Right in the middle of a shouting match with Mari, say, I’d like to sneak a two-minute break with her six-month old self, gurgling, smiling winsomely at me, her goddess of a mother (she worshipped the ground I walked on, I swear, constantly tracked me with her eyes, broke into delighted laughter whenever I entered a room she was in: ah, 6-month-old Mari, the biggest ego-trip of a child a mother could have, and what a nice contrast to the sultry 14-year-old adversary-Mari of today).

Or take Kei’s trainers – (every time I look at those trainers, I wonder when and how this happened. Kei has humongous feet. No one in the family can figure it out: Hajime and I both have normal-sized feet, ditto for all our parents. Anyway, when I’ve just found Kei’s boat-sized trainers for the umpteenth time, mud-encrusted, upside down, all ahoo, right in the middle of the genkan*  instead of neatly lined up on the shoe shelf, I wish I could pull out a minute or two from the time he first learned to walk.  He took it so seriously, was so methodical about it. He’d take a few faltering steps, then go straight down on his butt, look shocked, then, with painstaking dignity, hoist himself back up onto his legs and try it all over again. He’d do that any number of times until he’d gotten it right. And I contrast that with the boy who cannot finish a homework assignment, science project, household chore – anything – without the maximum parental input, and – yes, I admit it – I long for just a minute with that indefatigable toddler: the one-year-old Kei who wouldn’t give up.

I used to mention this to Hajime, used to say to him ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could just have five minutes of the time Kei was a toddler or Mari was a tiny baby’ – and he just looked at me like I’d started speaking Croatian. Things like that never occurred to him, and he thought it was lunacy to have fantasies like mine, silly, impossible fantasies. And yet this is the man that goes running off to Arizona to sell trailers at 40-plus, so obviously he had a fantasy of his own tucked aside all that time. Only his fantasies weren’t of the fond nonsensical stuff mine were made of, they were the kind that you keep until you can turn them into reality…

Now that they are so much older, like many parents I look back on that time my kids were tiny with rose-colored glasses. But I do remember the exhausted confusion of it all, the sleepless nights, the tantrums, the feeling that I was holding up the universe for two people who couldn’t do a thing for themselves.

The most hellish time we had was just after Kei was born. I was tired all the time, I remember, more tired than I could ever remember being in my life: I never got as much sleep as I wanted. Naomi was down in Kyushu just after Kei was born, helping Hajime’s sister Megumi, who had shingles. During that time, Hajime left for work at the earliest possible moment in the morning, so it was just me and the kids. I never knew which end was up half the time. I’d wake up and wonder what to do first. Did I feed Kei? He slept with me at the time, and he’d always wake up bawling his head off either from hunger or from a full diaper. Feeding him was always my first inclination, as my breasts would be uncomfortably full. But if I were to feed him, I wouldn’t be able to relax because of Mari, who’d be whining too, needing to go to the toilet right now, or desperate for a drink of water. Or should I get myself something to drink, I’d wonder – my throat was always parched, even in the dead of winter, but ironically and exasperatingly, my bladder would also be full. The dry winter air was another consideration. We all had coughs; were always catching colds, so we had to have a humidifier going 24-7. And even if you’d set it with a full tank the night before, by the early morning it would be empty again, the red light beeping away. I would lie there – only for a moment, of course, as it was impossible to ignore the cacophony of screaming children and beeping humidifier going on around me, or the painful insistence of my own bladder or my own raging thirst – and I’d dream of performing alchemy with fluids. That somehow the water in my bladder, Mari’s bladder, Kei’s diaper, would transform itself into good clean water to slake our thirst and fill the humidifier tank. That the milk in my breasts might magically be spirited into Kei’s hungry belly, that with no effort on my part at all, all the pesky, work-intensive fluids in our little apartment right down to the condensation dripping down the windows and rotting the wooden window frames could suddenly find their way into the right places. And I could go back to sleep and not have to get up and deal with the fitful children, Kei’s diaper, the cold, dirty apartment, my soaked nightshirt, sore breasts, the inevitable dirty dishes leftover from the night before.

