Bears Begging in Paradise

I'm so tired right now I probably shouldn't be blogging. Today is my fourth day off in a row and I am exhausted. I can tell I am getting old because these days I think about the great relaxing holidays I'll be able to take in the future when my kids are older. . .

My kids get so excited about having a day off of school that they pop awake about 2 hours earlier than usual on Saturdays, Sundays and national holidays. Sigh. Daddy is allowed to sleep in, because basically you could re-enact the American Civil War on top of him and it wouldn't wake him up.

The girls have long ago given up on 2 things: 1. trying to wake up Daddy, 2. any pretense of being quiet in order not to "disturb" Daddy. This means that I, the world's lightest sleeper (did a down feather in the comforter shift? the ear splitting clamour of it all!) get the joy of being awoken early most mornings. My one chance at sleeping in usually comes with flu season when they are so exhausted from vomiting all night long that they sleep past the dawn.

So this weekend saw me stubbornly trying to indulge my adult appetites every evening(watching non kid suitable T.V. shows, reading, drinking red wine, trying to stay up for some time alone with Masa) and then having my puffy, sleep deprived face rubbed in it the following morning when I was forcibly evicted from my futon by my robust, extremely vocal and energetic offspring.

Yesterday we took them on a road trip to view the fall foliage. Before setting off Masa had called the local tourist center there and inquired into "kid-friendly" activities in the area. They recommended a "Bear Park." Okay. So we drove up and took in the amazing scenery--glorious fall foliage--brilliant oranges, reds, golds, greens splashed across mountain valleys. We kept the kids under control by reminding them of the end destination (at the end of the afternoon): Bear Park.

Now, up in what can not be called anything other than "Nature", I expected this Bear Park to be a kind of reserve. I mean, look to the left--a cascading waterfall, look up to the right--snow pack just above a brilliant splash of crimson. Look down at your feet--a daddy long legs making a dash for it, over across the top of your Nike and off to the mushroom the size of your hand by the side of the path. Crystal clear blue rivers flowing down into an emerald green lake. How could anyone keep a bear up here and not put it in a "natural" environment?

We got to the Bear Park and saw a small concrete entrance gate/booth. Two old Japanese women were inside. They looked like they were fighting off frostbite, wrapped in several layers of different ponchos/blankets. (Up on the mountain it was about 10 degrees Celsius). Nothing looked. . . very. . . .good. The one window on their booth was cracked and broken. All the exposed metal was rusted. Uh oh. I instantly pictured forking over our money only to pass by the concrete box and find one poor bear locked up on one small cage.

That would have been a good thing it turns out.

What we found on the other side of their cement outpost still disturbs me. It will always disturb me.

In three small outdoor concrete pits were bears. Maybe 60? 70? There was also another small series of cages in which were crowded more bears. In these concrete enclosures the bears had: each other, concrete and some pools of water that looked like they were filled at the mercy of the skies overhead rather than any hose or pump. No trees or logs to climb/play with. NOTHING green anywhere. Basically: nothing. No feeding troughs, no toys, nothing to climb. . .

As soon as the bears saw us they started to stand up on their rear legs and clap or pray. They had obviously learned what humans think is "cute" in order to get food. The two elderly ladies at the entrance had sold us two bags of apples just for this purpose and my family began to desperately huck apple after apple into the bears enclosures. I think even the girls felt a bit like they were in the middle of a starving crowd dispensing Red Cross supplies.

My usually stoic husband looked panic stricken. He hurried back up the hill to buy more apples. In fact, during our short time at the Bear Park, he went back up the hill about 4 times to buy more apples. In fact, we bought ALL the bags of apples.

When we left the bears were still clapping, praying and holding onto their toes (another cute pose that they had learned).

On our way out Masa asked the ladies at the gate a few questions. They seemed very, very defensive. He wanted to know where the bears slept? What did they eat? (other than the over priced apples tourists bought to throw to them) What happened to them when the winter snows came? Where were they from originally? What kind of bears were they?

Their caregivers didn't give many answers: they are bears. We got the first two from Hokkaido. They sleep in their cages. Rain? Snow? They are bears.

