidental.
That year, I decided to do Christmas dinner with a friend and her two boys (aged 1 and 4) at my apartment in Osaka , Japan . Her Japanese husband was a doctor and had an even more demanding work schedule than my husband did at the time. She would do the turkey and the Christmas Cake and I would do the dinner rolls, cranberry sauce, hors d'oeuvres and the stuffing. I called my mother for my Grandmother’s dinner roll recipe and a week later nearly attacked a clerk in a local grocery store when I saw him carrying an American sized bag of fresh cranberries. He was about to divvy them up into little 100g bags for sale. I walked triumphantly home with the whole bag.
My friend kept me updated on the well fare and keep of her Christmas cake. I was fascinated with the whole idea and concept of a British Christmas Cake. This was not the Japanese Christmas cake―a flat white sponge cake with whip cream for frosting and strawberries teetering among chocolate Santas and Happy X-mas plaques on top. This was a real traditional British Christmas Cake--it was already months and months old! Each time she fed it some brandy my excitement mounted.
Then, in the two weeks before Christmas DD#1 got Influenza B and DD#2 got Influenza A. The following week they swapped. I got both strains as well. The two things that my refrigerator become stocked with were: suppositories, 1 type for anti-nausea and the other for lowering temperatures.
When my friend phoned on Christmas Eve to check if Christmas dinner was still on I swung open the refrigerator door, rifled through the contents of the side shelf and grasping my adult sized anti-nausea suppository confirmed that we were “on”.
Although the dinner rolls failed to rise properly they were deemed to be good despite their flattish shapes. The kids flew through their plates of turkey and cranberry sauce, gravy and stuffing. My kids happily ate the rock hard icing off their slices of Christmas Cake while my friend’s boys spurned their icing in favor of the fruit cake underneath. We topped them off with a dab of ice cream each. The magic of turkey and brandy drenched Christmas cake created a mellow group of children and two satisfied adults. It was the best Christmas dinner I had ever eaten.
This year, my husband was in hospital on the 25th. But the girls and I sat down to a turkey dinner, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. A Japanese fluff and no substance Christmas cake had snuck its way onto our holiday table. As I cut it my American heart yearned for that British fruit cake. Weeks later, long after the last of the turkey had gone, the wish bone had dried and been broken (Miss 8 won) my British friend arrived for a visit with her two boys (now 3 and 6!) and as she opened her suitcase and pulled out a tupperware I started to hear Christmas carols, on January 11th!
It wasn’t until late that evening, on January 11, 2007,with the children all finally asleep upstairs on their futons, that we sat down at my dinner table and over a slice of her Christmas Cake we talked and laughed and shared. Although it came on time, wrapped properly and cherished, met with joyous cries and squeals of excitement from my girls on the 25th, for me , it was on January 11th, late at night, with brandy soaked fruit cake sitting on a fork and a friend seated opposite me that Christmas arrived.
Monday, January 8, 2007
Pig Latin
So, in our home we speak mostly English although the kids speak Japanese to each other occasionally (this is happening more frequently as Miss 4's Japanese improves). I have to confess that my girls' vocabularies are heavily influenced by both me and my husband. He, I would feign to profess is the culprit behind their foul little mouths, and I am the one responsible for terrible phrases like, "Don't push my buttons!" and "Excuse me, I am NOT your slave." etc. wince and ouch. It is so hard to hear yourself played back like that. I think because of the condensed nature of our English universe that I perhaps see even more of myspeak in the language of my children. That and thanks to Cable T.V. a smattering of The Peanuts vernacular : Recently Miss 8 turned in a towering rage and screamed, "You block head!" at Miss 4.
But just the other day it occurred to me that beyond Japanese, beyond English, my children ought to learn Pig Latin. That way, when they pull out disturbingly inappropriate adjectives and expletives in front of their American Grandparents (worst case scenario) or even just in front of the other Native English speaker we run into on rare occasions here in the Tohoku Region of Japan (frighteningly likely) I could bark out things like, "on'tday ouyay areday aysay ethay fay ordway! " You know, cut them off quick. With out the benefits of a third language like Pig Latin I am left to look incredibly uncomfortable while murmuring, "Now girls, you know we don't use language like that." and of course everyone in earshot knows that we da. . .er, ahem, well do obviously!
Pig Latin? It's so easy to decipher some of you might scoff. Ah, but the key here would be the element of surprise. Everyone who knows us would be perking up their ears in the expectation of hearing either English or Japanese. Pig Latin would throw them off just enough to be a success I'm sure. Unless they happen to be in the third or fourth grade. Then it would be a totally useless effort and what's more they'd probably insist on conducting the rest of the conversation purely in Pig Latin.