Friends of mine, I have since learned, had it like that all the time. Their husbands were of no use at all, couldn’t understand why they couldn’t manage on their own without any assistance, were chomping at the bit to get out of the cluttered apartment and away from their wild, exhausted wife and screaming kids, to escape that strained, crazy atmosphere any chance they got. Pet and Miaow, my Thai friends, say that when they’ve gone back to Thailand for visits with their kids, it’s a whole different story – there are grannies and aunties and cousins and in-laws and everybody wants to hold your baby or rub your aching neck or make you a cup of tea. But here in Japan, it seems, the extended family has been dying an unnatural death. And if you luck out and end up with one that’s still alive, then it’s just about axiomatic that you’ll also have a live-in mother-in-law who doesn’t just want to help – she wants to take control. If you’re lucky enough to get any support from your family, in other words, you usually have to pay dearly for it.  I got off easy.

Hajime did do things with the kids occasionally – always on the weekends, of course. He taught them both to skate, for instance, and we both took them swimming. We were big on the library too, visiting our local branch every other week, and we’d take the kids on walks, or go with them to the park and play Frisbee. Most of the time we all got on together reasonably well, too. But there was always something distant about Hajime. Something lacking, something out of touch, not quite there. I had the sense that he was just biding his time, and I know that the kids felt this too. You’d ask him a question and he wouldn’t seem to have heard you. Mari, in particular, used to resent this, would jerk on his hand and call out to him plaintively, Otoosan!  (We told them to call us Mama and Papa, I’ll have you know, but for some reason we always got the full, formal Otoosan and Okaasan from both of them. It’s only recently that they’ve taken to calling me ‘Mom.’)  Hajime and I stopped talking somewhere in there – I mean really communicating. We’d talk about what we needed to talk about, but seldom say anything to each other that was actually meaningful.

Whenever we went down to Tokyo for the weekend when the kids were really little, I always got a break. ‘You just sit down and relax,’ Naomi would tell me (and I always took her up on it, too) ‘I’ll make us something for dinner!’ Then after we’d all eaten, she’d ask Hajime to help her clean up. ‘Ruth needs a break!’ she used to tell him. And as soon as the kids were old enough to hold a cup without dropping it, she had them rinsing or drying plates (they would actually fight for the honor of being able to help at Naomi’s house, too: don’t ask me how she did it).

Saturday Makoto was always doing church business or visiting members of the congregation. Or if he wasn’t doing that, he was conducting baptisms or weddings or funerals. This was good. Because if he wasn’t going over the church accounts or preparing sermons in his tiny study or doing other church-related business, he was bossing Naomi around or lecturing Hajime. Sundays, of course, were an issue. Because of church.  At first when we went to his folks’ place, we only stayed Friday night, leaving Saturday afternoon or evening. Hajime was adamant. There was no way he was going to go to church. Even the thought appalled him. To have to sit there in church, viewed by all, the good, obedient family man surrounded by wifey and the small fry, pious and God-fearing, listening to his father preach – well hey, life was just too short. In the privacy of our own home back in Chiba, we had disputes over this. Not proper disputes, really – they would mainly be me putting forth my case, and Hajime getting all terse and angry. Whenever he saw that he was losing, he’d just walk off seething, as though he had plenty to say but wasn’t going to lower himself by actually saying it. I won every single time because of Hajime’s lack of words: disputing with him wasn’t exactly like shooting fish in a barrel, it was more a case of winning by default.

My argument was that it would not hurt the kids to have a little religious education whether he believed in what they learned or not. I felt that it would be good for them to hear different sides of the story. Of the existence or lack thereof of a supreme being, of Jesus, of creation. They were sure as hell going to get the atheist’s side from him, after all, the ‘Gosh-I-don’t-know’ side from me, and the ‘Don’t-know-don’t-care, never-think-about-it’ side from just about everybody else around them, so why not have a Christian perspective too? Plus, it was his father, for God’s sake, and his mother.  And it was only once a week! How stubborn, how hateful, how stingy could he get, refusing to go to church only once a month – just one and a half hours every thirty days or so?  Finally we compromised and Hajime said I could take the kids if I was so crazy about pleasing his parents and he would stay in their house and have a break himself.