When we left Masa noted that the two elderly ladies were locking the gate and leaving with us. "I guess no one stays with the bears." he said. Then, "I guess no one is going to take care of them tonight, you know feed them, check their water. . . "

I reckon not.

Maybe their caregivers were thrilled when we bought the last bags of apples to disperse among the bears--their feeding duties for the day were over.

Just outside the Bear Park there was a beautiful outdoor vista area. In the middle of it was a natural hot springs foot bath. Before going into the park we had made plans to stop and take in the sun setting on all the foliage with our feet in the hot steaming mineral water. . . but after saying goodbye to all those bears, all those bears packed together, begging together from their concrete cages. . . we decided we didn't need a foot bath.

With the Bear Park about two kilometers behind us, I reached for a package of crackers and started to unenthusiastically (my mind was still trapped on hard concrete back with the bears) offer them to the girls. Reno looked at it and then looked carefully at my face, "Mommy. After seeing the bears, it makes you kinda not hungry, huh?"

blogging just to blat.

blat is a form of "blog and chat" combined.

Friday---now that I am working Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, Friday has redeemed itself in my eyes as the most glorious wonderful day of the week. I celebrated today by buying 2 new drinks on the way home. The first was a Tomato/vodka drink in a can. It was a disappointment. I added it to my all veggie lunch (you know, as my liquid veggie) but it barely tasted like a tomato at all. In the future, I will just buy myself an extraordinarily big juicy tomato (no matter what the cost, even out of season) slice it up and pour vodka on top. Then I will throw on a splash of Tabasco. It would be a HUGE improvement on the icky, too sweet, weird cocktail in a can I experienced this afternoon. Next I moved on to drink number two--well, I am on drink number two right now with the plan of completely sobering up prior to Saki's arrival home on the youchien bus. It is a winner. Kuro Cocktail, grapefruit tonic. Veeeryyy smooooooth and bitter. Love it.

I also celebrated today because my husband is back on the island! He has been abroad on business for the past 11 days. (that is 10 nights, 11 days). I don't know why, but just knowing that we are in the same country again seems to have freed up my breathing and made me want to. . . sing? (I never sing. Must be this incredibly delish cocktail in a can) Although even when Masa is here I pretty much single parent--it still feels fantastic to know that there is a "second string" back in town. Great. I can now get run over by a truck and no longer worry over who would look after the kids while I was being scraped off the pavement!

Blogging without a Purpose

I am blogging without a purpose here at the moment. Just because I started to feel like the blog was, well, suffering. Like the fish do when the kids loose all interest in them and start forgetting to fed them and don't even contemplate cleaning their tank.

Maybe a comparison to a virtual pet would be better: My Blog--the Adult Tamagochi.

My kids had those tamagochi things for a while and guess who became obsessed with making sure that the tamagochi went to school, ate regularly, went to the toilet, etc.? ? ? ? Good lord, I even discovered "Tamagochi Town" on line and started taking them on virtual vacations!

Standing next to another mum at Saki's preschool my daughter's tamagochi and her daughter's tamagochi's alarm went off at the same time. So we confided our addiction to each other and laughing about becoming a slave to a virtual pet helped liberate me.

Standing there and commiserating about how embarrassing it was to be constantly chained to an electronic toy and swapping stories about the trials and tribulations of tamagochi transformations--how you have to try so hard in order to get them to transform into the tamagochi you want them to be (example: send it to charm school a zillion times a day and it'll turn into a cute little strawberry looking creature. Forget to send it to school, or send it too infrequently and it'll turn out looking like a little nasty onion creature.) I realized: Oh my God, I have turned into an idiot.

So after that, I let them die off, one by one.

It's a sad ordeal too--those people who design those things know how to pull emotional strings--but die they did and then I refused to get replacement batteries when MONTHS later the girls noticed that their virtual pets had gone feet up in the air.