However, beyond the reason sited above for teaching the girls pig Latin , is the real reason that I want them to learn it. Living with, in, between two languages, it is easy to find yourself in a world of code. So when you are at your child's Japanese youchien (preschool) and she starts to say something inappropriate, be it a curse word, an unkind truth (that lady's butt is sooooo big!) or something too straight and honest, "I don't wanna hold his hand because he picks his nose!" you can quickly pipe up in English and intercept it. Likewise, you can threaten and coerce and bribe your child on the sly to get the desired behavior you want. "If you don't cry and just sit and sing the song with the rest of your class I'll take you to Mr. Donuts today." Many uses.
Or say, you find yourselves at the American Grandparents' home and your kids are looking at the meal put in front of them with a decided mix of disgust and revulsion. A soothing stream of Japanese along the lines of "eat it, at least a bite of each dish and don't you dare make a face, spit or say you hate it." does wonders. You can also use the language gap to your benefit in situations where you just don't want others to know what your family is discussing. This was a decided advantage when Miss 8 was still nursing at the age of two plus and would occasionally ask for the breast when out in public.
But what happens when you have a friend over who speaks both Japanese and English? Or to make matters a little more strained, an acquaintance, more of a tentative perhaps-we-might-become-friends kind of friend?
This is what happened a few weeks ago at our house. I had invited a youchien classmate of Miss 4's over with his mother to make gingerbread man cookies. The mother is a really nice, intelligent woman with a great sense of humor who, as a bonus, also speaks some English. Everything was going excellently. The kids were not only having a great time with icing and decorating the cookies and themselves but I felt like the mother and I were having a relaxed, easy going cup of coffee and conversation in the midst of the bedlam. Miss 8 was even being extraordinary generous with her younger cohorts, not ordering them about and making them do whatever she wanted (she tends to see her younger sister as more of a subordinate drone often than a playmate) but actually helping them and playing together!
Then sometime during the third or forth batch of cookies Miss 4 pulled the piece of packing tape covering the hole in the hallway wall off.
I was so relaxed that I just instantly said, "put that back on!" and turned to the visiting mother and murmured something about "they" accidentally made a hole in the wall when "they" threw something." I can't remember which language I said it in. Maybe Japanese as you can sometimes even leave out your subject (they) when speaking in Japanese and my main priority was to be vague--as vague as I could be.
Miss 4 and Miss 8 however instantly took offense. They view "the hole in the wall" with respect and profound sincerity. I had fibbed about one of their most revered objects in the house. Miss 4 instantly piped up, "Daddy did it!" and Miss 8 froze where she was and in very loud and clear Japanese gave more details, "Daddy made the hole in the wall when he was mad." The visiting mother's lower jaw dropped slightly and she hastily grabbed for her coffee cup as I tried to hush up my children. They wouldn't be hushed. Miss 4 continued, "Daddy did it! He was MAD" Miss 8 decided to show Daddy's "form" and started to imitate a big league pitcher. The visiting mother took a long sip of coffee. My mind raced. She lowered the cup. I smiled. She smiled.
I suggested that Miss 8 might want to help Miss 4 and her guest choose a video to put in to watch.
Well, the woman deserved some sort of explanation and one of my eternal curses is that when directly confronted I can not lie. "My husband got angry and threw a persimmons at the wall. It broke the wall and made a hole!" I laughed weakly.
She murmured something, I'm not sure what and then thank goodness the kids were back from the T.V. unit waving videos and DVDs in our faces.
The only thought that was on my mind? PIG LATIN. I need to teach these kids PIG LATIN.
Our afternoon continued on very pleasantly and when our guests left there were expressions of desire to get together again on both sides. Of course I haven't heard from the visiting mother since. . . I keep going back to that moment, right after the tape was ripped off leaving a hole in our afternoon. . . if only I had had the forethought to teach them Pig Latin. I could have done an instant patch job just by murmuring "on'tday aysay ouryay atherfay ademay ethay olehay inway ethay allway."
But just the other day it occurred to me that beyond Japanese, beyond English, my children ought to learn Pig Latin. That way, when they pull out disturbingly inappropriate adjectives and expletives in front of their American Grandparents (worst case scenario) or even just in front of the other Native English speaker we run into on rare occasions here in the Tohoku Region of Japan (frighteningly likely) I could bark out things like, "on'tday ouyay areday aysay ethay fay ordway! " You know, cut them off quick. With out the benefits of a third language like Pig Latin I am left to look incredibly uncomfortable while murmuring, "Now girls, you know we don't use language like that." and of course everyone in earshot knows that we da. . .er, ahem, well do obviously!
