More on Love You to Pieces

Esteemed translator Deborah Iwabuchi has posted her review of Love You to Pieces.

Searching for Empathy

Check out my guest post at Beacon Broadside on how Love You to Pieces came to be.

Bye Bye Bunnies

Today’s activity in Occupational Therapy was to decorate a small box.  The therapist demonstrated by cutting shapes out of colored paper and pasting them on the box, and…voila!  A rabbit!  I thought that Lilia would choose to do the same, since she’s always loved rabbits.  But she shook her head. 

“How about a bear?” the therapist asked.

“No.”

“How about a cat?  Or a panda?” 

 ”No, no.”

“What do you want to make?” 

“Sakurai Shou-kun!”

So Lilia lovingly cut out a head, a body, and clothing and made a box doll of her beloved pop star idol.

 

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About LYTP – Part 1

I don’t know about you, but I love to hear how books came into being.  For the next few weeks, I thought I’d post about how I came up with the idea for my new anthology Love You to Pieces, and how I put the book together and found a publisher, etc.

I’ll be posting about other stuff, too.

So the book.  I have to start with Lilia’s diagnosis.  She was born 14 weeks early, and although she was sent home with a clean bill of health, my husband suspected by about six months that she was deaf.  I was sure that she had responded to sound, but tests confirmed that she was, indeed, profoundly deaf.  She couldn’t hear my voice, claps of thunder, the music I played, or the airplanes that flew over our house.

I had never known a deaf person, and I had no idea of what all of this meant.  Because of Heather Whitestone, I knew that she could possibly become Miss America.  Because of Marlee Matlin, I knew that she could possibly become an actress.  But I really didn’t know what her deafness would mean in our life as a family.

My first impulse was to get a bunch of books and read up on the subject, just as I’d read up on Japan before coming, and as I’d devoured tomes on twins when I knew I was expecting multiples.  I was hoping for a well-written memoir or a novel by a parent of a deaf child, or a memoir or novel written by  a deaf person.  I found a couple memoirs that were out of print and unavailable.  I wound up ordering a book called Train Go Sorry, by Leah Hager Cohen, a hearing individual brought up among the deaf children at a residential school for the deaf run by her father.  This turned out to be a very good book for me to read.  Cohen writes beautifully, and she presented the lives of the students in a respectful way.  It’s been a while since I’ve read the book, but it had a major influence on the way I think about my daughter.  For one thing, from reading that book, I immediately understood the importance of sign language.  For another, I became convinced that Lilia could learn both English and Japanese.  One of the students Cohen wrote about was a Russian girl who’d moved to New York City.  While in Russia, she had learned to speak and sign in her native language, and while in the States she’d learned to speak in English and communciate via ASL.  This girl didn’t have cerebral palsy, and she was a high achiever to be sure, but I keep her in my mind every time my daughter writes a word in English or picks up an American book. 

 

Dream Come True

According to Amazon.com, today is the official publication date of Love You to Pieces.  Reason enough to celebrate, right?

But get this:  Lilia has learned to say “Mama”!

We’ve worked on this for awhile.  For a long time, when she wanted my attention, she called out “Ahhhhhhh.”  And then, after she got her cochlear implant, she called me “baba”.  She could hear the difference, but the “m” sound is really hard for her.  I had her touch my nose while I said “mama” so she could feel the vibrations, and sometimes she could do it, but when she tried too hard, it always came out “baba.”  The other day, she commanded my attention and pronounced “mama”.  She was very proud that she could say it without touching her nose.  I’ve been waiting years for this moment.  No one could have given me a better Mother’s Day gift.

DIY Girl

There are many things that Lilia is capable of, but she can be also be very dependent and lazy and spoiled.  The Japanese have a word for this: amaeru.  In theory and practice, Lilia can crawl to the toilet, grab onto the bar on the wall, and do her business, but she almost always relies on me for transportation.

Yesterday morning she woke up very early.  I heard her calling for me, but I decided to stay put and see what would happen.  I heard her clamber out of bed, crawl to the toilet, and then crawl back to her room.  Then there was some thumping and banging, and then we heard her going downstairs.  Yoshi went to see what she was doing, and then he called me to come look.  She had changed her clothes and was standing against the sink, washing her face!  We were so proud of her.  I wanted to give her a trophy or something.  Sometimes I worry that Lilia will never be able to live independently, but on occasions like this one, I start to believe that it will happen. 

 

Golden Week Report

We are now on the last day of that string of holidays known as Golden Week.  This is the time of year when the highways are clogged with traffic, and every public space is mobbed.  Also, most families have plans to visit relatives or do something fun.  I have been trying to get us through this period without driving too far (gas just went up 25 yen per liter) and without spending too much money.  My husband has had baseball games every day, so we’ve been on our own.

Yesterday, Jio talked me into going to a park an hour from our house.  He told me that the third graders in his class had arranged this outing.  They actually conpsired the week before to get their parents to take them to a science park near here.  We spent six hours in the great outdoors, playing kick ball (also very well organized by the third graders – oh, how smoothly they sorted themselves into teams) and running around, after which I was too exhausted to make dinner. 

Yesterday morning, although it was cloudy, I made sandwiches, loaded all of our gear into the car, and we set out for the park the kids had agreed upon.  Turns out, no one else was there.  It’s a big park, and it was a holiday, but all we saw was a high school kid running laps, and an elderly man on some sort of power walk.  Jio immediately said that he wanted to go home.

I made him play for about two hours.  He skated on his rollerblades, and we hit some balls, and had a picnic, and then we went home.  In the evening, one of the parents called and said that today everyone is going to another park, and that yesterday’s event had been organized by the children without parental approval.

Meanwhile, my mother-in-law believes that someone has stolen her keys.