Any way. . . back to blogging with out a purpose. I have been READING blogs with a purpose. A lot going on out there--people making significant life choices (marriage, moves, job changes) and people celebrating important events (arrival of baby, announcement of pregnancy, the divorce finally came through. . . etc.) and I have been sitting here feeling a bit like a cicada must feel during those years in the dirt. I am going through a lot but no one around me can see it. I am working hard on transformation but it is still all in the dark.

However, I am feeling very. . . content sitting here in the dark focusing on all these inward changes. And honestly, when I poke my head out (to go to work, to go to school events, to go buy milk at the grocery store) I come back rather fatigued and ready to refocus again, on me: in the dark.

Dark does not equal (=) depression. Dark equals me tuning out everything that I feel I can safely tune out for the moment--chatter, bustle, much ado about nothing. If it is not going to do grievous damage to a friendship of great importance, if it is not going to affect my professional career, if it is not going to end up fodder for the psychologist's couch in my children's' futures. . . then I probably am not all that caught up in it at the moment. I am very focused inward and then in graduating degrees on that around me--starting with the closest moving slowly and deliberately to the outer areas of life.

Spontaneous is obviously an adjective that I have rarely met with. If I did it most likely shocked me and sent me scurrying back home.

So the seasonal change suits me quite well this year. Summer is on its way out. Our evenings are finally cool and even chilly towards the early morning hours. The leaves on the trees haven't started to turn yet, but the rice fields are now swollen ponds of gold. This morning, standing on campus looking out at the trees and lawns surrounding the building I teach in, I was delighted to find dragon flies (both blue and red) hovering above the chestnut trees. Fall is coming.

I can't wait until the trees explode in yellow, brown, red and orange and I wake up realizing that I need mittens and a scarf.

And then there will be the snow, the ice, the chill northern winds of Japan. Snow festivals. Hot nabe. Waking up at 5 a.m. to turn on the furnace.

And eventually spring will come, when cicadas dig their way out of the dirt, new creatures, transformed.

August 7th, 2008

7:00 a.m.

I wake up because Reno has set an alarm clock--on a summer break morning! The real offense is that it is going off NOW. I had intended to sleep until 8:00 a.m. when I need to wake up Masa. Damn. I get up off of Saki's futon and gingerly step over Reno who is sleeping blissfully through the assortment of wild bird songs (alarm clock). I look over at Saki who is sleeping on my futon. I got shoved off of it at about 5 a.m. when she decided (as is her habit these days) that she wanted to use me as a human pillow.



I don't enjoy being used as a human pillow, especially when it involves being rhythmically kicked and kneaded.



I decide to give up on sleep and head downstairs to brew some coffee to make iced coffee. It is already quite hot inside the house and the Japanese summer sun is shinning down in samurai ferocity. Today the predicted high is 30 degrees Celsius (85 degrees F). Which shouldn't be such a hardship for a girl raised in California but it's the 66% humidity index that does me in.



Today is trash collection day so I need to wake up and get the trash to the trash collection point by 8 a.m. anyway.



We are by the way, completely thumbing our nose at the traditional natsu yasumi taiso regime. We have not even "thought" about getting up at 6 a.m. and down to the local neighborhood park to line up and perform early morning stretches and exercises to the nation wide broadcast summer taiso program.



Saki comes down the stairs about 5 minutes after me and sidles up to the computer where I am checking my e-mail and reading the U.S. news. She doesn't say anything but looks meaningfully at me.



"Good morning! What would you like for breakfast?"



Saki nods her head.



"Banana with sprinkles?"



"Yes. And milk. In a baby cup."



I go chop up a banana, sprinkle it liberally with the trans fat free cake decoration sprinkles that my sister-in-law sent from the States and fill a Playtex toddler cup with milk.



Saki will be 6 this October but still insists on the "baby cup." Mostly so that she can break the eating/drinking rule of "stay at the table" and wander the house drinking milk/apple juice/water/tea to her heart's content and my consternation.