Pig Latin? It's so easy to decipher some of you might scoff. Ah, but the key here would be the element of surprise. Everyone who knows us would be perking up their ears in the expectation of hearing either English or Japanese. Pig Latin would throw them off just enough to be a success I'm sure. Unless they happen to be in the third or fourth grade. Then it would be a totally useless effort and what's more they'd probably insist on conducting the rest of the conversation purely in Pig Latin.
However, beyond the reason sited above for teaching the girls pig Latin , is the real reason that I want them to learn it. Living with, in, between two languages, it is easy to find yourself in a world of code. So when you are at your child's Japanese youchien (preschool) and she starts to say something inappropriate, be it a curse word, an unkind truth (that lady's butt is sooooo big!) or something too straight and honest, "I don't wanna hold his hand because he picks his nose!" you can quickly pipe up in English and intercept it. Likewise, you can threaten and coerce and bribe your child on the sly to get the desired behavior you want. "If you don't cry and just sit and sing the song with the rest of your class I'll take you to Mr. Donuts today." Many uses.
Or say, you find yourselves at the American Grandparents' home and your kids are looking at the meal put in front of them with a decided mix of disgust and revulsion. A soothing stream of Japanese along the lines of "eat it, at least a bite of each dish and don't you dare make a face, spit or say you hate it." does wonders. You can also use the language gap to your benefit in situations where you just don't want others to know what your family is discussing. This was a decided advantage when Miss 8 was still nursing at the age of two plus and would occasionally ask for the breast when out in public.
But what happens when you have a friend over who speaks both Japanese and English? Or to make matters a little more strained, an acquaintance, more of a tentative perhaps-we-might-become-friends kind of friend?
This is what happened a few weeks ago at our house. I had invited a youchien classmate of Miss 4's over with his mother to make gingerbread man cookies. The mother is a really nice, intelligent woman with a great sense of humor who, as a bonus, also speaks some English. Everything was going excellently. The kids were not only having a great time with icing and decorating the cookies and themselves but I felt like the mother and I were having a relaxed, easy going cup of coffee and conversation in the midst of the bedlam. Miss 8 was even being extraordinary generous with her younger cohorts, not ordering them about and making them do whatever she wanted (she tends to see her younger sister as more of a subordinate drone often than a playmate) but actually helping them and playing together!
Then sometime during the third or forth batch of cookies Miss 4 pulled the piece of packing tape covering the hole in the hallway wall off.
I was so relaxed that I just instantly said, "put that back on!" and turned to the visiting mother and murmured something about "they" accidentally made a hole in the wall when "they" threw something." I can't remember which language I said it in. Maybe Japanese as you can sometimes even leave out your subject (they) when speaking in Japanese and my main priority was to be vague--as vague as I could be.
Miss 4 and Miss 8 however instantly took offense. They view "the hole in the wall" with respect and profound sincerity. I had fibbed about one of their most revered objects in the house. Miss 4 instantly piped up, "Daddy did it!" and Miss 8 froze where she was and in very loud and clear Japanese gave more details, "Daddy made the hole in the wall when he was mad." The visiting mother's lower jaw dropped slightly and she hastily grabbed for her coffee cup as I tried to hush up my children. They wouldn't be hushed. Miss 4 continued, "Daddy did it! He was MAD" Miss 8 decided to show Daddy's "form" and started to imitate a big league pitcher. The visiting mother took a long sip of coffee. My mind raced. She lowered the cup. I smiled. She smiled.
I suggested that Miss 8 might want to help Miss 4 and her guest choose a video to put in to watch.
Well, the woman deserved some sort of explanation and one of my eternal curses is that when directly confronted I can not lie. "My husband got angry and threw a persimmons at the wall. It broke the wall and made a hole!" I laughed weakly.
She murmured something, I'm not sure what and then thank goodness the kids were back from the T.V. unit waving videos and DVDs in our faces.
The only thought that was on my mind? PIG LATIN. I need to teach these kids PIG LATIN.
Our afternoon continued on very pleasantly and when our guests left there were expressions of desire to get together again on both sides. Of course I haven't heard from the visiting mother since. . . I keep going back to that moment, right after the tape was ripped off leaving a hole in our afternoon. . . if only I had had the forethought to teach them Pig Latin. I could have done an instant patch job just by murmuring "on'tday aysay ouryay atherfay ademay ethay olehay inway ethay allway."
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