DIY

Homegirl is always wanting to do things by herself these days  (except in the morning, when she’s supposed to change her clothes for school).  Oftentimes, when I’ve been upstairs obsessively checking email or my Amazon rankings, I’ll go down to find she’s pulled a chair up to the ‘fridge and gotten herself a glass of milk, with mixed results. Thanks to recent bathroom rennovations at the deaf school, she can now do her business all by herself.   And she’s even able to write her daily diary pretty much on her own, though she sometimes asks how to write something, and she makes grammatical mistakes.  But better her mistakes than mine, right?  In the past, when her teacher was correcting her diary, I’d apologize for the errors, because they were mine.

One thing Lilia thinks she can do but can’t is answer the phone.  When she hears it ring, or sees it light up, she rushes over and fights for the receiver.  Until we get a video phone, or until she can actually speak, that job is best left to me. 

  

We Are All Special

Although initially, I thought of the experience of parenting a deaf daughter with cerebral palsy as special, in reality, just about everyone’s life is touched by an  individual with special needs.  Today, I read in the newspaper that best-selling mystery writer Ian Rankin has a son with Angelman syndrome.  (It’s a rare disorder, but there is actually a story by Hannah Holborn about parents and a similarly affected child in Love You to Pieces.)

Rankin told Lynn Barber of the Los Angeles Times that learning of his son Kit’s diagnosis has made him a better writer:

“He was halfway through the eighth [novel in his Rebus series], Black and Blue when Kit’s condition was diagnosed and the anger and distress he poured into the novel lifted it from the ruck of crime fiction.”

The barrels of the money that he is making from his crime fiction will go, Rankin says, to the care of his son, who will need someone to look after him for the duration of his life.

“Having a special-needs child, he says, forces you to think about mortality - you’ve got to provide for the child after your death.” 

I am Famous

My son has always been blase about my writing and publishing, which I sort of thought was natural because I’ve been publishing since before he was born.  But a few years ago, when asked what I did, he said “nothing.”  I realized then that I should tell him more about my writing and my accomplishments.  I wanted him to have respect for the work that I do, and I wanted him to understand that I have my own passions.  In Japan, mothers are supposed to be totally devoted to their children and have no interests of their own, but I don’t want my kids to think like that.

So anyway, I’ve been talking to my son about my books and what I’ve been doing to promote them.  He hasn’t seemed terribly interested or impressed.  (Lilia, on the other hand, is quite thrilled!)  But last night, he had to write sentences for Japanese.  One of his sentences was “Boku no okaasan wa yumei da,” which means, “My mother is famous.”  It’s not quite true, but I realized that maybe he is just a little bit proud of me and aware of what I’m doing.  At least it’s a step above “My mother does nothing.”

Cell phone etiquette

Today I read this in Shelf Awareness, a newsletter for booksellers:

 For international perspective, Sarah Knight of the Northshire Bookstore, Manchester, Vt., has just returned from Tokyo, “where it is considered extremely rude to talk on a cell phone in public (text messaging is of course done and is okay). The few people I did see talking on phones would first walk down an alley and use the phone there and only briefly.”

Apparently people are more polite in Tokyo, then, because in Tokushima people talk on their cell phones in public all the time. 

Am I Overprotective?

We’re on an outing, at the beach.  We’ve come with friends to the dolphin training center, which is on the sea, accessible by a floating ramp and platform.  It’s windy, and raining, and the platform undulates as we stumble across it. 

“Don’t run,” I shout to my son.   “It’s dangerous!”  There are no railings.  The sea is cold and deep. 

In the past, I’ve seen my son fall into a pond, fall off an eight-foot high rock wall, and tip over my daughter’s wheelchair as he was running down the corridor, pushing, in a luxury hotel.  He came home from camp with a huge gash on his knee - an injury incurred when he tipped over in a canoe.  He’ll have a scar.  My son is accident-prone.

But I’m the only one shouting out, “Don’t go too close to the edge!  It’s dangerous!”

My friends say nothing to their kids.

Later, on the beach, the children are drawn to a large dinosaur sculpture.  It’s slippery and offers no clear purchase.  Of course, my daughter wants to climb around as well.  Not a good idea, I think.  It’s dangerous.