When Reno awakes and descends the stairs I take her breakfast order. While I am frying up her bacon and scrambled eggs I help myself to a bowl of kabochya, tofu miso shiru. I offer her some and she predictably refuses it--she hates Japanese pumpkin (kabochya). She also hates Japanese style breakfast which has always puzzled me as I love it. Grilled fish, Japanese pickles, natto, rice and miso shiru is my favorite breakfast. But since I am the only one in the family who will eat it I usually only get it on vacations when we stay at Japanese style inns (ryokan).



Masa simply doesn't eat breakfast, unless it is served at 11:30 a.m.



While I am standing in the kitchen doing the dishes (which involves, emptying the drying rack of last night's dishes, washing up the morning's dishes and then setting them in the drying rack--like most Japanese households, we have no dish washer) I mentally flip through today's dinner options.



Shyogayaki pork with a nice chilled shredded cabbage, cucumber and tomato salad and some fresh shishito. Wiping a bead of sweat from my nose, before it drops on its own onto the dishes I'm cleaning, I decide to add chilled tofu to the menu. Today is going to be just too damn hot. Rice of course, for the girls and Masa. . . and miso shiru with. . . daikon and wakame in it.



I look at the time on the gas heater on the wall (gas stove, gas heated hot water) and realize that it is nearly 9:00 a.m. If I want to beat the trash collection guys (who actually hop off the truck and manually dump garbage bags into the back of a truck that to my eyes doesn't appear to have any trash compacting abilities) I had better get the trash taken out.



Outside it is HOT. Not as hot as inside though. And although we do have two air conditioning units, they are Japanese wall mounted ones, that work just fine as long as you stand directly underneath them and don't move a muscle, they will keep you rather refreshed. The furnace effect inside is more because of our cats. We live in a rented house and the screens aren't normal. They pull down out of the window frames. . . hence, if our cats tear the window screen I can't fix it. I have searched all over and I can't find out how or where to fix screens like ours that have been damaged. The first summer here the cats damaged all but four of the screens (out of 10 or so). So now, unless I bother to drag out the cat cage and stuff the felines in, we stay indoors with the windows closed all year long.



Every morning I vow to set up the cat cage and stuff them in. Then the heat sets in and I lose all desire to drag out and assemble anything. Plus they just look at me accusingly when they are in the cage.



I have to walk about four blocks hauling the trash. Today I see a tear in one bag and do my best to hold it far away from me. We have a steel bowl like thing in our sink that is for "nama gomi" which roughly translates as "raw garbage." Into which goes fish bones, left over eggs, fish heads, tofu, vegetable peelings, fish guts, chicken skin and fat, etc. Living in Northern Japan it isn't so disgusting most of the time--but in the months of July and August here, in the summer heat of our area it is DISGUSTING. I empty it frequently and double bag the contents that I empty out of it before I put them in the trash but MY GOD DO THEY REEK.



I even bought some handy "orange oil" spray to hose them down with but it just smells like oranges in a rotting heap of food.



I manage to get to the trash collection point without any disgusting-gomi-juices getting on me and I unlatch the metal cage door (we have 2 threats to the trash: crows (the biggest threat) and bears, who I have never seen and hopefully never will see in our neighborhood.) and deposit my family's garbage among the garbage of our neighbor's. I carefully shove the metal door up as I slide the bolt across it to close it. The first year here I didn't know that trick and I scrapped about two inches of flesh off of a finger one morning. "Gaijin certainly do have blood curdling beast like yells don't they?" was probably said casually over many a breakfast table in the neighborhood that morning.



Heading home I hope that my torn garbage bag doesn't rip further and spill. I was on garbage duty the past two weeks and luckily nothing like that ever happened on my watch. I just passed off the tongs, the dust pan, the broom and other "minder of the trash" things to my neighbor last night. If my bag rips open she's the one who will have to clean it up. I like her so I hope it doesn't rip. Plus, there are nearly always tell tale signs of whose garbage is whose and I'd hate to have her start looking at me with ". . .and I suppose you honestly couldn't spare the extra 200 yen to buy the heavy duty garbage bags? The one's that don't rip like wet tissue?"eyes of accusation. . .



I open the door intending to wake up Masa straight off, it's 9 a.m. so he's overslept already by about an hour, but I find him downstairs mumbling good morning to the girls, who are fighting with each other over something significant like space on the sofa. I suggest to my bickering brood that perhaps they should get outside and start filling the pool.



