A Democrat Abroad

Last week, after Barack Obama became the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, I got online and joined Democrats Abroad.  I’ve voted democratically all of my life, but I’ve never joined any sort of group.  (My brother, on the other hand, was a member of the Young Republicans when we were in college.)

I also started reading a collection of essays put together by Shari MacDonald Strong, the senior editor at Literary Mama (sort of like my boss), called The Maternal is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change.  Some of my favorite writers (such as Barbara Kingsolver and Anne Lamott) are represented here, alongside some of my favorite Literary Mama columnists such as Ona Gritz, Susan Ito and Violet Garcia-Mendoza - and Jennifer Graf Groneberg.  (I haven’t read her essay yet, as I’m reading in order, but I skipped ahead and read a couple of paragraphs about a deaf girl with cerebral palsy who was homeschooled by her mother after school officials said that she’d never be able to read, but who got herself into nursing school years later).

So anyhow, it’s a wonderful book. 

One thing that I’ve learned is that four out of five people vote as their parents did, and a number of these essays  concern mothers inculcating their children with their political beliefs.  This is all very new and strange for me because growing up, I had no idea how my parents voted.  In principle, they kept their voting habits a secret, because in America we elect our officials behind a curtain with complete privacy.  It’s our right to vote for whom ever we want, and our right not to tell anyone.

I grew up believing that my parents were Democrats.  Imagine my surprise when, several years ago, I found out that I was wrong.  By that time, it was too late for me to be influenced by my parents’ political choices.  I’d already voted for Mondale and Clinton.

My son, by the way, is a keen Obama supporter.  I’m thinking of getting him a T-shirt proclaiming his view.

 

Farewell, Harriet

I just learned with sadness from another blog about the death this past week of Harriet McBryde Johnson.  Harriet was kind of a hero of mine.  When I first found out that my daughter was deaf, I thought of Harriet, who’d gone to law school and become a celebrated published writer in spite of her disability.  My daughter’s abilities are different, of course, but I thought, “It’s okay.  She can become a lawyer like Harriet McBryde Johnson.”

I met Harriet at that writer’s conference in Charleston where I met Bret Lott.  We - and a few other people - hung out together.  I gave her a copy of my literary journal, Yomimono, and invited her to submit.  I figured she had a unique point of view.  But she never sent me anything. 

The second night of the conference, I heard her read in a bar.  The place was packed, and there she was at the mike, in her wheelchair, reading a very Southern story about hunting.  In the next day’s session, Valerie Sayers praised her work, and sure enough, later one of Harriet’s stories appeared in the literary magazine that Sayers edited.  During the conference she also mentioned that she was working on a novel about the camp for disabled kids that her parents sent her to every summer.  It turned out to be a great book.

She wound up publishing an essay about her meeting with Peter Singer in The New York Times Magazine which caused quite a stir.  That essay appeared in her wonderful memoir Too Late to Die Young, which is remarkable not because she suffered from a form of muscular dystrophy, but because of her fine writing, her wit, and her impassionaned political activism.

Harriet, you did good.

 

Writer Mom

Look!  I’m in this month’s issue of Tokyo Families.

Where’s Beth?

Some readers of Love You to Pieces will wonder why I didn’t include Beth Kephart, author of the award-winning and extremely poetic memoir A Slant of Sun, about being a new mom with an autistic son.  This book is one of the first concerning parenting a disabled child that I read, and Kephart writes so beautifully, that each sentence was like a string of pearls.

Okay, here’s the answer:  she turned me down.   When I first came up with the idea of putting together of collection of literature on raising a child with special needs, I sent her a message asking if she’d be willing to contribute.  She responded that she had moved beyond writing about her son’s special needs, and that they were no longer such an issue; he has learned to function in the world.  It’s possible that she was giving me a gentle brush off.  After all, she didn’t know who I was or what kind of a book I would ultimately come up with or who would publish it.  If she had suggested that I excerpt her memoir, I probably would have, but I wanted to respect her wishes.  By the way, if you haven’t read A Slant of Sun, you should.

I also contacted Bret Lott, whom I’d met a writer’s conference in South Carolina.  We’d both contributed book reviews to Manoa, and we talked about that a little, so he had something to remember me by.  At any rate, Bret wrote that my idea sounded like a good one, that he’d be happy to be a part of it, and that he was confident I’d find a publisher.  This was all before Jewel,  inspired by an aunt with Down syndrome, became an Oprah pick, but I feel quite sure that he would have said “yes” even after.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Praise of Japanese Music Class

When I was a kid in Michigan, music class meant that we gathered our chairs around a piano and sang songs from a mimeographed lyric sheet.  Maybe once in awhile the itinerant music teacher would pass out some tambourines and castanets. 

Only now, all these years later as a mother in Japan, do I understand how lame all that was.  We never learned musical notes or how to play instruments or the names of the great composers.  Not during the regular school day.

Last week my daughter was thrilled to get a recorder and to begin learning how to play it.  The kids at the deaf school also learn to play taiko - traditional Japanese drums - and perform at the annual culture festival.  Before the recorder, my kids learned to play something called a harmonium. 

I had a look at my son’s music class workbook and noted that he was learning about Bach and Beethoven.  And although my hearing son has a dread of music class whereas my deaf daughter loves it (go figure), I’m so grateful that my children are being educated in the arts.

 

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.