My friend’s daughter stands on top of the dinosaur’s back holding a big stick.  What if she fell?  I think.  But I don’t say anything.  My friend says nothing.  “Be careful,” I say to my son.

“Hand her up to me,” my friend says about my daughter.  So I hoist her up, and my friend holds her.  I pray that she doesn’t get overexcited and go spastic.  It’s slippery, and she is heavy and hard to control.

Then my son starts goofing around.  He is suddenly hanging from the dinosaur’s neck, afraid to fall.  He grabs onto my friend’s leg and brings everyone down with him.  I try to catch them all, but I can’t. They fall.

I gather up my sobbing daughter, who seems more scared and betrayed than hurt.  My friend will have bruises.  My son goes down to the shore to brood; he feels responsible.  But I know that it was my fault.  I knew it was dangerous. And yet I also know that I must allow them to take risks once in awhile.   It’s very hard, though.  I couldn’t keep my children safe inside my body, so now I do everything I can - maybe too much - to keep them safe in the world. 

My first review

Just got my first major review for Losing Kei.  It’ll be published in the next issue of Booklist, a journal put out by the American Library Association.  Mostly the reviewer summarized the novel.  At the end she wrote, “Kamata’s is an intriguing look into one woman’s experiences with a culture very different from her own.” 

My last Post about Laundry (maybe)

There is this thing that my mother-in-law does with the laundry that drives me nuts.  When she takes the clothes down, she always turns them inside out.  For many weeks, I have furiously turned the clothes right side out before putting them away.  Finally, I asked my husband why she did that.  He said that it’s to keep the clothes from wrinkling.  If I was Martha Stewart or whatever, I’d be more conscientious about this sort of thing, but I’m not.  We have too many clothes and they’re crammed into drawers.  They will wrinkle no matter what. 

I find it frustrating that my mother-in-law is always creating needless work for herself.  She sometimes rearranges the laundry I’ve already hung out to dry.  I find it more frustrating that she has no activities, no passions, with which to occupy her time.  I have told her several times that I want to take care of my own laundry, but she always says that she has a lot of free time.  When she’s not hanging out my laundry, she’s in her little house, often in the dark, often sleeping.

I’m trying to be more mellow about the laundry.  I’ve decided that I will no longer turn my husband’s clothes right-side out, since he sees the logic in inside-out clothes anyway.   And I’ve also given up on the “no snacks right before dinner” rule.  Yesterday, in spite of dozens of protests on my part, my mother-in-law fed my children cookies and milk late in the afternoon.  I didn’t say a word.

Blurbing for Beginners

Yesterday I got the latest issue of Poets & Writers magazine and discovered an essay about getting blurbs, which was kind of apropos.   My publisher told me that he was waiting for a blurb to put on the front cover of my novel before going to press.  I assumed that he’d sent the manuscript to lots of famous writers and was waiting for them to email words of praise.  On the backs of other books published by the same publisher there are such blurbs from Pulitzer Prize winners and writers that I admire like Lee Smith and Ann Beattie.  After reading the essay in Poets & Writers, I’m thinking that the authors of those books actually know the Pulitzer Prize winners and asked them directly for blurbs, and that my publisher was waiting for me to send him the blurbs.  Oops.  A little breakdown in communication there.  I suppose it seems to him as if I know what I’m doing, but I ‘m just making it all up as I go along. 

I did put a bunch of blurbs about my writing in general on my new website.  I should have gotten these people to blurb about Losing Kei.  Oh, well.  I did manage to procure one blurb, but the book is supposed to go to press right about now, so there’s no time to ask anyone else.

Love You to Pieces - Now on Amazon!

I just had a look at Amazon, and found that my anthology, Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs in now available for pre-order at Amazon.  The fabulous cover has yet to be posted, and the book won’t be published till June, but it’s exciting all the same!

Dress Rehearsal

Today was the dress rehearsal for the deaf school’s culture festival.  The mothers usually sit it on it, as I did today. 

The junior high school students went to Hiroshima for their school trip.  They are doing a sort of skit, in which an atomic bomb goes off.  I always feel self-concious when the students make presentations on the atomic bombings.  I feel that everyone expects me to be apologetic.  The other day, I told my students that my purse was once stolen in Japan, and they apologized to me.  But I don’t want to apologize for the war.  I married a Japanese man.  Isn’t that enough?!