Masa is out the door and off to work long before the bickering brood has settled the sofa dispute much less begun to take any action towards filling their pool. I finish up the breakfast dishes and start on the laundry. First I have to bring in all the laundry off the line from yesterday and fold it and put it away. Then I have to start hanging up the load of wet clothing and towels that I did this morning. Half way through taking in the first load of clothing to fold and put away I realize that I am dripping with sweat. No, not figuratively, literally. I swipe a hand towel out of the fresh laundry and drape it around my neck and swab my face off with it. It's 10 a.m.



I finish off the pot of iced coffee that I made earlier. I was up until about 2 a.m. as Reno has dedicated every bone in her body to staying up as late as possible during summer vacation and last night Masa came home about 10:00 p.m. He usually gets in later, anywhere between 11:30 p.m. and 1:00 a.m., but after seeing the results of Reno's 5th grade kanji test on Monday evening he has been trying to get home earlier in order to help her with homework.

Just after he came through the door I put his dinner on the table. His last blood test showed that he is dangerously close to becoming officially diabetic so he is being force fed healthy fare. Last night was grilled fish, a side dish of long onions with fish flakes, soy sauce and sesame oil dressing, grated daikon, the kabochya and tofu miso that Reno spurned this a.m. and rice. I keep intending to switch him over to brown rice but the girls protest it so vigorously that I'm beginning to think I'll have to buy a second rice cooker--one for the simple carb crowd and one for the health conscious procreaters of the simple carb addicts.



Although Masa kept begging me to go on up and sleep with Saki (who BLESS her little soul collapsed and passed out at about 10:45) the American in me wouldn't succumb. I was going to stay up later than my 10-year-old even if it killed me. Masa and Reno worked on math and kanji at the kitchen table till about midnight when I did finally fall asleep on the floor downstairs. I woke up at 1:00 a.m. and enjoyed some adult only time with my husband before going up to bed at about 1:40 a.m.



Japan's work practices seem diametrically opposed to family life and specifically, they seem designed to extinguish any "adult time" that couples might have after having children. Take my two chores this a.m.: the laundry and the trash. The trash is supposed to officially be out by 8 a.m. Without clothing driers (most Japanese household still don't have a clothes dryer) the Japanese housewife needs to get up early and get her washing done in order to get the clothes out on the line to dry before the MIND MELTING heat of the day sets in.



I, by the way, am about 2-3 hours behind all good housewives. A good housewife has the laundry done and out by say 6:30 a.m. so that she can focus on making her husband a bento and creating a six dish breakfast for her children. I cheerfully offer my kids toast and hard boiled eggs and bananas and Masa doesn't take a bento to work with him. I always feel victorious when I succeed in hanging out the laundry without fainting from sun stroke.



But you can see that basically a Japanese housewife's daily chores demand that she be an early riser. Work practices demand that husbands work late or if not working in the office that they go out drinking (the social/business drinking that is part and parcel of the Japanese workplace/way of doing business). Either way they come home far later than their European or American counterparts.



I used to not wait up for Masa and it meant that we had nearly no time together, alone, as adults. When we were both awake and together it was always in the role of mother and father. Rediscovering time with my husband as just him and me has been so rewarding that I am sporting a permanent living dead sort of appearance.



Besides, if I didn't stay up to see him in the evenings two things would happen. A) he'd revert to an all ramen diet thus hastening the onset of diabetes. B) I'd end up living in a world where my conversations would be dominated by themes appealing to only 10 and 5 year-olds.



I have a few local friends but no one that can pop in for a visit on the spur of the moment and no one that I can just call up to chat. The local friends I do have are like me, juggling a career and child care and that basically makes owning a phone nearly purposeless. Unless you find a friend who stays up past 10 p.m. and wants to talk late at night when the kids are asleep.



Part of the reason I can't really have decent phone conversations is that even if I get the kids out the room, that doesn't mean that they can't hear what I am saying. So there again, all the conversations I can have while they are awake are child censored ones. Our house has four bedrooms and pick one, any one, and you can hear whatever is going on anywhere else in the house. When I escape with the cordless out the front door it invariably ends with two children frantically calling out "Mommy! Okaasan! LAURA!" until I am found.

At noon I make tuna fish sandwiches for the girls. Reno's has cucumber mixed in: Saki's only has tuna and mayonnaise. I hope she thanks me when she accepts her Oscar. The child can look ill, peeked, swoon and if need be, vomit on command. She can also detect even the most finely diced and concealed piece of vegetable--any vegetable--in her food. If it wasn't for vegetable fruit juice mixes she would be a complete anti-vegetarian.

I have to skip any lunch today as I am off for a CT scan at the local Red Cross hospital (my mother naively asked, "Are all the doctor's American? Do they all speak English?" isn't that cute?). My doctor is trying to discover why I have been running a low grade fever since February. I keep looking at her and cheerfully suggesting, "Stress?" But so far she isn't buying it. She's shoved a camera down my throat (I tried violently to vomit it up for the duration of the procedure but failed) to check out my stomach, ordered lung x-rays and a multitude of blood tests. All the tests have come back negative so far--I am one healthy, low grade fever sporting poser. At least that is how all these tests make me feel--no answers except, "you're a poser."

After today's CT scan maybe I should fess up to my chronic sleep deprivation. Actually, the real reason she is so test happy is my recent weight loss. I have lost 24 kilos in less than 5 months. But, honestly, the reason, as I told her, is STRESS. I stopped eating, because I had no appetite due to STRESS.

Anyway. I haven't lost anymore weight since I saw her a month ago. Maybe that will settle her down some. She's threatening me with a camera up the bum next. I am so excited to be 24 kilos lighter than I was in February/March but to escape the camera up the bum test I have even consumed several Snickers this week.

And so, at 1:35 I cheerful wrap up my blog post and head off to the hospital. I already pity all the other patients as I have to take my incredibly LOUD and ACTIVE offspring with me. I pray to God that while I am in the CT scan machine they don't burst into surgery in process, knock any frail elderly people down or drive patients waiting in the cardiology department to have, well, a heart attack.

Speaking of which, I better go hunt down their DS games and soft ware. The irritating noises and tunes of the software will drive people near them batty, but the games themselves will keep my two stationary at least.

It's Tough to be a tadpole: or The Circle of Life our Family's Style

It's really tough to be a tad pole at our house. Reno and Saki have been marauding through the local rice fields and have taken captive a dozen or so poor little wanna be amphibians. Those that have now succeeded in sprouting legs are currently being rounding up in a Barbie house in the drive way. I just gracefully exited the scene saying, "When they stop moving, they're dead."

Not that I am a callous cold woman--I was trying to shock Saki and her friend into listening to me. I had just spent a good three minutes trying to explain that today is very hot and sunny and that these are just little bitty baby frogs with soft wet skin. I was cautioning that they really shouldn't be handled too much or forced to jump for say over a minute or so. But Saki and her little friend Yuki went right on screaming at the little green blobs that were desperately trying to escape Barbie's dream house.

So, my youngest, who is currently torturing frogs in the drive way, surprised me last week by locking herself in the bathroom to weep over the death of one of our goldfish. (All the gold fish have by now departed this planet--some kind of deadly fish fungus.) What surprised me was her completely sincere solemness about it. She cradled the dead fish in a piece of tissue, holding it gingerly to her chest. She moved in a slow stately march to the bathroom. She took a deep breath. "I am going to close the door now and I want to be alone."

Hmmmm. I stood outside wondering what exactly she was up to. When the door opened a good five minutes later I asked, "What were you doing? Did you flush the fish?" She nodded quickly and left to go play at a friend's house.

When she came home I found her standing in the genkan staring at the empty fish tank. She looked up at me. "I was crying in the toilet. For the fish. For the poor fish." And I could see her eyes glistening and threatening to fill with tears again.

Now, why was I surprised? Because I have gotten used to pets being unceremoniously chucked once they have given up the ghost. I remember gearing up and readying myself to break the news of the death of Reno's first pet to her. I was so worried and tense. It's such a blow to lose a beloved pet--so senseless, so raw so, well, emotional.

But Reno at the age of three, when told that her hamster Hannah chyan had died, blinked at me intently and responded with, "so can we get 'nother one?" No tears. No remorse. No singing songs in honor of the dear departed little fuzzy companion.

Me? I would have been gathering flowers and elaborating laying them on my pet's grave for MONTHS. In fact, that is what I did when I was three. I was in the fourth grade when I started bringing flattened snakes (road kill) home to bury in our backyard. I had a plot for all the poor departed creatures that I happened across. I wept for them. I prayed for them. I loved them beyond their life spans.

Now, when an actual REAL family pet died--I was inconsolable for LOOOOONG periods.

So when Reno greeted the demise of her first pet with a quick, "can we get 'nother one?" I was flabbergasted. Then I got disturbed.

Fish came and went and no matter how pleased she seemed with them at the time, still, death raised only one question in her mind, "Can we get another one?"

Her ojiichyan (Japanese grandfather) died and thankfully, she was content to just sit quietly through the funeral without posing the dreaded question. I expected her to be upset about losing a grandfather but she seemed a little more intrigued with gaining a portrait at the butsudan to light incense for, to put out little ceremonial cups of sake and leave tiny bowls of rice for. She was only five-year-old at the time, so perhaps I just expected too much. She was just still too young to wail and beat her chest yet like her dramatic mother.

Reassurance came on an attempted flight back home from the States later that same year. We had to de-board the flight home due to Saki suddenly spiking a fever just before take off. In the airport, clutching a screaming and feverish Saki to my chest I looked down to see Reno sobbing uncontrollably. "Oh honey, what's the matter?"

"Melon. Melon is waiting for us, but we aren't going to be coming home to her!"

Melon was a one-year-old American short hair cat, our current (and happy to say still currently alive and well) family pet.

Reno continued to sob--tears welling up in her eyes and pouring down her cheeks while her chest heaved. Saki wailed, although for a completely different reason--Otis media in both ears.

All the way to the local ER Reno continued her mournful monologue about Melon the abandoned cat. She had been missing her the whole three months in America but had always told herself to be strong, she would see Melon soon. She missed petting her; she missed watching her eat. Now she wasn't going to get to see Melon soon.

Normally a crying five-year-old and a shrieking one-year-old in the back of a taxi that was taking a good 45 minutes to get us to the ER that was supposed to be just 15 minutes from the airport would have pushed me over the edge. However, this time I was happy. My eldest daughter had a soft spot for her pet cat. The universe was back in alignment.

If there is one thing I want my daughters to learn from me it is a respect for life--for all life. I get upset when I see little boys pulling the leaves off of trees-stripping branch after branch nude. I want to take in each and every stray cat and kitten that I see, I want to save the whales, the harbor seals and rain forests and everything in them. I'm a bit of a bleeding heart really. But it is one weakness that I am not ashamed of. Seeing connections between all the living organisms in my life--from the towering dandelion weed in the front yard to the soft grey cat curled up at the foot of my futon, to my daughters, our neighbors, the world--makes me feel safe and whole. We are all in this together. Albeit my beloved daughters may spend half their time together locked in near mortal combat, and that weed at the front of the house really needs to be whacked down and ripped out by the roots--still, we are all on the same ride.

So I want my kids to learn to respect that and to learn that when someone gets off this ride it doesn't take anything away from you to pause and recognize and mark the loss. In fact, learning to mark the connections between the universal "you" in all it's varied forms strengths the individual you. You are part of something bigger than yourself.

Of course, those poor little tadpoles stewing in their portable interrogation box, I mean bug catching cage, are probably wishing that they could be disconnected from my family. But last year, I remember taking the fully developed frogs back to the rice fields with the girls and watching my girls' faces as they let each bright green frog hop off a finger tip into the tall rice--I celebrated that connection present on their faces. And don't worry, the seige on Barbie's Dream house ended before the little guys "stopped moving."

Why I Wish I Were a Fiction Writer

I have never been very talented at writing fiction. I took a seminar in it once at university and while I passed the class, I found it to be exceedingly difficult to weed out my life and my experiences and perceptions and use them to infuse a sense of reality into my fictional stories and still keep the stories fictional. I tried my hand at writing fiction again in graduate school and encountered the same problem. My stories that were best received by the professor and my peers were inevitably those in which my name and the name of others had been changed, the location modified and events fiddled with.

But now I find myself in a weird ethical bind. I want to continue writing creative non-fiction prose. And I know that creative non-fiction prose isn't necessarily the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth but . . . Why do I feel this insane urge to go public with all my deepest innermost thoughts and turmoils? Why do I feel like to write from any position but the one in which I find myself mired in is a lie?

Obviously when I write, now and in the past, I choose what to omit and what to include. Omission isn't lying, at least not outright lying and many times you have to decide what to omit to help strengthen the emotional or artistic impact of a piece of writing. Just as what you decide to include is important, to me what you leave out is of nearly equal importance.

I always think of Virginia Woolf and her struggle in her quest to write a true stream of consciousness. Trying to represent reality in all its complexity is beyond our reach. Even now, sitting here at the computer typing I am not aware of everything going on at this exact moment. Yes, I am listening to my ipod (to Gwen Stefani). Yes, I am drinking a Starbucks Ice Latte (venti size--I have young children so I need the caffeine). Yes, I am trying to decide what word to write next and what word should come after that word and mostly I am struggling to repress the urge to just delete it all. And I just left out at least 20 other things going on in my mind and in my environment and they have all changed or been modified in some way in a 100 different ways already so I have already lost the ability to transmit them exactly as they occurred to me.

I guess the gist of it is that not only did a profound life changing event happen to me but it has changed the ground from which I experience my life. When I walk down the street now, I have different impressions of people, different thoughts flit through my mind than previously. If I were a telescope either someone has swung me round and pointed me at a new star field or they have tampered with my lens and my whole outlook has changed.

And that leaves me puzzled about how to write. I always just wrote from here, from me. While I always had to consider what to omit, what to reveal, what to elaborate on, what to hint at. . . I never had to consider where to write from. I knew the center of myself and I knew which perspective I was writing from. My filters were established and fixed.

It's silly really. If I write, "I took off my youngest daughter's training wheels yesterday. It felt like releasing a hawk--off she sped down the street, pedalling frantically and triumphantly away from me, her mother." You still read it the same, don't you? But the person saying it has changed dramatically. The insecurities that watching my five-year-old speeding away from me stirred up in my maternal chest were augmented by the other insecurities incubating there.

I define myself as a mother. I define myself as a wife. I define myself as a foreigner. I define myself as a woman. I define myself as a teacher. I define myself through my experiences. I'm a big believer in life shaping and molding us. If we choose to react to an event or if we choose not to react to an event we have been changed by that event. It forced us to make a decision and that decision leads us along our individual path of life to the next event awaiting us.

So I used to be strolling along, narrating bits of my experiences and observations about what I saw along the way, when suddenly my path disappeared. I'm still finding my way, testing the ground at it were, looking for my footing, watching each step. And writing on this hill side of broken rock just seems foolish. I miss the solid ground. I miss the safety of knowing where I stood, knowing exactly where I was positioned in life.

Of course that was probably just an illusion. But like a night light left on in a child's bedroom it gave me the peace and the illusion of security. No monster dares enter a room where a night light is on.

Just can't blog/write

Well, I constantly think that the ability to write will return to me so I put off admitting that it has left. However, I feel guilty when I get those reports from the site meter telling me that people are still dropping by--probably expecting to find something to read.

What can I say? Write? Obviously nothing.

I basically have gone through a life changing event and it has left me changed. Unfortunately, it has left me wordless, unable to put any of myself on paper.

However, it hasn't left me hopeless. So I'm keepin the blog for a bit longer. Hoping that maybe, just maybe, a new writer will emerge from the mess that is me.

Cheers.